Black and white photography relies heavily on dodging and burning to add emphasis to certain parts of the image, to balance or contrast areas of tone, and improve the overall composition – and Silver Efex Pro’s control points let you do this in moments, without masks or selections. You don’t always need them. Silver Efex […]
Tutorials
Try this five-second fix with a gradient and color burn blend mode in Elements
You can’t always choose the lighting you shoot in, and sometimes it’s just so flat that your pictures don’t have any depth or intensity. It doesn’t help that most digital cameras lean slightly towards overexposure in these conditions too. That’s why I wanted to have a go at ‘relighting’ some shots I took in Paris […]
Get better tonal adjustments with the Tonal Contrast filter in Color Efex Pro
You can make basic tonal adjustments with levels and more sophisticated modifications with curves, but the Tonal Contrast filter in DxO Color Efex Pro goes a whole step further. The problem with curves adjustments is that any change you make in one area of the image curve has a knock-on effect on the rest. If […]
How to remove sensor spots automatically in Capture One
How to use creative sharpening in Lightroom
There is more than one type of sharpening. It’s a common mistake for photographers to look at an image, choose a sharpening setting that looks right and imagine that they’ve fixed it. They may have made it worse… In fact, there are three types of sharpening, and they do three different jobs. These are ‘capture […]
How to create a red filter effect in Silver Efex Pro
Nik Software must have discovered some unknown digital alchemy when it developed Silver Efex Pro. Suddenly, here was a digital imaging tool that really could replicate the look, feel and even the ‘soul’ of silver-based black and white. And one of the favourite tools of traditional black and white photographers was the ‘contrast’ filter. These […]
Did you know you can save and combine selections in Elements?
Photoshop Elements is usually seen as the poor relation to Photoshop itself, but it offers many of the same high-end features if you know where to look! Photoshop has alpha channels, but Elements has ‘saved selections’… You can get by perfectly well most of the time just working with one selection at a time, but […]
How to create your own processing recipe in Color Efex Pro 4
Color Efex Pro 4 doesn’t just boast a huge list of great filter effects, it also lets you ‘stack’ them in combination and then save your own, unique style as a ‘Recipe’. Nik Software really pulled out all the stops with Color Efex Pro 4. There were many useful additions and tweaks to the filters, […]
How to use gradient masks in Capture One to improve outdoor shots
Capture One provides a system of internal adjustment layers so that you can make localised adjustments to your pictures. These aren’t directly compatible with the adjustment layers in Photoshop and Elements – they just share the same name – but they are saved with your images in the Capture One library, so you can go […]
How to control noise for better portraits in Lightroom
Shooting in available light often gives the most natural and attractive portraits, but it also means you often have to shoot at high ISOs. I took this informal picture while I was working on a feature for N-Photo magazine, and while the light from the window is soft and even, it’s not very bright and […]