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…
Images often need a contrast boost to give them a little more life and intensity. It’s a perfectly ordinary technique we’ve been using for years. Tone curve tools or simple contrast sliders are used to push the bright and dark values in the picture further apart to increase their separation (and, ideally, without ‘clipping’ extreme…
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…
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 This has been replaced by a separate Google Photos option with much simpler editing tools.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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If you downloaded ON1 Effects 10 Free you’ll have got an email offering you some free landscape presets. So here’s how to install these presets, and it’s useful for installing presets generally with the full ON1 Photo 10 product too. 01 Download and unzip First, you need to download the presets and these will arrive as…
Boundary Warp is a new feature in Lightroom Classic CC 2015.4, and if you subscribe to Adobe’s Photography Plan you may have downloaded this update without paying it much attention. But Boundary Warp adds a useful new function to Lightroom’s Panorama Merge feature that lets you keep more of the image area. Normally, the panorama…