Tutorials

If you are a parent with a passion for taking good photos of your kids, this guide will walk you through it and help to improve your skills.

Photographer Joe Edelman has put together a helpful beginner's guide that explains one of the most important (and easy to overlook) details in portrait photography: catchlights. These specular highlights can make or break your photo, and in this video, Edelman covers all of the basic "dos" and "donts" of catchlights in portraiture.

We've seen a lot of creative self-portrait ideas come across our inbox over the past several weeks, but none are quite as fun as this "punch portrait" tutorial by photographer and YouTuber Mike Smith.

Lightroom has many adjustments and in general, they work reasonably well. I bet the most widely used sliders are the Highlights and the Shadows sliders. There seems to be a general tendency to make sure that the highlights are not blown and the shadows are not blocked.

Fuji's Instax film is typically thought of as a "snapshot" product, not something you'd use in a studio, but Brooklyn-based photographer Anthony Tripoli hasn't let that stop him. He's figured out a way to shoot studio portraits on Instax film, strobes and all.

One of the most useful AI-powered tools in Photoshop is the relatively new Object Selection tool. But if you're finding that the tool isn't quite as precise as you would like, Unmesh Dinda from PIXimperfect has a few tips that will help you dial the feature in just right.

Los Angeles-based event photographer Mik Milman made this 11-minute video showing how he stores and organizes his photography gear. The centerpiece of his organizational strategy: a rolling tool chest.

There's no shortage of creative photography ideas that you can try while isolating, but we really like this one from the folks at Adaptalux. Using just some paper and light, they'll show you how you can capture beautiful abstract macro photography without leaving home.

Do you know your camera basics? Today we dive into shutter speed and teach you all the ways you can use shutter speed to unlock your creativity and expand your photography style. Learn how to show fluid movement or capture a split second and what styles of photography these shutters speed options are best for.

If anything good has come out of the current lockdown, it’s the many wonderful ways people have been finding to stay creative. When the coronavirus began to take hold and necessary government instructions rendered my wedding and portrait photography business inoperable, I had to deal with the shock and financial implications of it like any other photographer. It also threw up another challenge: how do we as creatives stay creative?

In this post, I'll share how I do quick and easy color cast removal using Photoshop. I will provide some examples to show you that it can work for a wide range of images. The color cast removal process I will explain may not be a universal solution but it seems to be very resilient.

When it comes to major retouching like changing eye color, most of us choose to use Photoshop or a similar pixel editor rather than a RAW editor like Lightroom. But as Anthony Morganti shows in the tutorial above, you don't actually have to leave Lightroom to make this kind of edit.

Jared Polin of Fro Knows Photo—recently the target of a good-humored April Fools' Day parody—is doing his best to keep his 1M+ subscribers educated and entertained. To that end, he's now giving away his Guide to Flash Photography for free or "pay what you want."

Product photographer Dustin Dolby is back with another workphlo tutorial that tackles a difficult subject in simple terms: how to shoot reflective products using only a single light source.

Photographer Mathieu Stern has put together a simple step-by-step that will teach you how to turn your digital photographs into beautiful cyanotype prints. If you've never made physical prints at home, consider this your gateway drug.

I'm light-painting photographer Russell Klimas, and in this article I'll share how I do top-down light painting in a room. I was originally inspired to do this technique because when I had done it with a drone I had a troll complain that the images weren’t clear enough.

Unmesh Dinda of PIXimperfect has put together a brilliant educational video on the oft-confusing Divide blend mode in Photoshop. In this tutorial he'll show you how to use it to remove any color cast, before diving into the fascinating mathematics behind this useful tool.

Last week, photographer Brendan Barry created a timely tutorial on how to turn your bedroom into a giant camera, and use it to take actual pictures. But what if you don't have any photographic chemicals around for developing and fixing those images? Barry's got you covered.

When most of us began pursuing a career as photographers, we pictured idyllic days spent behind our beloved cameras photographing all the things. We quickly learned that our time behind a camera would be precious, as most of us would spend way more time sitting at a computer editing, communicating with our clients, managing marketing and social media campaigns, and well, just running the business.

Photographer Brendan Barry has put together a detailed step-by-step tutorial that might help you stay busy while you're stuck inside. In this video, he'll show you how to take and develop photos by turning your bedroom into a camera obscura, and your bathroom into a makeshift darkroom.

Nature and macro photographer Don Komarechka made this 4-minute video tutorial in which he shares how you can make and photograph frozen soap bubbles (if you live somewhere cold enough).

If you're looking for at-home photo ideas, here's an 18-minute behind-the-scenes video by photographer Irene Rudnyk showing how you can get dappled light for a portrait shoot with a small budget and studio space.

Photographer Michael Comeau over at OnPortraits has put together a cheeky tutorial that pokes fun at how almost every portrait editing tutorial (his included) tends to feature pretty girls as the models. So he created one using "Grumpy Old Men" instead.

