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.
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.
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 This has been replaced by a separate Google Photos option with much simpler editing tools.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 […]
How to synchronise photos with Lightroom and Creative Cloud
A lot of us are still getting used to the idea of subscription-based software, but one of the strongest reasons for choosing Lightroom Classic CC over Lightroom 6 (the ‘perpetual licence’ version) is its integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud. You can manage photos on your laptop, add to them via a browser, edit them on […]
Can Apple Photos replace Aperture?
When Apple announced it was going to discontinue its professional image-cataloguing application Aperture, but that a brand new Photos app was on its way, many (including me) obviously hoped that Photos would go some way towards replacing our favourite application. These hopes were raised by early screenshots showing some powerful-looking editing tools. Well the dust […]
How to install Lightroom presets
Lightroom Classic has some powerful image enhancement tools, as fans will know, and the ability to apply and store editing presets. But as well as creating your own, you can get presets from all sorts of different places and they’re really easy to install – and here’s how you do it. 01 Free presets from […]