Have you ever been disappointed to find the eyeballs of your subject to be not as sharp as you had expected even though your camera confirmed that autofocus had locked onto them? Photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery made this 9.5-minute video explaining how he avoids this "false positive autofocus trap" when focusing in tricky situations or on tricky subjects.
If you're zoomed into a photo in Photoshop, popular ways to move around include holding the spacebar (and then clicking and dragging) or clicking inside the Navigator panel. But there's a lesser-known trick that's just as handy, and the Photoshop Training Channel explains how it works in this 2-minute video.
Photographer Eric Floberg made this 10-minute video showing how he creates in-camera double-exposure photos using a tilt-shift lens, a technique he calls his "creative bread and butter."
Shooting directly into the Sun, whether it is sunrise or sunset, often results in some areas around the Sun getting clipped, and we get these rather harsh edges in our sky. Even when shooting bracketed or underexposing for the highlights, we may not achieve a pleasing result around the strongest light in a scene.
As with any genre of photography, there is no "one size fits all" solution for exposure in any given situation. There are as many different means of achieving a "look" as there are photographers practicing those methods, and any can be adapted to fit into the kind of photography you want to be doing.
By carefully applying blur to a portrait, you can make it look like it was shot with a shallow depth-of-field using a fast (and expensive) lens. Here's a 12-minute tutorial by PiXimperfect that teaches the key to creating this faux blur in a realistic way.
I recently shot this image while teaching a street photography workshop in London. I had been talking to my students about noticing things that were “odd” or out of place which normally makes for an engaging subject.
To shoot directly into the sun is both challenging and fun. Challenging because it can be difficult to control the light and, not least, our images are very often marred by sun flare. One simple way of avoiding flare is to shoot an extra exposure with one finger or more obscuring the sun.
“Do you have 9 lights?” The account manager at Oakland University asked me. Somewhat inspired by a Queen album cover, he was looking to create an image where 9 award-winning students stood out in a dramatized version of a newly renovated space on campus. While I understood the goal of the session, I immediately knew rigging 9 lights up would be nearly impossible while showing such a vast space. I told him that it may take some time, but I could get it done with just 2 lights.
Here's a 6-minute video by photographer Kelly Hofer of Theory of Curiosity on Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS), a technique that lets you shoot photos and videos of heat using an ordinary camera and Photoshop.
Want to shoot an "impossible" f/0.2 portrait? Here's a 3.5-minute video in which photographer Tony Northrup demonstrates the Brenizer Method, which effectively turns a telephoto lens into an ultra-fast wide-angle lens.
Macro photography has always been a passion of mine, and exploring the universe at our feet can be almost magical. As beautiful as this genre of photography is, it really comes to life when you literally add an extra dimension to it. If you’ve never attempted to see a stereo 3D image before, you’re about to go down the rabbit hole.
Taking portraits in bright sunlight has been a bit of a no-no for a long time, but the truth is that you can actually get stunning results if you use a fill flash. The results look awesome and give a high-end feel to any outdoor portrait, and the best thing is that it's really not too difficult. You just need to understand how to use a fill flash.
Want to improve your macro photography game? Here's a great 12-minute DPReview TV episode in which master macro shooter Don Komarechka demonstrates some simple techniques and setups you can use to capture better outdoor shots.
I'm photographer David Johnson, and in this tutorial I'll be sharing how I shoot long-exposure photos of defocused fireworks.
There's a new photo recovery technique that may help humanity recover some of the world's oldest photographs that were previously considered to be damaged beyond repair.
Mixing ambient light with flash is a tough technique to get around. I can do it no problem, but when someone asks me to explain it I draw a blank. There’s a very good reason why it’s hard to understand: you’re smashing two distinct schools of lighting an image together.
It’s becoming harder to get the entire image sharp with the constantly wider lenses and more extreme foregrounds that are used in today’s photography. Even optimal apertures aren’t enough to get both the foreground and background as sharp as desired. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, though. Focus stacking for sharper images has become a go-to technique for photographers of all levels to achieve images that are sharp all the way through.
Lightroom's Auto Mask feature lets you intelligently target edit towards specific portions of photos. While the standard tool is useful, there are more advanced ways of using the tool that can take your editing to the next level. Here's a great 13-minute tutorial on the subject by Signature Edits.
I have only 1 tip that will hopefully inspire you and help you to improve your landscape photography: use a wide angle (preferably 16mm or wider, full frame equivalent) and get extremely close to objects.
