Post-Processing

You Can Grab a Copy of DxO Optics Pro 8 Completely Free for a Limited Time

Between now and January 31st of 2015, those interested in switching up your post-processing workflow and experimenting with software outside of the Adobe ecosystem have a great incentive to do so: DxO has partnered with Digital Photographer to offer free, no strings attached licenses of DxO Optics Pro 8 to anybody who wants one.

Halloween Tutorial: How to Carve a Realistic Looking Jack O’ Lantern in Photoshop

Love carving Jack O' Lanterns? Hate the mess? No problem. We are photographers after all, which means we don't need to actually go out and DO things like this... we can just 'fix it in post.' Jokes aside, this short and simple tutorial will show you how to carve a simple Jack O' Lantern entirely inside of Photoshop.

No seeds, no sharp objects, no mess, just a bit of digital trickery.

Adobe Just Released a Simple and Free Aperture to Lightroom Migration Plugin

If you've been looking to migrate your Aperture library over to Lightroom ever since the official announcement of Aperture's demise, you've had to be content with manually doing it or using one of the unofficial tools that had already been released. But that is no longer the case.

Earlier today, Adobe officially released its own tool: a free Lightroom plugin that will allow you to import your entire Aperture (or iPhoto) library, metadata and all, quickly and easily.

How to Post-Process Almost Any Aspect of a Single Exposure Landscape Shot

Most tutorials tend to focus on one small aspect of the photographic process -- be it tweaking a minor adjustment such as white balance or showing you how to properly sharpen an image -- but this Lightroom 4 QuickStart tutorial goes way beyond this.

It, instead, opts for a more comprehensive approach, showing you how to properly edit almost any landscape image from beginning to end.

Adobe Shows Off Features for Changing Time of Day Lighting and Removing Fog

At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.

Adobe Video Imagines an Impressive Future for Touchscreen Photo Editing

During the Max conference, as he was preparing to demonstrate some of the touch functionality baked into Photoshop CC on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, Adobe's Josh Ulm said, "when we started to explore touch, we knew that we would have to radically shift the user interface."

What we didn't know at the time is just what he meant by "radically," but the ad above gives us a sneak peek at just how touch-capable Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe applications will eventually be.

Video: A Full Portrait Retouch Done Completely in Capture One Pro 8

There are a seemingly infinite number of videos that walk you through retouching a portrait from beginning to end; however, most of them are based in Photoshop, Lightroom and -- once upon a time -- Aperture. This leaves the less-used but robust Capture One Pro out of the game.

Well, not anymore! Giving Capture One Pro 8 some love is photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz, who decided to take it for a test drive and see how close he could get to his Photoshop results using Capture One Pro 8 instead.

Adobe Brings Cloud-Based Photoshop Beta to Chromebooks

Adobe has been making moves into the cloud for some time now (it is called Creative Cloud after all), so it doesn't come as a surprise to hear that the long-awaited Chromebook Photoshop beta is finally live and ready for cloud computing early-adopters to start putting through the ringer.

Adobe Unveils Photoshop Elements 13, Bakes in Simple-Yet-Powerful Editing Tools

As Photoshop CC continues to get more and more complex -- seriously, have you seen THE SIZE of some of the Photoshop books out there!? -- thanks to the myriad of new features Adobe continues to add, the company is moving its beginner-focused Elements offerings the other direction.

Released officially last night, Photoshop (and Premier for you video folks) Elements 13 is even easier-to-use, more intuitive, and yet more powerful than any of the previous iterations.

Cheetyr is the Searchable Photoshop Cheat Sheet You’ve Been Waiting For

Photoshop is a wonderful resource, full of creative potential; to help streamline that creative potential, Adobe has included an insane amount of shortcuts that allow you to easily apply effects, swap tools and perform actions. There's just one issue... there's too many of them to keep track of.

With so many shortcuts for so many different things, it’s sometimes hard to remember the shortcut you need the moment you need it -- unless, of course, you're using Cheetyr.

Video Tutorial: How to Create Clean, Flawless Photoshop Actions

Photoshop actions can be a critical resource in any photographer’s workflow. Turning otherwise monotonous tasks into an autonomous utility, actions are created by manually performing a series of steps and recording them as an ATN file. This ATN file can then be ‘played’ in the future, when you’re looking to repeat those actions on future images, without the hassle of repeating the now-recorded workflow.

But where do you even get started with creating an action? And how can you effectively plan them out as to not cause any errors when trying to use them in the future? Well, Phlearn has us covered in their latest video, which breaks down the steps to creating and using an effective, flawless action.

Helpful Tutorial Shows You the Best Ways to Reduce Noise in Photoshop

Noise reduction, much like sharpening, is one of those post-processing tools that is often overused or used improperly, yielding terrible results. But as Bryan O'Neill Hughes shows you in the video above, tackling noise in Photoshop can be both easy and effective just as long as you know what you're doing.

How I Photograph the Milky Way in the Light-Polluted Skies of Singapore

When it comes to photographing the elusive Milky Way in one of the most light-polluted major cities like Singapore, timing is critical. Most of the faint details will be washed out by the extreme light pollution and if we were to shoot the Milky Way under unfavorable atmospheric conditions, our attempt would be futile.

Unfortunately, most of the tutorials online only work in locations that are at least 2 stops darker than most of the dark locations in Singapore and so, we need to do more in post-processing to unveil the elusive Milky Way and more complex workflow is required if we’re shooting at much brighter locations.

