Software How To

When it’s time to edit our photographs, most of us upload the files to Lightroom or Photoshop and jump right in. But according to one of our favorite image-editing instructors, there’s an important preliminary step that’s often ignored.

You’ve no doubt marveled at spectacular landscape photos with depth of field that seems impossible to achieve with anything other than a tilt-shift lens or a large format view camera. Surprise: The same effect can be accomplished in post processing with a technique known at focus stacking. And it far easier to do than you may think.

Everyone who has done a lot of shooting knows that some images just look better in black and white. And that includes certain portraits and street photos as well as different types of landscape imagery.

There are a number of reasons to remove an object from an image. Sometimes the goal it to get rid of a distracting element, while other times you may want to move a key subject to a totally different photo. Or perhaps you’re creating a special effect.

Using long exposures during the day is a great way to create unique landscape and nature photos. This technique results in an ethereal look, with soft, dreamy water and cotton-like clouds. The typical approach is using ND filters to dramatically reduce the amount of light entering the camera, but there’s a post-processing trick for getting the job done.

Sometimes you come across a great scene, apart from the fact that two or more objects in the frame are too close together for an ideal composition. In some situations it’s possible to rectify the problem by changing your vantage point, but if that’s not possible there’s a quick editing fix.

You'd think that Photoshop would do a better job of making it easy to create vignettes for your images, but it doesn't, according to Blake Rudis of f64 Academy. And he's right.