Up. That’s all you need to say. Last November, we took on a project with Wired UK magazine to photograph Richard Branson’s latest venture in attempting to conquer the final frontier: space. We spent the good part of a week in the deserts of New Mexico and California, photographing the spaces and places, the infrastructure, the people, and ultimately Sir Richard himself.
The vast majority of my photographic work is environmental portraiture, corporate and editorial photography, and interiors, some of my commercial photography does include product photos. Quite honestly, some of this stuff is pretty straightforward, take a nice representative image of the product on a clean white backdrop so it integrates onto a website (also white) seamlessly. Sometimes a client gives me a bit more artistic license, and sometimes I get to do a shoot that's just for me.
French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics of using Lightroom 4 to post-process your digital photographs. If you're just getting into using Lightroom and shooting in RAW, it's a helpful primer that will allow you to hit the ground running.
Faking the look of old films is becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile photo sharing apps, but so far the popular apps have stuck with various films and not older photographic processes. If you want to create a photograph that mimics the look of a wet plate, it's actually pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!
Here's a humorous and lighthearted 5-minute video titled, "Fafa's Photoshop Tutorial." Created by the comedy series Glove and Boots, it's a short and sweet introduction to using layers in Photoshop... taught by puppets. Think Sesame Street meets Scott Kelby.
When Space Shuttle Endeavour was making low level flyovers of famous landmarks across the United States a couple of months ago, Adobe Lightroom Quality Engineer Ben Warde was able to photograph it flying by the Golden Gate Bridge. The 10-minute video above shows how Warde post-processed one of his best shots from that day using basic Lightroom adjustments. While the information may be basic for many of you, it should be helpful for people who are just starting out with programs like Lightroom, …
Here's a great introductory retouching tutorial by photographer Sara Kiesling, who writes, …
Visual Supply Co (AKA VSCO), best known for its film emulation software, has launched a new product that's designed to reduce the time you spend post-processing your images in Adobe Lightroom. VSCO Keys is a tool that adds powerful and customizable keyboard shortcuts to Lightroom 3 and 4. You can assign keys to the various sliders in the program, allowing you to keep your hands off your mouse during photo editing.
Looking for free lessons on how to get started with using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to post-process your photographs? Look no further than the official YouTube channel of New York City camera shop B&H Photo Video. The store often invites well-known professional photographers to hold lectures on subjects they're knowledgable in and passionate about. The collection of videos aren't as shared as other shorter tutorial videos you'll find online due to their great lengths -- they run up to two …
A few months ago 14-year-old Julia Bluhm caused quite a stir when she managed to collect over 80,000 total signatures in an attempt to get Seventeen Magazine to put one completely un-Photoshopped spread in each issue. Her argument was that the magazine's readers have a sensitive body image, and constantly seeing unrealistically thin and perfect software-enhanced models wasn't helping the matter.
Watermarks are a popular way of "signing" photographs and deterring theft, but having a giant logo overlaid on your images can ruin the viewing experience. Photographer Klaus Herrmann has one solution: integrated watermarks. He writes, …
Here's a tutorial by photographer Stephen Davies on how you can create a pseudo double exposure photograph using a couple simple steps in Photoshop.
Those of you lucky enough to already have Photoshop CS6 already know about all the popular, highly-advertised features like Content Aware Move. But there are a lot of smaller improvements that come with each re-design of Photoshop that never get to see the limelight. In honor of those small (but often highly useful) improvements, Photoshop Insider Scott Kelby put together a short YouTube video that highlights a few of them for you.
Well, lets just say I've gotten better at this over the last couple of years. The left image was one of the first I've "scanned" with my DSLR, and the one on the right I've just rescanned using the techniques described below (higher resolution available here). Right now I can get higher resolution and better image quality that what street labs give you on CD.
