One of the parameters first time photographers frequently go nuts with in post (to their detriment) is sharpening. So whether you're editing in Camera RAW or Photoshop (or even Lightroom, for that matter), the basic tips and tricks in this Photoshop Playbook tutorial will help make sure your photos don't end up as one big artifact.
There's no shortage of great photography resources out there for photographers of all levels who want to continue honing their skills, and joining their ranks today is a new video series from Olympus that is part marketing campaign and part learning opportunity.
One question -- or should we say debate -- that often arises among photographers is whether or not you should take a lower-paying job if it means getting an assignment from a reputable publication or brand. The hope, of course, is that the impressive photo credits will entice other clients to hire you for a fair rate, making up for the initially low pay.
While there is no “right” answer to this question, the team over at PhotoShelter asked John Harrington, author of a number of top-selling photography books, to weigh in on the debate over Skype.
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.
One of the first things that we learn when we start taking photographs seriously is that ‘aperture’, the size of the hole in the lens through which light passes, controls depth of field.
A large aperture creates shallow depth of field while a narrow one creates wide depth of field. But there’s a little more to aperture than that, let’s take a closer look at this most fundamental photographic control.
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.
There are a ton of posts that’ll have you scared to take a DSLR to a color festival or run. I want to share my own color-proof seal for the Holi Festival of Colors in Utah that managed to keep my DSLR completely clean for under $15.
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.
“What’s in my bag” posts oftentimes come across as a bit pretentious. Between pulling out this body or that piece of glass, it’s easy for the post/video to become a game of “look what I have that you probably don't have because it costs $XX,XXX.”
But when done right, they can be both interesting and informative, as photographer Erik Almås demonstrates in this fantastic walkthrough of his camera equipment.
Choosing the right camera settings for concert photography can be a daunting task, even for experienced music photographers. Here’s a breakdown of every major camera setting that I recommend for shooting live music.
Are you frequently afraid that you’re falling into the trap of only taking cliché photographs? If so, then Kai from DigitalRev might be able to help you sort it out with this (slightly pretentious) DRTV video on 25 photo clichés that you should stop doing.
As much as composition, proper exposure, and location can affect how good your subjects look in a photo, posing plays a very crucial and often overlooked role -- well, overlooked until you realize that all of your portraits look awkward and unnatural.
Fortunately, there are resources out there to help. And so if you're one of those photographers for whom posing individuals and groups doesn't come naturally, this fantastic seminar put together by B&H should help a great deal.
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.
We all know that light is the crucial element in photography. Understanding how it behaves and the factors that influence it is mandatory.
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.
Most camera gear is built with longevity and strenuous activity in mind, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the best possible care of your gear. To that end, Canon’s service and support team recently put out this video showing the best practices for making sure that you properly and thoroughly clean and check your gear so it can keep working for as long as possible.
The first post I made on sensor-stack thickness wallowed deeply in PhotoGeekery. This one is meant to be of practical use so I’ll try to leave the Geek stuff out. We’ll start with the simple facts.
If you’re looking to get more out of your smartphone’s camera with minimal financial investment, look no further. Kai and the DRTV team have created a short little video that goes over ten cheap, clever tricks that'll help you get the most of your mobile photography.
Kai specifically uses an iPhone throughout the video, but a number of these tricks can be used on any mobile device.
Behind every great photograph is a well-crafted creative workflow, and if you haven't honed yours yet, then this seminar by photographer Robert Rodriguez Jr. will help you nail it down. In a little over an hour, he details the four steps he uses in Lightroom's Develop module to go from RAW file to final, edited image.
It's not unusual for still photographers to dabble in videography at some point in their career. With almost every high-end camera on the market capable of shooting HD video almost as well as it can capture stills, the potential is just teasing still photographers to jump into the motion picture realm.
Many of the compositional principles used in photography also apply, but motion picture adds an entirely new dimension to creating compelling work. To help ease that transition a bit, Filme von Draussen has shared a video called How to Make a Mountain Bike Film. And while the title sounds a bit specific, the 10 steps he shares in the video are universally applicable.
