tutorial

How to Remove a Background in Photoshop

Using Photoshop to remove the background in an image so that you can replace it is one of the most frequent things for which it was used, and might still be. The actual placing of a new image for a background is relatively easy. The heavy lifting comes from making a good selection of your subject as this will be used to remove the unwanted background for replacement.

How to Download Instagram Photos

Need to download a photo from Instagram? Perhaps you uploaded a photo long ago and have since lost the original file, or perhaps you are interested in downloading a public domain space photo from NASA to use as your phone's wallpaper. Whatever the reason, the good news is that it is easy to download Instagram photos.

PhotoPills: A Photographer’s Guide

PhotoPills is a planning tool to help you create images of the Sun, Moon, stars, meteors, and more. It can help you decide the best place to focus for maximum depth of field and calculate the correct exposure when using a neutral density filter to blur water, clouds, and other subjects. What's more, you can use it from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection to plan a photo shoot anywhere else in the world.

How to Use Bulb Mode on a Camera for Long Exposure Photos

When you hear “long exposure,” you probably think of a shutter speed that’s too slow to hand-hold and produce a sharp image. It might be something like ¼”, or maybe as long as 30”, which is the most common slowest shutter speed in DSLR and mirrorless cameras. However, shutter speeds slower than 30” can be advantageous in many long-exposure scenarios.

Landscape Photography: The Ultimate Guide

Landscape photography is one of the most popular photographic genres. It's easy to get started with the genre, but it can take a lifetime to master landscape photography skills. You don't need a sophisticated camera or expensive lens, and the skills you learn when doing landscape photography translate to other types of photography.

Cleanup.pictures: How to Easily to Remove Objects From Your Photos

Removing unwanted objects and text out of an image to clean up your photo used to require special software and skills, but these days AI has led to features like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop that lets anyone do it in just a few clicks. If you do not have a Photoshop subscription, there is a free Web and mobile app called Cleanup.pictures you can use.

How I Took a Photo of the Andromeda Galaxy from My Backyard

I recently shot a photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy that went viral, appearing everywhere from the front page of Reddit to Newsweek. The photo was taken with a four-inch telescope over the course of multiple nights from my backyard near Charlottesville, Virginia, US.

Astrophotography: The Ultimate Guide

Astrophotography. We hear the term tossed around a lot these days but what actually is it? The true definition of the word is photography of the nighttime sky. The sky only—at night.

How to Delete Your Instagram Account

Instagram is a wildly popular (and often lucrative) photo and video-sharing social network, but sometimes it can become a bit overwhelming, leading to the question of whether it's worth so much effort. It's easy to get drawn into endless scrolling through eye-catching photos when the intention was to spend just a few minutes.

How to Shoot Landscape Panoramas with a Telephoto Lens

One of my favorite techniques in photography is shooting panoramas with a telephoto lens. I got asked a lot about this technique, so I decided to create a full video and article in which I’ll go through the entire process.

How I Built a DIY Gel Holder for the Godox AD300 Pro Flash

I purchased some of the new compact and foldable Godox softboxes (e.g. AD-S60S, AD-S65W, AD-S85S, etc) for my Godox AD300 Pros. They work just fine but I wanted to use the magnetic color gels from my AK-R1 kit with them, so I decided to design my own gel holder compatible with the AD300 Pro.

How to Achieve Moody and Emotional Portrait Photography

Some of the most enticing shots in portrait photography depict darker emotions, adding in elements of storytelling that include our shadow sides, and show the subject as a complex human. Portrait, documentary, and news photographers rely on emotions to draw viewers in.

The Best Time of Day to Take Outdoor Portrait Photos

When is the best time of day to shoot portrait photos outdoors? Should we shoot only during the golden hours and avoid midday altogether, or is it better to use the brightest daylight hours to take our portraits with a few simple light modifiers? In this guide, we explore the best times of day for outdoor portraits.

3 Steps to Creating a Dramatic B&W Infrared Photo in Photoshop

Like most photographers, I love black-and-white infrared images. There is a purity and intensity to a well-crafted monochrome image, and there are many software options out there to help convert an image to black-and-white.

How to Update Your Camera’s Firmware

If you are a digital photographer, it is a good idea to make sure your camera's firmware is up to date to ensure you have a reliable device with the latest features and fixes. In this article, we will guide you step-by-step through updating your camera firmware.

