These days, we try to avoid lower contrast and flare, but it’s part of the charm of most retro photography. However, achieving flare is quite a hard effect to replicate unless you’re shooting in ideal light conditions, with the sun in, or close to the edge of, the frame. To save time and effort, here’s how to add a convincing flare effect in Photoshop Elements.
Falling objects captured by stop-motion photography are impressive, but the techniques can be a bit hit and miss. For a simple Photoshop solution, first shoot a background, in this case a cake and tablecloth, and then the object you want to show falling through the air. Using Photoshop’s layers and masks, we can overlay the two and give the impression of a high-speed shot. Here’s how it’s done…
When you shoot dozens of similar shots in the same location, you may end up needing to tweak loads of nearly identical photos. You could slog through each photo one at a time, tweaking contrast using a Curves Adjustment Layer and then adding a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to boost colour, but this repetitive editing process could take ages. A faster way to tackle a group of photos with similar photo-fixing needs is to condense multiple editing commands into a single Photoshop Action.
Shooting raw files has become one of the most important photography tips we offer our readers on a daily basis. Yet while most photographers agree it’s important to shoot raw files, the nuance of fine-tuning and editing raw files is at the top of said photographers’ list of most common photography problems.
In our new weekly series, Raw Tuesday, we aim to demystify the experience of shooting and editing raw files. Every Tuesday we’ll bring you new tips and tutorials strictly relating to using raw files.
SLR technology is always improving, and one key area is the image quality of photos shot at high ISO settings. But what if you don’t have the newest SLR or have raw images with potential that are suffering from image noise? Help is at hand! By utilising the power of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) software, it’s possible to rescue noisy raw images in a flash.
In the traditional darkroom, split tone effects are applied to images using a combination of chemicals to tint different tonal areas, such as the shadows or the highlights. This effect can be recreated in the digital darkroom by using this very simple method for split toning in Photoshop.
Learn how to use the Refine Edge controls in Photoshop to perfect selections and get rid of unwanted bits of background colour.
The ability to sharpen an image after you’ve taken it is a saving grace. Sometimes a shallow depth of field or a wrongly chosen autofocus point can mean that key details in an image are soft. Using the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop can bring back these lost details, and prevent an otherwise great photograph from being destined for the recycle bin.
In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll show you how to blur the background in Photoshop and sharpen detail in your foreground interest. Here we’re going to apply two layer masks to our snowy egret image: one to sharpen the fine feather details and one to blur out the background.
In the days of the darkroom, film would be chopped into fours or sixes then lined up and used to create a contact sheet. In most cases, this served as a useful overview of the roll of film, but there are more creative possibilities. We can achieve similar results in Photoshop from a single image by making a duplicate layer for each contact sheet window to recreate the effect of an old film contact sheet.
Despite its origins in traditional film photography, the cross-processed look is still hugely popular with photographers who want to give their images a creative edge. Typically, the characteristics include skewed colours, increased saturation, and enhanced contrast. In this Photoshop tutorial we’re going to show you how to cross process photos digitally and add a black-edged border to a raw image.
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