hacks

7 Photoshop Tricks That Are Hidden in Plain Sight

Adobe’s Photoshop is such a complex piece of software that even professionals find new features and settings every now and then. This 7-minute video from Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE explores 7 Photoshop tricks that may be new to you even if you've been using PS for a long time.

6 Creative Portrait Photography Hacks in 2 Minutes

Ready for some rapid-fire DIY tips? A team of French photographers who goes by the moniker "Shootr" has put together a simple photo hacks video that offers a few creative ideas for your next portrait shoot.

9 Simple DIY Hacks and Tricks for Photographers

DIY photography tricks... need we say more? Whether you're stuck in a creative rut or just want to break out of your photography comfort zone a bit, this video is the perfect way to start the week.

6 Creative IKEA Product Photography Hacks

Want some cheap and simple do-it-yourself photo equipment? Check out the IKEA store near you. In addition to being affordable options for home items, a number of IKEA products can also be repurposed for your next photo shoot.

French photography website Shootr.fr recently published the above 2.5-minute video that shares 6 different hacks you can do with IKEA items.

10 Simple Photography Hacks with Household Things

If you'd like to experiment with some do-it-yourself photography hacks and tricks, check out this new video by DigitalRev. Over the course of 10 minutes, Kai shares 10 different cheap and simple hacks you can do with ordinary things you'll find lying around your house.

7 Simple Tips, Tricks and Ideas for Taking More Creative Smartphone Photos

COOPH, The Cooperative of Photography, is back in the photo tip game again, this time showing us 7 smartphone photography tips you'll want to be writing down if you ever shoot with the computer in your pocket.

From unique panorama uses to a clever way to easily take partially underwater photos, these tips are quick, easy and will certainly add a little variety to your Instagram arsenal.

7 Simple DIY Photography Tips and Tricks Using Only Household Items

The team over at COOPH today shared an insightful video that describes 7 DIY photography tips that use nothing more than items you have lying around the house. From can koozies to tights, a number of unusual household products make a cameo and help you add a unique, homemade element to your photo game.

10 Cheap & Clever Tricks for Getting More Out of Your Mobile Photography

If you’re looking to get more out of your smartphone’s camera with minimal financial investment, look no further. Kai and the DRTV team have created a short little video that goes over ten cheap, clever tricks that'll help you get the most of your mobile photography.

Kai specifically uses an iPhone throughout the video, but a number of these tricks can be used on any mobile device.

Focus Stacking Macro Photographs with a Hacked Flatbed Scanner

Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.

Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.

The Three Winning Apps From This Year’s Photo Hack Day

Last month, nearly three hundred programmers descended on Dropbox's headquarters in San Francisco for the third annual Photo Hack Day. In the span of 24 hours, they threw together 70 new apps using the APIs of different photo services. $10,000 in prize money was distributed to the top three apps. Here's a look at the three best hacks that popped out of the competition.

Take Hands-Free Roadtrip Photos with a Pair of Hacked Cameras

Snapping a photograph while driving isn't the smartest, safest, or easiest thing to do. How then should one go about snapping pictures of the interesting things you drive past without breaking the law or putting people at risk?

Caleb Kraft of Hack a Day has one possible solution: remote-controlled cameras that attach to the side windows of a car.

Use a Red Dot Sight for Locating Subjects with Super Telephoto Lenses

Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:

They're designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible -- the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.

Malcolm reports that the site "works amazingly well", making it "trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly".

Turn a Pringles Can into a DIY Snoot

If you have a potato chip tube lying around, you can convert the tube into a super simple DIY snoot. All you need to do is cut an opening in the closed end that's the size of your flash head (tip: use some duct tape to prevent it from scratching your flash).

Image Fulgurator Adds Graffiti to Other People’s Photographs

The Image Fulgurator is a brilliant device created -- and patented -- by Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck. It's an optically triggered slave flash that fires through the back of a camera, projecting a message or image on the film through the lens -- basically, it's an optically triggered projector. What this allows von Bismarck to do is prank unsuspecting photographers by adding random pictures or words into their photographs whenever they use their camera's flash.