As one of the best-known and respected portrait photographers in the business, Tamara Lackey certainly knows her stuff when it comes to capturing life’s most intimate moments. In this video, part of her series in collaboration with Nikon, Lackey shows you how to shoot a quality romantic portrait session.
The question, "how can I take better photographs" never goes away for the photographer who is constantly looking to improve and evolve, no matter how many years they've been doing it. But this question is particularly difficult to answer for beginners who don't yet have the foundation that years of looking through a viewfinder offers.
Thankfully for those people, there are professionals like Jim Goldstein who don't mind condensing years worth of experience into useful tips and advice.
Photography can be an expensive hobby to get into. With most DSLRs nowadays coming in at around $400 for even the lowest of consumer level cameras. By the time you add in accessories, the financial aspect can be a bit demanding for a newbie.
But just because it can be financially demanding doesn’t mean it has to be, as our friendly neighborhood DRTV stars explain in the useful video above.
Consider this a friendly reminder for any wedding photographers who haven't already heard it or maybe even forgot the tip when we shared it almost exactly a year ago.
Most entry- and enthusiast-level cameras come with a pop-up flash, which though not especially powerful, can come in very handy. In this tutorial we’ll show you six built-in flash techniques than can help you get the better results from this often overlooked and somewhat maligned feature.
Whether you’re just diving into Adobe Lightroom or have been using it for a while and are simply in need of some productivity tips, the above video on keeping your catalog as clean and structured as possible will likely come in very useful.
Created and narrated by Adobe Evangelist Terry White, the video runs through 5 things that you should know to get the most out of your Lightroom image catalogs.
If you're new to the world of studio portraiture and you've noticed that the skin tones in your photos are often turning out wrong, it's possible you're getting color contamination from the ambient lights in your studio -- be that a bank of windows or overhead lights.
Lindsay Adler and CreativeLive want to help you clear that up, and so they've published this short snippet of their Skin 101 course to explain how best to avoid this issue.
They say the devil is in the details, and boy is that ever true when it comes to creating an easy-to-navigate photography website. In the video above, The Slanted Lens' Jay P Morgan and Adelaide Lawren sit down and talk you through 6 tips that will help you get one of the most important parts of that site squared away: the contact page.
Sprinkled in-between the more advanced lighting, photography and post-processing tutorials that we feature on the site, we've been trying to add in the occasional basic tutorial or walkthrough for the beginning photographer. Not everybody who reads PetaPixel is a pro- or even an intermediate-level photographer, and we all have to start somewhere.
The video above falls squarely into the "for beginners" category (in case the title didn't clue you in), and even though it was uploaded all the way back in 2010, it will still come in very useful if you're just starting out.
An ongoing debate among photographers from all backgrounds is that of natural vs artificial light. Both options have their pitfalls and qualities worth praising, but even so, it seems like some photographers are hesitant to put a subject in front of a strobe if natural light is available.
But as shown in this video put together by Felix Kunze and Sue Bryce for CreativeLive, when used correctly, strobes can almost perfectly replicate the look of natural light. Kunze and Bryce compare identical model setups side-by-side using both natural and strobe lighting as an exercise in showing off the differences and similarities between the two.
There’s no such thing as too many resources when it comes to learning how to take a good photograph. And here to prove this statement is a neat little pseudo-interactive web guide put together by Shutterfly for those among us who are just starting out.
Butterfly lighting is one of the oldest techniques for lighting a subject. Named for the butterfly-shaped shadow that forms underneath the subject’s nose, this setup is a proven method to ensure your subject is well-lit in a pleasing manner.
CJ Kale and Nick Selway long ago fell in love with Hawaii and founded Lava Light, a photography gallery focused on capturing the ever-changing landscape created by an active volcano and crashing waves -- and sometimes both together when the conditions are just right. And if swimming with fire and dodging lava bombs weren’t challenging enough, these photographers believe in creating their images completely in-camera.
Balancing exposures between sky, water and lava can be incredibly tricky. Luckily, Lava Light has shared some tips to help you get the shot without combining exposures or using HDR.
We've introduced you to best friends CJ Kale and Nick Selway before, back in 2012 when we first shared the beautiful photography they created for their gallery "Lava Light Galleries." But today, you get to go into the water with them while they tell you about capturing amazing shots while, at times, swimming in 110°F water.