In the era of the “selfie”, of the relentless click-and-publish images on social media, of the mega sensors replete with megapixels, we are witnessing an unpredictable resurgence of many ancient photographic devices and techniques.
Want to learn how to shoot tack-sharp landscape photos? Photographer Dave Morrow made this solid 27-minute guide that teaches his personal focusing strategy. He believes it's the "most in-depth guide to back button focus and hyperfocal distance currently on YouTube."
Photographer Jonathan Usher of Wellington, New Zealand, recently created this photo of the Milky Way rising from the horizon near his city. But get this: he wasn't using a tripod or any other stabilization -- not even a rock. It's a "60-second exposure" shot handheld.
Smooth Trans Focus (STF) was invented by Minolta in the 1980s and became available in the Minolta 135mm f/2.8 STF in 1999. The special design of the lens with an Apodization (APD) filter allows for the smoothing of out-of-focus areas, or bokeh. The APD filter reduces the light transmitted through a lens, but the strength is gradually decreased toward the center of the filter.
There are different techniques you can use in Photoshop to brighten up a dark and dull portrait. This 4-minute tutorial by PHLEARN shows a 2-minute technique that avoids desaturated, unnatural skin tones.
Photoshops High Pass filter can be an effective photo sharpening tool, but its effect can be too drastic for certain areas of your photo. Here's a 9-minute tutorial from photoshopCAFE that looks at how to more effectively use Photoshop's "High Pass" filter for sharpening.
Here's a 5-minute tutorial by photography artist Antti Karppinen that shares a technique for effectively dodging and burning your photo using the Gaussian Blur adjustment in Photoshop.
Just starting out in photography and want to learn how to blur your backgrounds when shooting portraits? Here's a 4-minute video from Sheldon Evans that looks at how you can create a beautiful bokeh in your photos.
Shooting photos of birds in flight can be a difficult challenge in wildlife photography. Here's a 6-minute tutorial by Nature TTL that offers tips on this sub-genre. Considered by some to be one of the hardest forms of wildlife photography, freezing the high-speed action of a bird whizzing past you is rewarding when you succeed.
Looking to add some drama or action to your photos but not quite sure how? Look no further… In simple terms, camera panning (or motion tracking as some people call it) is a technique where you follow a moving subject, shooting with a slower shutter speed to create a feeling of speed or action.
Once you've matched the color tones in a composite photo, you can then move on to matching the saturation for proper realism. Here is a 5-minute tutorial from Antti Karppinen that shows how you can do so using Photoshop.
One of the most common difficulties with compositing photos is having the color tones of the different parts of the image match. This can be tricky to achieve, but this 10-minute tutorial by Photoshop expert Antti Karppinen shows a powerful way you can do it using a Selective Color adjustment mask.
There are many tips and tricks in Photoshop that can make editing life easier if you know how to use them. Here's a 13-minute tutorial by PiXimperfect that teaches how you can easily identify and remove blemishes in portraits using a black-and-white adjustment layer.
The use of slit-scan photography is actually quite old. It is often called line-scan, photo finish, or streak photography. Slit-scan photography has a rich and colorful history rooted in chemical analog photography. This technique is often used to visualize high-speed events such as missiles and bullets, although it is probably best known as photo finish photography used to determine the outcome of races.
Is there an unwanted color cast spoiling your photo? Correcting this is really simple when you use the curves tool, as demonstrated by PiXimperfect in this 7-minute tutorial.
In this 9-minute tutorial from photography Andrew Boey of Beyond Photography, learn how to use a white wall to create any color backdrop you want by using just a speedlight and a colored gel.
There are plenty of ways you can color correct an image, but here's a technique you might not have learned before. this technique from In this 6-minute tutorial by f64 Academy, learn how inverting the colors in your photos can help you effectively remove color casts.
One way portrait photographers like Annie Leibovitz light large-scale group photos is by lighting smaller groups by themselves and then compositing everyone together into a large group. Photographer Barry Harley recently employed this technique with relatively affordable gear for a group photo with friends while on vacation.
Focus stacking is a technique typically used in macro shots to achieve a large depth of field. It’s a relatively simple concept: take many images focused at slightly different distances and combine the sharp portions to a single image in post. This 6-minute video from landscape photographer Mark Denney will show you how to utilise the technique in landscape photography.
Here's a 4-minute video by the Photoshop Training Channel on how to use Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill tool with an advanced technique for those times in which it doesn't work quite as well as you had hoped.