Lightroom presets are a great way to speed up your photo development workflow. They enable you to store a whole host of predefined development settings that can be applied in a single click via the preset. They can also be applied to a whole group of images at the same time, so the benefits are…
Iris Blur was introduced in Photoshop CS6, alongside Field Blur and Tilt-Shift. In this Iris Blur Photoshop tutorial we are going to use to quickly create a stylised image with the focus on a particular part of the image. Here is the original shot we are going to work with, it’s a reasonable shot, but…
In this tutorial we are going to create a dramatic high-key portrait using Lightroom and Photoshop. The end result is not intended to be a completely conventional high-key image, we want a more stylised image with some localised contrast. High-key photography is generally characterised by having the majority of the image with very light tonality,…
If you’re new to Lightroom, understanding the differences between your catalogs, folders and collections is essential to achieving a smooth and hassle-free workflow. Lightroom effectively acts as a database for your images, you can easily get by with just one catalog and a number of folders, or you can combine these with collections for deeper…
In this tutorial we’re going to look at digital cross processing in Photoshop. Cross processing in an effect that used to be achieved by deliberately processing various types of film with the ‘wrong’ chemical, in order to produce various types of creative colour effects. For this tutorial I’m going to use an image I captured…
In the tutorial we are going to look at split toning in Silver Efex Pro 2 from NIK Software. Split toning used to be a film-based technique in the pre-digital photography days, but we now have a number of ways to digitally create artistic split tone images, whilst it’s perfectly possible to crate split tones…
Most photographers, including myself, spend most of our time ensuring our images are as clean and free as possible from noise/grain. There are occasions, however, when you may want to add grain to simulate a old-style film effect to add a vintage and textured look to your image. In the ‘old’ pre-digital days this would…
Whilst Adobe Lightroom has gained a lot of popularity when it comes to processing and managing RAW images, Adobe Camera Raw is based on the same software-engine and so can produce just as good results. Whichever software package you use (Lightroom or ACR), the point is that you can process most of your images without…
There are a number of ways to convert colour images to black and white in Photoshop. You can simply convert to grayscale via the colour mode menu (Image > Mode > Grayscale), or simply desaturate the image. In this tutorial we are going to crate a black and white image using the channel mixer. For…
In this tutorial we will be creating a ’tilt-shift’ effect using the relevant filter in Photoshop. This feature was added in Photoshop CS6. This filter basically mimics the effect of a proper tilt-shift lens used in dedicated tilt-shift photography. To get the full effect it is best to use a photography that has been taken…