This piece originally appeared in PhotoShelter's guide Building Your Outdoor & Adventure Photography Business – for the full article download the guide here.
Elizabeth Krist, Senior Photo Editor at National Geographic, and the rest of the Nat Geo team seek photographers who have an eye for composing striking and electrifying images. But perhaps even more importantly, they want photographers who have a real curiosity about the world around them -- those who aren’t afraid to delve into the intellectual and research aspects of an assignment.
To give photographers a better sense of what goes on behind the scenes at National Geographic, Elizabeth provided some insight into what type of work the magazine commissions, how photographers can pitch Nat Geo, and what you can do to get noticed.
Put together by photographer Steve Perry, the video tutorial above shares a collection of useful tips, advice and examples that help explain how to best think of and use focal lengths when you're out capturing landscape photography.
When you're looking to get the most bang for your buck, sometimes the best bet is to wander off the beaten path and take an alternate route. The 'road less travelled' if you will.
The video above, featuring renowned Dancers Among Us photographer Jordan Matter, is only a minute and a half long, but he shares a very interesting perspective in it. Many photographers are all about planning every shot, and to be sure, this approach can yield spectacular results. As they say, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.
But Matter seems to take a different approach. He prefers to "make his own luck," ala Titanic antagonist Cal Hockley... minus the big diamond and evil tendencies.
Photoshop's Content Aware Scale tool doesn't get much headline time thanks to other popular features like Content Aware Move and, of course, the vilified Liquify tool, but it can come in extremely handy in a few situations.
When it comes to buying glass, deciding what you want and how much you're willing to spend can be difficult even in the best of conditions. So, naturally, when buying second-hand glass, an added layer of caution is needed to make sure you're getting what you're looking and paying for.
No matter how many hours you spend in Photoshop each day, it’s inevitable there’s a feature or utility within the app you’re yet to use or are completely unaware of. Such was the case for this neat little tip by Digitalchemy that we just stumbled upon, which shows you how to import a collection of photographs into Photoshop, each as a new layer in the same file.
Defined by Google as, “the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens,” Bokeh is a term that has become much more prominent in the past ten years or so than ever before, thanks to the photography community.
This article was reprinted with express permission from Thomas O’Brien and …
Here's a neat GoPro feature that you might not know about: the GoPro actually has a setting where you can take video and still photos simultaneously. No, we're not talking about pulling low-res stills out of video. We mean actually snapping high-res stills at an interval while shooting video.
Promoting FujiFilm’s new X-T1, renowned photographer Zack Arias traveled around the mystical streets of Marrakech to highlight the camera’s capabilities, all the while sharing a plethora of fantastic street photography tips.
Wedding photography has grown exponentially over the past decade, and with that growth has come some new trends in weddings that weren’t nearly as prevalent before. One of these is the ‘first look,' the moment that the groom first sees the bride in her dress, and a moment that is quickly becoming a must-capture.
The above video, put together by B&H in collaboration with photographer Joe Buissink, shows just how to get the most out of this rising trend.
When it comes to simple photography hacks, few are as useful and clever in the field as this one, presented by 34-year wedding photography veteran Frank Donnino.
When it comes to street photography, much of the aesthetic appeal is the limited editing that usually takes place (or doesn’t take place, I guess), leaving the story and subject the focus of the image instead of creative editing. But that's not to say that editing should be left out of the equation or completely disregarded.
If you're wondering where that line should sit, this tutorial by Swiss street photographer Thomas Leuthard shows you what he does when he imports his street photos into Lightroom 5.
It's easy to plateau when you're experimenting with light painting photography, and as a result, this fun genre can often turn into a flash in the pan hobby.
And so, in order to help sustain your interest in what I think is a worthwhile endeavor and an under appreciated form of photography, I've decided to provide a few of the toys and tricks I've picked up in my experiences. These are things that have helped respire my interest in the past. Hopefully they'll motivate you to continue experimenting as well.
When it comes to getting the most out your post-processing applications, you really want to know your shortcuts. The problem is, there's so many within each program that it’s impossible to remember them all.