How to Combine Photos with Unreal Engine for Creative Composites

Mixing photography with digital backgrounds is becoming easier and more approachable. In this in-depth and over one hour video, Serge Ramelli breaks down how to use the free Unreal Engine to build a background from scratch and use it to create new composite photographic images.

How to Shoot ‘Space Nebula’ Smoke Photos at Home

During long periods of cloudy weather, it can be really frustrating as an astrophotographer to wait for the sky to clear up. Over the years, I’ve learned how to handle these long downtimes.

How to Make a DIY Softbox for Free

Almost anything can be used as a light modifier. As long as it interacts with light in one way or another, it can be considered a light modifier. In this article, I will show you how to build a do-it-yourself (DIY) softbox with things you likely already have around at home.

How to Use Curves Effectively in Capture One 22

The Tone Curve in Capture One 22 is by far my favorite tool to edit images, but it's usually one of the most difficult commands to get to grips with. It can definitely be one of your most valuable assets if you want to improve your editing skills.

Festive Food Photography: Shooting with Christmas Lights

If you're wondering how you can shoot some stunning Christmas food photography, try shooting with holiday festive lights. In this video, I will go through in detail how to shoot with Christmas fairy lights. These lights will bring some festive spirit to your food photography and add sparkle to your Instagram feed this holiday season.

How to Install and Use LightZone, the Underdog Raw Digital Darkroom

Darktable, RawTherapee, digiKam are undeniably powerful applications for processing RAW files. But while they offer a plethora of advanced editing and processing tools, using them to get the result you want requires and patience and some effort. But who has time for that?

How to Create and Sell NFTs for Free

A lot of people have asked me in recent days how they can create and sell NFTs (non-fungible tokens), so I decided to write this tutorial on how you can mint (and hopefully sell) an NFT for free, with absolutely no gas fees or other costs to you.

A screenshot showing the process of creating a new heal layer in Capture One

How to Reveal and Remove Dust Spots in Capture One Pro

Capture One was recently updated with a dedicated before and after tool, and new powerful heal and clone tools. Before this update, the healing and cloning tools were unusable to me, but now with this update, I can save the time of moving back and forth between Capture One and Photoshop.

How to Create a Small World Photo in Photoshop

Want to create a "small world" or "tiny planet" image in which a landscape photo (often a panorama) is turned into what looks like a miniature planet? Here's an easy-to-follow 2-minute tutorial that will teach you how to make one in Photoshop.

How to Fix a Badly Lit Portrait in Adobe Lightroom

Don’t toss a photo just because the lighting isn’t the best. You may be able to bring it back alive in post-production. As photographers, we face countless different scenarios and it's nearly impossible to get the perfect shot 100% of the time.

5 Ways to Use the Lightroom’s Brush Tool in 2022

Even though the Brush tool is not a new tool in Adobe Lightroom, you may be surprised by all the ways it can be used and all the advantages you can gain by using a brush. This is part of my daily workflow and I hope it will become part of yours!

An Advanced 7-Step Way to Edit B&W Photos in Lightroom

Black and white images can tell entirely different stories than color. By removing all of the colors, the tones carry the weight of the story. There’s a lot of gray area (pun intended) when it comes to black and white images as there’s no right or wrong way to take them. In this article and video, I’ll be walking through a new way to edit black and white images in Adobe Lightroom.

Local Adjustments in Lightroom for Midtone Control

In most images, midtones carry much of the important information. This is not true for all images, but those are the exceptions. In this article, I will present an approach to control midtone information from color to tonal structure.

How to Level Up Your Portraits Using Simple Props

An easy and effective way to increase production value to your images is by adding simple props. Not only do they add additional visual interest, but they can also add story to the scene. Today, I’ll be starting with a basic “walk-up” shot and working step by step to make changes until we get to our final portraits using props.

How to Do Top Back Lighting in Product Photography

I'm photographer Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens, and in this article and 10-minute video, we’re going to talk about my favorite lighting when it comes to lighting any kind of product: top back light.

How to Use the Luminosity Mask in Lightroom Classic

The Luminosity Mask is a really great tool to use when it comes to retouching landscape, cityscape as well as portrait. It gives you more freedom when you use different tools in Lightroom and you will see it is awesome!

The Split LUT Technique in Photoshop to Get Separate Controls

I'm Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE.com. In this 4-minute video and article, I'll share a new Photoshop technique I came up with that gives you separate control over strength, color, and luminosity in LUTS. I call this the Split LUT technique.