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,…
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…
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…
Fine art can mean a whole lot of different things, but here I’m just going to show how to turn a colour image into a simple graphic composition that could work quite nicely when you hang it on your wall. There are two things you need in order for this to work. One is an…
Photoshop Elements Gradient Maps can create a wide range of effects from black and white conversions to sepia toning and colour tints, so how do they work? Gradient maps take the brightness values in the picture and ‘map’ them on to any gradient you choose, and this is actually rather useful. Let’s say you pick…
There are so many filters in Color Efex Pro that it can take a long, long time to work out all the things that it can do. Some of the tools are obvious, like Levels and Curves or Graduated Filters, but some are less so, and the Detail Extractor is a prime example. It sounds…
Capture One, Aperture and Lightroom combine image cataloguing, browsing and non-destructive editing in a way that makes it possible to enhance whole batches of images both quickly and consistently. In particular, they let you choose the perfect set of adjustments for a single representative image in the batch, then copy them across wholesale to all…
The editing tools in Lightroom 5 are steadily improving to the point where many photographers won’t need any other software for their day-to-day image enhancement, and the new Radial Gradient tool in the Develop module takes this one stage further. It offers a way to quickly highlight the focal point of your pictures, subdue backgrounds…
Anyone who used to shoot with black and white film will have a favourite, and I always had a soft spot for Kodak Tri-X. I didn’t mind the grain because I liked that gritty, ‘documentary’ feel, and sometimes I push-processed during development to get a little more contrast, especially in the depths of the Northern…
Have you ever used a ‘mist’ filter with your camera? These are pretty weak – they usually produce an overall hazy glow to your pictures that doesn’t look that realistic. But there is a way to create ‘mist’ effects in Photoshop Elements that’s a lot more realistic. It uses adjustment layers, masks and blend modes,…