Post-Processing

I took a trip to Iceland this past March, but weather wasn't the greatest while I was there. We encountered a few blizzards, and I took some photos to see what I could recover from them. Adobe recently announced a Dehaze tool for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, and I wanted to know how well it could recover image data from a blizzard -- which could be considered be an extreme version of haze. After trying the slider on my images, I'm very impressed!

Argentinian professional photographer and retoucher Joaquin Villaverde has a knack for restoring and colorizing old photographs. The video above is a time-lapse he made showing how he recently breathed new life into a vintage portrait that had a good amount of damage. It's 2 hours of work in Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 condensed into 3 minutes.

Adobe Photoshop serves as an important process in many photographer’s daily workflows. Whether you are fine-tuning your shots from a wedding or simply touching up a photograph of your cat, Photoshop can help you bring your mind’s visualizations to life. However, you may be utilizing more of your time than needed if you employ repetitive actions without the use of macros.

When Adobe launched a major Creative Cloud update that brought the powerful new Dehaze slider to Lightroom CC, photographers who had purchased a standalone copy of Lightroom 6 instead of subscribing to Adobe CC didn't receive the new features.

Do you yearn for a time when graphics were more pixelated and Betamax still had a chance? At times, we can’t help but to reminisce about late 20th-century technology, which is why we have decided to take a close look at Retrospecs for iOS. This nifty $2 app allows you to quickly transform your favorite pictures into retro computing art with the press of a button. Today, we are taking a look to see if it fulfills our nostalgic desires or gives us the pains of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.

Nothing can be more frustrating than taking a beautiful photograph only to later find out that it is riddled with digital noise. While digital image sensors have advanced the field of photography, they have also introduced new problems to tackle. Luckily, programs such as Adobe Lightroom can reduce the amount of noise within a photograph caused by high ISO settings or long exposures. Today, we are going to learn how to tackle noise reduction in Lightroom CC.

Last week, we took a look at an excellent Photoshop alternative for Mac OS X, Affinity Photo Beta. This week, we are taking a look at a possible Lightroom alternative, Emulsion, to see if it can also help you step outside of Adobe’s ecosystem. While Adobe provides an excellent range of products, some photographers are looking to expand their horizon with more affordable alternatives.

Want to see an impressive example of what the new Dehaze slider in Photoshop and Lightroom can do? Check out the 1-minute video above by photographer Grant Friedman, who tested out the feature using a foggy and blown out RAW photo of Times Square on a rainy day.

Want an ultimate single-page cheat sheet for looking up keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC? The design team over at setupablogtoday have created just that: massive sheets that you can study and explore to your hearts content.

Adobe announced a major update to its Creative Cloud subscription service today, bringing a large number of improvements to the entire Adobe family of 15 CC desktop apps. Here's a look at what's new for photographers in Creative Cloud 2015.

That Dehaze feature that Adobe teased last month is now official for Photoshop's Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom in a major new Creative Cloud update. The feature helps eliminate fog and haze from photos to create "startlingly clear images."

If you shoot film, you know how difficult it can be to properly organize your photographs once they have been digitized to your computer. Modern digital cameras allow easy organization with built in metadata that provides every bit of information you could ever need; however, digitally scanned photos contain no such data. Promote Systems has introduced the Meta35, a device to easily import and sync your film camera’s metadata.

With many cameras now supporting integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, a good number of photographers are editing their photographs while still on the road. There is a variety of applications on both iOS and Android that offer different feature sets at varying price points. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the best offerings to help you pick out what may be the best solution for your circumstances.

High-end retoucher Pratik Naik of Solstice Retouch created this 8-minute time-lapse video showing how he retouched the hair and skin in one particular portrait over the course of 2 hours and 8 minutes.

The debate between analog and digital may never end, but there can be a happy medium. One of the reasons that analog continues to live on is due to the wondrous ‘color profiles’ that one can find in different packages of film, along with their unique grain profiles. VSCO, a company that designs presets for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, has released their latest collection “VSCO FILM 07” - the eclectic films package.

