By Amy Renfrey Lightroom is a wonderful software program. I’ve been using it for the past few years. In this lesson I am going to provide you with some basic Lightroom tips so you can begin navigating your way around the program. So what’s so wonderful about this program? It is a really simple program to use. It’s designed for  [ Read More ]

By Ajay Kumar N INTRODUCTION Working with Shapes Photoshop provides several tools that help add stylistic elements, such as shapes, to your work. You can add either a shape or a rasterized shape to an image. A shape is simply a vector object that keeps its crisp appearance when it is resized, edited, moved, reshaped, or copied. A rasterized shape  [ Read More ]

By Ajay Kumar N I. INTRODUCTION IN ADDITION to using Curves and Levels to correct the tonality of your photographs, you can also play with the Shadows/Highlights feature to help recover details in the shadow and highlight areas of a backlit image. This feature works a little bit like the Recovery and Fill Light sliders in Adobe Camera Raw, plus  [ Read More ]

As I mentioned in my prior post, retouching is a vast area and encompasses the smallest edit such as an image crop or resize to dramatic changes such as Photoshop art.  In this discussion I want to give you additional examples of how more extreme manipulation of the images can create drama or interest. The before and after pictures in Part 1 demonstrated a fairly basic approach to portrait retouching.  The goal of the retouch in that instance was to simply make the subject look better.  For portrait work that is really the majority of what is needed. With editorial work we want to convey a message or feeling through the photography.  We want to say something. Great pictures throughout history have done just that with very little to no retouching whatsoever.  There are many iconic photojournalistic editorial pictures I could use as examples, some disturbing such as the Eddie Adams picture of the Viet Cong Guerilla being executed in 1968 (not pictured) to more joyful subjects as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Times Square Kiss picture on V-J Day in 1945 (right).  The list can go on and on. Neither of these have significant retouches.  They may have been cropped or adjusted for exposure in the film processing but otherwise most likely nothing else at all. Today with digital capabilities we’re able to add more visual impact to what we are trying to say in a picture by applying more retouching techniques. I’m going to start with an example of a picture I captured that  [ Read More ]

We like to talk about a photographer’s “style”.  Well typically when we think of a photographer’s style we concentrate on how they take a picture.  Outdoor vs. indoor.  Natural light vs. artificial light.  Photojournalistic vs. formal portrait.  Sometimes what gets overlooked in that discussion is how the photographer retouches. To me, retouching has as much to do with a digital photographer’s style as does any of the things listed above. Retouching determines how the final product looks.  I guarantee that every portrait that a photographer shows you, with a few exceptions, has some form of retouching work applied. Retouching is another element that separates professional photographers from amateurs! Because of that, I think it’s necessary to discuss what is retouching. But in order to ask the right questions, we had better have a brief discussion on what retouching actually is. “Retouch” as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary: To rework in order to improve To alter (as in a photographic negative) to produce a more desirable appearance To color (new growth of hair) to blend with previously dyed, tinted or bleached hair Based on those definitions, anything we do as photographers to change the appearance of the photograph we captured = retouching.  Examples can be as extreme as completely smoothing out the skin (some call it airbrushing)  to very subtle such as cropping or rotating of the photograph. Now you understand why I say that almost every photograph you see has some form a retouching applied to it.  I can tell you with  [ Read More ]

Author: Md Arif   You may find no dearth of Image Manipulation practice when it comes to image foreground extraction but you will come across a number of unwanted problems; for instance when you want to want to mask complex images with thin or semi transparent objects like hair from its background. Only an expert graphic designer has solution to  [ Read More ]

Beginners Photoshop Help For Layers Advertisement Right, now you own Photoshop, you just need to work out how to use the damn thing so why don’t we get started with this Photoshop help for layers. There is such an extensive area to handle and there’s just so much power and flexibility that layers can offer, so understanding Photoshop doesn’t simply  [ Read More ]

Advertisement I often shoot where it’s difficult or impossible to use a tripod for twilight exposures. While the sensors of high-end digital cameras keep improving, most photographers prefer to use settings less than ISO 400 for the sharpest results and least noise. But when using small apertures for greater depth of field plus reduced ISO settings, tripods are typically required  [ Read More ]

Advertisement We are living in the digital age where technology continues to develop and advance with easy day that passes and where visual art and the digital editing industries have boomed. It seems that almost every month there is a new model of cameras being released into the market, each one promising bigger and better features as well as increased  [ Read More ]

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.” From this proverb it is clear that to make things beautiful thoughts are required and to make pictures beautiful, creativity is required. To assist and to work according to our creativity we have a lot of software. One of the best among them is Adobe Photoshop Family, which is comprised of Adobe  [ Read More ]

Advertisement If you have taken two or three hundred photos and find it a bear to pare them down to the ones you want to share or print, lightroom may be worth a look. Lightroom gets you there with the tools you need to create great images, manage all your photographs, and showcase them with style and impact. Adobe Light  [ Read More ]

Shooting on Chroma-key or Green Screen backdrops have come a long way with today’s technological advances. The purpose of this article is to explore the advantages of one plugin in particular; the Easy Green Screen 3.0 plugin, available from: photoshopgreenscreen.com, as Freeware. The plugin is available for all versions of Photoshop, CS or higher, running on Macintosh or Windows. I  [ Read More ]

Are you bored with shooting the same old identical poses on the same old identical backdrops? You have heard “Blue Screen” could be the path for you but you just art not sure how to get started and don’t what to invest a fortune to get started. I faced a learning curve back in the early days of this technology  [ Read More ]

By: Robert Merritt Are you sick and uninterested in photographing (plus viewing) the identical old images, over and over again? You’ve heard that “blue screen” is a path to go, but you do not really comprehend it or even know a lot about it? This is all you must understand to utilize it as a photography background! First…What exactly is  [ Read More ]

By: Sean T. Saunders , Posted On: 2009-12-16 Wondering what the best natural way of getting rid of cellulite is? Well, you’re not alone there. The truth is that many cellulite plagued individuals want to know the absolute best remedy for cellulite removal. Unfortunately, no person can say definitively what the best anti cellulite treatment is, as the remedy that  [ Read More ]

Did you have a great Thanksgiving? I sure did with family, friends and more then enough food, but I am still so full I need binoculars to get close enough to see the monitor ? I felt this would be the perfect opportunity to talk about Trimming the Fat. With anything you do in Photoshop there several ways to complete  [ Read More ]