You might have heard of the Pixelstick. “Nothing compares” is one of their tag lines. And this is true... at least price-wise. I have always wanted one to at least try out some light painting with it, but the Pixelstick retails for €400 here in Germany and $349 in the United States.

I have been getting quite experimental with my photography this year and recently stumbled upon Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM, photography. I fell into the work of photographer Andy Gray and was immediately blown away by the painterly feel of his images.

Our friends at SLR Lounge have created a simple little DIY tutorial that can help you add some creative flare to your portraits... literally. In 2 minutes, photographer Pye Jirsa show you how to make what they call a "flare ring" using some simple crafts supplies.

I love shooting foregrounds in my big vista landscapes but it has taken quite a while to find out the things that work well and what doesn’t. I still don’t think I have mastered it but really enjoy the challenge of going out and finding a powerful foreground. In this article, I wanted to share the things that I believe have the biggest impact on creating great shots like this.

There are a million-and-one ways to add creative flares and effects to your shots in post-production after you’ve taken the image, but nothing beats the look and feel of an image that has used in-camera flares and bokeh effects.

RGB LEDs are a relatively new piece of technology, and a wonderful addition that photographers should be taking advantage of. Before this technology existed, we were forced to resort to adding gels to our strobes in order to add a pop of color into our images. This worked well (and still does) but having the ability to change the hue and saturation of your lights with the flip of a switch or turn of a dial is incredibly useful.

Wedding photographer Reggie Ballesteros gets a lot of questions from aspiring wedding photographers, and one of the most common is: how do you use off-camera flash? So he's created a comprehensive guide that covers his entire process—from the gear he uses, to his thought process during setup, through execution.

Anyone who has had any exposure to still life photography or studio work will know just how expensive backdrops can be. I have a couple from Kate Backdrops company, one of which I use very often, but I've been hankering after a few more.

So you’ve just finished your first couples portrait session and once you’ve gotten home and started looking through the images, you realize that something just feels “off” with your shots. Oftentimes it’s just little things we never really pay attention to, especially when we’re trying to catch the last bits of daylight, but they’re all easily avoidable. In this video, we’ll show you 5 reasons why your couples portraits might look awkward, and what you can do to avoid them.

It's Valentine's Day and a good opportunity to grab some flowers and celebrate our love for photography with another creative project. I didn’t want to miss my chance, so I grabbed some red roses and in today’s post I will share my set-up for a Valentine's Day 'Refracted Rose' photo.

Silhouette images can really pack a punch -- they can be very striking and have the ‘wow’ factor. But how do you take them? Follow the tips below to take your own perfect beach silhouette images!

Today we are going to use skeleton leaves and glycerin for a creative macro project. Skeleton leaves are fascinating and intricate structures that make great subjects for macro photography and creative projects.

In this short tutorial, well-known portrait and fashion photographer Lindsay Adler will show you how to use "the most inexpensive and under-appreciated" lighting modifier to capture beautiful studio portraits. She's talking, of course, about the lowly umbrella.

Lightroom and Photoshop are designed to work hand-in-hand, so you can easily pass photos between the two programs while you're working with them. Photography instructor Phil Steele of Steele Training made this beginner's 17-minute tutorial on doing "round trips" (and even "nested round trips") with photos between Lightroom and Photoshop.

The first time I was hired to photograph on set at a music video was decades ago. The client was a record label and they didn’t give me any detailed instructions. I was just starting out and it didn’t even occur to me to ask just what I was supposed to take pictures of.

Pye Jirsa over at SLR Lounge wants to flip your portrait editing workflow upside down. In his latest tutorial, Jirsa shows off a technique he calls "Dark Mode" that creates a moody, dramatic look in just a couple of very simple steps.

In the most recent episode of Adobe's "Photoshop Magic Minute," Photoshop Product Manager Meredith Stotzner shows you how to create your own custom keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop in just 60 seconds.

Professional photographer Karl Taylor has put together a short-but-very-useful tutorial that will show you how you can calibrate your lens autofocus without buying a special calibration chart or tool. All you need are a few household items, your camera, and your tripod.

Light, shadow, and highlight -- this is always a great combination for creating portraits from a lighting point of view. This is the interesting part: changing the intensity of the highlight or the tone in the shadows while maintaining the exposure can produce a different feel to an image, from being dramatic to soft and subtle, and that is what is so intriguing about photography.

Posing is one of the most difficult "arts within an art" to master when it comes to photography, but this short video from Eli Infante might help. Eli shares three tips that you can use to liven up your posing and improve your portrait photography in the process.

In this article, I'll share with you the lessons I have gained leading photography tours in Romania with Intrepid Exposures. These are lessons I feel we can all learn from in order to create more powerful photography.