Have you ever noticed that the colours in the JPEGs you get from the camera don’t always match up with your RAW files when you open them in Adobe Camera Raw? That’s because when you shoot a JPEG, the camera still starts off by capturing a RAW file but then processes it in camera to…
Burning in the edges of your pictures is a great way to enhance the composition because it improves the picture’s overall contrast and helps you concentrate attention on the picture’s focal point. The point is that converting your pictures to black and white is just the start, and ‘digital’ techniques like channel mixing are useful…
What I like about Photoshop Elements is firstly that it’s a fraction of the price of Photoshop (and available as a ‘perpetual licence’) and secondly that it’s quite capable of carrying out almost all the image adjustments I want to do. This is one of my favourite techniques for enhancing colours and I use it…
If you look at any old Hollywood film you’d see they had a standard technique for creating ‘moonlight’. They’d simply shoot in bright sunlight, reduce the exposure and give the picture a blue tinge. The bizarre thing was that it worked – it did give the appearance of ‘night’. Moonlight isn’t actually blue, though. If…
You can fix converging verticals and other perspective problems in many programs, including Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro, but Capture One Pro 7 has what I think is the most easiest and most accurate tool of all. The problem with fixing keystoning is that you need to be extremely accurate in aligning the tool’s marker…
There’s this idea in digital photography that your histogram must never be clipped, and that it should always fit – just – within the maximum width of the scale. And sometimes we work so hard to recover shadow and highlight detail to prevent clipping, that we end up with an image that has lost its…
Polar panoramas are ordinary landscapes turned into miniature spherical planets. Usually, you create them by first shooting a 360-degree panorama as a sequence of overlapping shots and then combining them using Photoshop or some dedicated panoramic stitching software. The polar panorama I’ve created here, though, was produced in about thirty seconds from a single everyday…
You tend to think of Lightroom as an image cataloguing program with some image-editing tools thrown in, but actually Lightroom 5 can do many of the jobs that Photoshop can. It’s especially good at building effects from a series of different adjustments – and you can then save these effects as a preset you can…
Elements does have some limitations compared to Photoshop. One of these is the difference in the Shadows/Highlights tools. So is there a workaround? Yes there is… The Shadow/Highlights tool in Photoshop is designed to even up the tones in high-contrast pictures. It lightens the shadow areas and darkens the highlights by selecting these regions separately…
Color Efex Pro 4 (part of the DxO Nik Collection) doesn’t just apply individual filters – you can also combine, or ‘stack’ filters to create a cumulative effect. I’ve used it here to add a warm, dreamy glow to this minimalist landscape in order to show how this stacking system works. The start shot is…