The "Content Aware Fill" tool was one of the most lauded advancements in Photoshop CS5. Of course, the tool wasn't without its occasional glitches, but the ability to select a section and have the program clone it out automatically was still very impressive. But what if that's the only tool you want to use? What if you're a casual photographer who wants to remove unwanted sections in your composition without buying and learning a whole editing suite?
There's been a lot of controversy around magazines using Photoshop to make real people look unrealistically pretty or fit, but what if you could actively Photoshop what you saw and experienced? That's the question the people over at Cracked decided to ask, and the answers are pretty hilarious:
Here's a nifty Photoshop tip by photographer Alex Wise on how you can use a Threshold layer to approximate black and white points in a photograph, and then use those points in the Curves tool to remove color casts from photos.
Adam Dachis over at Lifehacker offers a simple method for correcting underexposed photo with any image editor that supports layers, inversion, and Overlay blending mode. Simply create a duplicate later, invert it, set the blending mode to Overlay, and then adjust the opacity to suit your taste. While it's certainly not a pro photography trick -- other techniques including adjusting the curves and levels may be better -- it's a quick and easy tip that may be good to know.
Here's a tutorial on how to do non-automated HDR for real estate photography using Photoshop CS5. The first thing you'll need is a sturdy tripod with a level. The closer you are to a leveled image, the less correction you'll have to do later.
Here's a brief video in which Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Kelley shares his technique for lighting large architectural spaces using small flash units. Kelley captures hundreds of photographs of each scene and the combines them afterwards in Photoshop. Back in September we shared an interesting time-lapse walkthrough by Kelley showing how he shoots home exteriors with the same technique.
Here's a Photoshop tutorial by Twin Cities Photography Group teaching how you can use Photoshop's High Pass Filter to soften the skin on a portrait subject without losing the skin's texture.
Here's a video in which interior photographer Roger Brooks walks through how he goes about lighting, photographing, and stitching residential interior photographs.
In this video, commercial photographer Jay P. Morgan walks through how he went about shooting a composite sports photograph of Mexican soccer player Rafael Márquez.
Here's an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how he went about creating a photo of a B-25 bomber. His technique for lighting the plane is similar to the real estate photography walkthrough that we featured last weekend, and involves lighting the scene a bazillion times from different angles, and then combining the different parts of the photo in Photoshop.
Demos at graphics conferences are often interesting to watch because they offer a sneak peek at technologies that may soon become available to the general public. The video above is a demo for "PatchMatch", an algorithm developed by researchers at Princeton and Adobe. Although you might be unfamiliar with PatchMatch, you've probably heard of its most famous feature: Content Aware Fill. Only a small piece of this amazing technology was introduced in Photoshop CS5, so the amazing image …
Adobe has announced a new Android app called Photoshop Touch for tablet owners. Rather than provide a full suite of image editing features, the app appears to be more geared towards minor edits, effects, and sharing. It'll be released in the near future for Android at a price of $10, and an iOS version is on the way as well.
The Sharpen Tool in Photoshop has always been useful in that it allows you to quickly sharpen specific areas in a photograph, but a major problem was that it had the tendency to introduce nasty artifacts into the image. Alternative methods that avoid this issue (e.g. using a new sharpened layer) became popular, leaving the Sharpen Tool to gather dust on many users' tool pallets.
Here's an educational time-lapse tutorial by Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Mike Kelley in which he walks through how he goes about photographing buildings. His technique might be described "manual HDR" -- after shooting the building over a longish period of time to capture different lightings, he then enters the scene and lights different areas of the building using two Canon 430EX Speedlites. Afterward, he loads the stills into Photoshop and selects different portions of the …
Here's a helpful tutorial by Tutvid that teaches how to give your photographs dramatic colors using only Adobe Camera Raw. If you've started shooting RAW but haven't played around too much with ACR, this video is also a great primer for becoming familiar with the different panels and sliders.
Want to use Instagram filters without using Instagram? Creative director Daniel Box carefully recreated a number of filters from the popular iPhone app as Photoshop actions, providing a quick and simple way to retrofy your digital photos. Download the actions file to get started.