If you've downloaded a copy of GIMP for Windows from SourceForge in recent days, you may want to double check to make sure you didn't get other programs installed as well. Some copies of the "open source Photoshop" were apparently being offered with for-profit adware bundled with the installer.

Pixelmator, the popular photo editing app for Mac and iPad, is now available for iPhones. The app is designed for mobile photographers who want "advanced, desktop-class photo editing tools" at their fingertips without having to move photos off their phones.

Photographer John Coates wanted to become more familiar with the latest default Photoshop CC 2014 keyboard shortcuts, so he created a handy cheat sheet to use as an at-a-glance reference. It's designed for photographers who use Mac, and is of high enough resolution (2560×1440) to be used as the desktop background on many displays. You can download the file for yourself here (or here).

At Adobe MAX 2014 last October, Adobe gave a tech preview of a new "dehaze" feature that it's currently developing that can seemingly magically remove haze from photos. Above is a new sneak peek video Adobe just posted that shows what's "coming soon to Lightroom CC."

Ah, “photography”, you loosely defined word that everyone seems to have their own definition of. It’s amazing how polarizing you can be, isn’t it? …

In this post, I'll share a trick I use to get some adjustments "beyond" +100 or -100 in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.

I recently had the absolute pleasure of meeting and shooting with Mackenzie Johnson! Today I'm going to share how I turned my portrait of her into a painting. Not everyone is a painter, but with a little time and patience -- and Photoshop -- I believe anyone can achieve this effect.

If you're just starting out in Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, and/or landscape photography, here's a video you may find enlightening. Landscape photographer Joshua Cripps offers a quick walkthrough of his post-processing methods, turning a straight-out-of-camera RAW photo of a lake scene into a finished shot.

When Adobe unveiled Lightroom CC/6 last month, one of the big features in the update was support for graphics processors (GPU) in order to speed things up in the Develop module. Adobe claimed that some users would see up to a 10x performance increase with the GPU helping the CPU out.

Want to see how the world's biggest fashion and beauty magazines retouch their photos? Here's a set of time-lapse videos that show many hours of retouching compressed into a matter of minutes.

Photographer Chris Lambeth offers this short and sweet 3-minute tutorial on how you can use a Levels adjustment layer in Photoshop to reveal subtle sensor dust spots in your photos. Dragging the Levels sliders helps make the spots pop out of the image, allowing you to easily select and edit them out in the base image.

Adobe Lightroom CC/6 has been a hot topic in the photo community ever since it was announced a week ago. Although most discussions have focused on the "big" features such as HDR, panoramas, and performance, I have personally found one small addition to be the most useful new feature in my own workflow. I'm talking about the new "Add to Collection" option -- it's a bigger time saver and organizational boost for me than anything else that was introduced.

While I strongly prefer adding creative touches to my photos with physical tricks and effects -- such as using dry ice for fog -- sometimes I do need some digital manipulation done in Photoshop. Here is my technique for adding some fake fog to a photo in just 4 easy steps.

Adobe made a big announcement for Lightroom CC/6 yesterday, but if you use Adobe Camera Raw for your RAW processing, don't worry: Adobe didn't forget about you. Adobe also quietly rolled out Adobe Camera Raw 9, an update that includes a few of the same big features that were introduced with great fanfare for Lightroom CC.

If you've been wanting to try out VSCO's film emulation presets without shelling out $119 per collection, there's good news for you today. VSCO has launched VSCO Film 00, a free start pack that contains two of the company's most popular film emulation presets for Lightroom.

Adobe today announced its latest version of Lightroom, called Lightroom CC. The update brings faster performance, some revamped tools, and a set of powerful new creation features.

Photoshop teacher Howard Pinsky shares this quick 9-minute video tutorial on how you can use Photoshop to repair old and damaged photos. The restoration is done using the Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Clone Stamp tools.

Travel photographer Jimmy McIntyre created this short 3-minute video tutorial to share a trick for adjusting the brightness of specific colors in your shot without affecting their saturation.

The other night I came across the work of photographer Victoria Will, who made real tintype portraits of some actors who attended this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Google today announced that it is starting to roll Snapseed 2.0 out for users of the popular mobile photo editing app. The new app contains a number of powerful new features, including filters, effects, a number of new tools, non-destructive editing, and copy-and-paste for edits.