Free Aperture to Lightroom Migration Tool is in Open Beta

The announcement that Apple is discontinuing Aperture has left many users wondering how they’re supposed to properly transfer their soon-to-be irrelevant file structure over to Adobe's Lightroom.

Neither Adobe nor Apple have yet released an official means to do so (at least not yet), and so software developer Adrian Grah took it into his own hands and created Aperture Exporter: a free utility that automates the process of moving from Aperture to Lightroom 5.

UK Students Shocked at Option to Pay for ‘Digital Slimming’ of Grad Pictures

Students at the University of York in the UK spent their graduation day yesterday Tweeting images of a controversial offer by school photo agency Success Photography.

When they went on the agency's site to select their graduation picture options, in addition to how many wallet size prints they wanted and whether or not they wanted a digital download, the site also allowed them to select "Digital Slimming" and "Digital Complexion and Smile Enhancement."

Grieving Father Asks Internet to Photoshop Baby Photo, Receives Incredible Response

It's true that the Internet can be a stupid and cruel place -- read any comment section on a controversial news piece for proof of that -- but it can also be a wonderful place that occasionally brings you to tears... in a good way.

This is a story about the best of the Internet: about a grieving father, a heartfelt request, and an overwhelming response.

Tutorial: How to Create Double-Exposures in Photoshop

While double-exposure photography all started in-camera – most likely by accident – it’s since become an actual style and genre of photography all its own. And while it can still be done in-camera through film or a number of DSLRs that offer the capabilities, it can also be done in Photoshop. Here to show us how is wedding photographer Andrew Klokow, with a quick and efficient workflow for nailing double-exposures in post-production.

Craigslist Ad Seeks Digital Artist to Make it Look Like Abusive Boyfriend is Cheating

This is, bar none, the strangest Craigslist ad we have ever seen. In the past, the few ads we've shared typically involve people trying to hire photographers to work for free, but this is completely different.

Posted by a concerned family, they would like to hire a professional digital artist who can make it look like one of their relatives' boyfriends is cheating. In other words, they would like you to insert this guy's face into several pictures with another girl and make it look 100% believable.

The ‘Doco’ Extension Gives Photoshop the Documents Panel It’s Always Needed

When you're working with multiple photos in Photoshop, one of the biggest pains turns out to be management. Despite being around for over 20 years, Photoshop’s approach to dealing with multiple documents still feels rather archaic or, to put it technically, a pain in the butt.

This left a gap in the photo-editing program that needed filling -- a gap that an extension called Doco (pronounced dock-oh) is trying to take care of.

Breaking: Apple Officially Kills Off Aperture

The day has come. We all felt it in our bones, but today it has been confirmed by the guys in Cupertino: Apple has stopped development of Aperture, its professional-level photo organization and editing software.

Tutorial: A Simple Way to Add a Watermark to Your Images Without Ruining Them

Watermarks are a controversial topic. Many believe they ruin your images, and are so easily removed that there's no point in adding one. Others see it as a necessary hurdle they would like to place in a potential photo stealer's way.

If you happen to fall in the latter camp, Phlearn's Aaron Nace would like to show you a simple way to create a custom brush that will take care of your watermarking needs for good, and offer a few tips on how to apply that watermark so that it doesn't outright ruin your images.

Tutorial: How to Quickly Fix Skin Redness Using the HSL Sliders in Photoshop

One problem almost all portrait photographers are going to run into at one point or another is skin redness. We're human, there's blood flowing through our faces, it's inevitable and even natural.

At times, however, it shows up just a bit too much around the nose, eyes, and cheeks. That's when you hop on Photoshop and pull up the tutorial above.

Demo Roundup of the Photo Features and Apps from Today’s Creative Cloud Release

Earlier today, Adobe announced a collection of upgrades, updates and new releases for its Creative Cloud platform. Briefly detailed in our coverage of the announcement, Photoshop CC received a number of improvements, Lightroom Mobile received an iPhone version, and Adobe announced a new iPad app Photoshop Mix.

But that was just an announcement, and so to properly introduce you to a number of these features, we’ve compiled a demo/walkthrough collection that shows each of these new features and apps in action.

Tutorial: 5 Things You Should Know About Layers in Photoshop CC

In this short but helpful episode of Adobe Creative Cloud TV, Adobe Evangelist Terry White reveals some neat Photoshop CC layer features that you may not know about. From filtering and searching layers, to selecting multiple layers, to generating assets from layers, White shares some very useful information.

Sneak Peek: A Useful Focus Selection Tool is Coming to Photoshop CC on June 18th

A couple of weeks ago, we told you to mark June 18th on your calendars, because Adobe would be revealing "the next evolution of Creative Cloud." Well, we're still a few days away from the fateful keynote, but Adobe has given us a little teaser, showing us just one of the features that the Photoshop team has been working on for this major update.

The Ultimate Guide for Creating an Efficient and Effective Lightroom Workflow

When diving into Lightroom, trying to set up a workflow can be a daunting task. Even once you have one in place, trying to stay consistent with it and properly tweak it as needed is a challenge.

Knowing this, the team over at Phlearn has put together a very useful, in-depth video that walks you through the basics of setting up a workflow and learning how to properly maintain it over time.

Tutorial Shows You How to Make the Most of the Clone Stamp Tool

While the clone stamp tool is one of the most vital and frequently-used tools available within Photoshop, it’s also one that few know how to use most effectively. Here to help fix that is Aaron Nace of the Phlearn team, who graciously dedicated a quarter of an hour to showing you how to make the most of this tool.