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.
Vignetting is often viewed as a bad thing when discussing lens quality, but it's sometimes desirable to add artificial vignetting to a photograph to draw attention to the center of the image, separating the subject from the background. Here's a helpful tutorial that shows how you can add vignetting using a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop.
If you use Photoshop, you're probably experienced with the uber-useful -- and oft-abused -- Clone Stamp tool, but what about the Clone Source panel that's been around since CS 4? This brief but informative tutorial by Photoshop guru Brian Wood is a great primer for that panel, and also includes some general Photoshop tips and tricks that you might not have known.
Ryan Burnside recently set out to find a cheap way to shoot 360-degree panoramas of scenes, and discovered that shooting a Christmas ornament (or any other spherical reflection) captures all the information needed -- all that's needed is a way to "unravel" the spherical image. Burnside found that the free image editor GIMP can do the trick.
Here's a crash course on getting started with using Photoshop Layers and Masks by Sean Armenta of Fstoppers. If you've been making edits on your photographs directly without creating new layers, watch this video to have your eyes opened to the power of layers.
Here's an awesome post-processing tutorial by photographer Sean Armenta teaching how to clean up skin in a portrait using three Photoshop tools: the Healing Brush, Patch Tool, and Clone Stamp.
Some friends of mine asked me to shoot a quick band photograph of them recently without any preparation or planning. Luckily, the location was pretty nice (we were at a hostel) and the weather was a bit cloudy so there wasn't harsh sunlight.
Those epic photographs of stars and galaxies that you see on sites like NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day don't actually look like that straight out of the camera. Instead, a good deal of post-processing magic goes into each photograph. How much magic? Countless black and white photographs shot with different cameras are carefully weaved together, and color is added to enhance the final image. The video above gives a quick and interesting two minute tour of how they post-processed one …
Here's yet another awesome Photoshop tutorial by Sean Armenta showing how to use the uber-useful Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop. He covers not just the basics of the tool, but also various tips and tricks you can use to maximize its usefulness.
Like the Pen Tool tutorial we shared last month, here's another awesome tutorial by Sean Armenta showing how to use the Healing Brush and Patch Tool in Photoshop. Perhaps these are two tools that you've never gotten around to learning how to use. If that's you, watch this video and you'll soon have two new weapons in your portrait retouching arsenal.
Have you always wondered how to use the Pen Tool in Photoshop but have never gotten around to learning it? f stoppers published this uber-informative video tutorial by Sean Armenta teaching how it's used and why it's a tool that everyone should learn. The teaching is done on a Mac, so if you have a PC, just substitute CTRL for CMD and ALT for OPT.
We've featured a couple beautiful examples of fake slow-motion video created using Twixtor shot with the Canon 7D and 550D. If you don't want to shell out $300 just for Twixtor, you can do something somewhat similar using only Final Cut Studio. The above footage was shot at 60fps using a Canon 60D and created entirely with Final Cut Studio. Yes, yes, we know the wheels look strange, but it's still a neat effect and might produce interesting results with the right kind of footage.
The Internet viral sensation "Double Rainbow" video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.
My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn't much light to work with, and I didn't bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven't done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here's a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used …
Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the …
I took this shot with my Canon EOS 450D, and a Canon 50mm f1.8 -- my favourite lens in the case of portraits especially.
Asters of any kind provide such potential in photography: the colours and the gentle curve of their tiny thin petals combines with their close-growing nature to give the impression either of flowers fighting each other for space and light or of a mass of colour, huddled together for comfort. The clump of asters shown in this shot are a soft, luscious purply-cerulean-cornflowery-blue. Light seems to dance off the petals. Or it would, had there been much light when I took this. Instead, it was a …
About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.
For a cover shoot of a men's magazine, it's no surprise if liberties are taken in post-production. Generous Photoshopping is pretty much a given in any fashion or modeling photo. But here's a bit of a surprise: it may not be the culprit for Lindsay Lohan's disappearing belly button! …