If you're just starting out in post-processing digital photos, you may feel overwhelmed with all the different terms and concepts involved in tweaking your shots. To help make things easier to understand, the browser-based photo editing service Polarr has created a helpful interactive website that explains common jargon with interactive demos.

On March 23, I was in Kearney, Nebraska to view and photograph the annual migration of the Sandhill cranes. These birds are graceful, awkward, beautiful and kooky all at the same time. They fly with grace, but while on the ground sometimes exhibit some of the funniest behaviors you'll see from a bird. With a wingspan of up to 7 feet, these birds aren't the biggest, but they're some of the biggest most of us will get to see.

Want to give your photographs a "Hollywood movie" look? Here's a fantastic 25-minute tutorial on how to do cinematic color grading on your photographs using Photoshop. The technique involves using the Curves tool to create a teal-orange look, a color scheme that is very prevalent in movies released in recent years.

UK-based glamour photographer Markp created this short video tutorial on how he sharpens photos captured at high ISOs in Photoshop without adding more noise to the image. His technique involves creating a High Pass duplicate layer of the photo, desaturating it and reducing noise on it, sharpening that layer, and then blending it into the original photo with Photoshop's "Linear Light" blend mode.

Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery offers this short Photoshop tutorial on how you can enhance the eyes of your wildlife subjects and make them pop. He uses a Curves layer, a layer mask, and a brush to paint in some brightness. "When it comes to wildlife, it's all about the eyes," Perry says. Now that's a bright eyed deer.

So I recently had this crazy idea in my head and some free time. The idea was to have myself falling over in the kitchen with tea and biscuits flying everywhere. Here's a walkthrough showing how I created the image with carefully shot photos and Photoshop.

Photoshop's Auto Color adjustment is a simple way to color correct a photo in just a couple of clicks, but it doesn't always produce the look you're going for. Here's a short tutorial on another easy way to do color correction that puts a little more control back in your hands without making things difficult.

I was working on a commissioned artwork in Photoshop today and I noticed something. I keep my left hand over the shift key pretty much the entire time I am working in PS. That little button does a LOT. So I thought I would take some time and show you guys what you have been missing out on if you haven’t taken advantage of shift key functionalities in PS before.

Wedding photography, much like the entire business of weddings, is highly influenced by the ebb and flow of trends. They come, they go, and they’re cyclical. When I plunged into the business in early 2012, I committed myself to research the industry: what works, what’s popular, and what sells? I quickly discovered that there’s a common, predictable, and heavily relied upon set of post-processing trends in wedding photography.

Here's a tutorial by New York City-based photographer Jeff Rojas that offers a crash course on how to use the Liquify Filter in Photoshop to make realistic retouches to your images.

Photoshop experts who teach the software for a living generally know it like the back of their hand. But how skilled would they be if they were forced to downgrade to the original version of the program, Photoshop 1.0? That's what CreativeLive set out to find out recently.

VSCO helps photographers easily add the look of film to their images. Lens Distortions does the same thing, except with out of focus glass shards. The service provides a Photoshop Action pack that lets you add an out-of-focus object between you and your subject.

Apple has sent out an email reminder to Aperture owners, reminding them that Aperture will no longer be available for purchase starting this spring after it's replaced by the new Photos for OS X app. Aperture users can migrate their libraries to the new Photos app, which is now available for anyone to try through the OS X Beta program.

Want a better understanding of how Photoshop's sharpening filters work and how to best use them? Here's a tutorial in which Photoshop expert Deke McClelland discusses using Photoshop's features to bring out clearer details in your digital photographs. McClelland discusses all the sharpening filters found in the Sharpen menu in Photoshop (e.g. the one-click sharpening filters, Unsharp Mask, and Smart Sharpen), as well as the Sharpening panel found in Adobe Camera Raw.

Earlier this month, a leaked product page revealed a number of features that will be found in the upcoming Lightroom 6. One of them was an HDR merging tool that combines multiple exposures into a single HDR image. Here's a first glimpse at how the feature will work.