The Lightroom HDR tools built in are good in their way, but will only get you so far. Yes, you can boost the shadows, reduce the highlights, add some Clarity and Dehaze and maybe a graduated filter for the sky, but you can end up doing a lot of work only getting half way to the […]
Featured posts
Welcome to the Life after Photoshop archive of 'Featured' posts. These are favourite articles or tutorials that appear in the carousel at the top of the home page.
6 tips for getting an authentic analog film effect
Modern cameras can reproduce the world with utter, clinical accuracy. The trouble is, it turns out that’s not what we wanted after all. A lot of the time, what we actually want is the faded, distressed, imperfect look of analog photography. So here are six top tips for getting that analog film effect ‘look’ with […]
Google Snapseed 2 review
Verdict: 5 stars If Snapseed 2 was a paid-for app, it would still be getting a 5-star rating. The fact that it’s free is just the icing on the cake. Snapseed combines a huge range of filters with some dazzling contemporary effects and an interface that’s perfectly design for small touchscreen devices. If only – IF ONLY – this was still available as a desktop app too.
10 iPhone photography tips
Smartphones can shoot much more than snaps and selfies. The cameras are good, the apps are better and the way you can instantly share your photos with your friends and all your other devices is perhaps the best thing of all. But a smartphone is also a genuinely creative tool.
Black and white in Capture One Pro
Maybe you wouldn’t normally think of Capture One Pro as an image-editor. It’s a superb RAW converter and general image enhancement tool, but most of the time you’d probably swap to a plug-in or an external editor for really detailed effects work – especially any that required localised adjustments. But I’ve been spending some time with Capture One […]
Budapest parliament
It’s all very well giving advice about how to achieve certain effects using this software or that software, but it always strikes me that no-one ever talks about WHY you should use a particular effect with a particular subject. Books and magazines are very tied up with the mechanics of photography but rarely stray into […]
Improve autumn colours with Color Efex Pro’s Contrast Colour Range filter
It’s that time of year when autumn leaves produce a riot of colour, and you’ve only got a short window of time to get out there and get pictures. But the results don’t always match your expectations, and this shot is a prime example. The reds and yellows of the leaves were striking, but they […]
Did you know you can stack filters in Google Snapseed?
I am a huge fan of Google Snapseed. I’m not a huge fan of what Google has done with it, dropping the desktop Snapseed app and then the online Snapseed editing tools built into Google+ Photos. This has been replaced by a separate Google Photos option with much simpler editing tools. Thankfully, Snapseed still exists […]
How to fix glare with perspective correction
Here’s an interesting little problem you often get when photographing paintings or other pictures. You get the camera perfectly perpendicular to the picture, only to find you’ve got horrible glare from the surface of the picture, completely ruining the shot. So here’s the problem. I didn’t have a polarising filter with me, which might have […]
How to make sense of the Apple Photos interface
We already asked, can Apple Photos replace Aperture?, and no, it can’t, but it’s still a very good tool for managing your family photo collection, where the ability to capture, find and share pictures simply is the key. To anyone used to a full-on image-cataloguing tool, though, or even the old iPhoto, it feels like […]