Software How To

Sharpening your photographs can be a dicey proposition: We all want crisp images, but if you’re not careful when using Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask tool you can ruin an otherwise nice shot. In this helpful tutorial, you’ll learn a better, non-destructive technique.

Ask a Pro is a Q&A column from professional photographer, writer, and educator Scott Kelby. Scott is here to answer all your photography-related questions, so if you have something you’d like to know, e-mail him at editorial@shutterbug.com (with “For Scott Kelby” as the subject line) and your query could be featured in the next edition of Ask a Pro.

Creating a web page for your images these days is fairly easy, and there are numerous web apps available that offer a wide variety of colors and backgrounds. But organizing your images before you even consider the template (or “skin” as it is called in the trade) is perhaps the biggest challenge, given the proliferation of images we all have made with various cameras and mobile devices stored on flash drives, hard drives, and even memory cards.

Astrophotography is really popular these days, and this Lightroom tutorial from Rob & Jonas’ Filmmaking Tips will get you up to speed on how to capture amazing images of the night sky.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a budget-friendly image editing package that’s designed for casual users and amateurs. Under the hood, however, there are dozens of advanced features and hidden capabilities that are accessible via plug-ins. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could unlock, say, 130 of those features with one add-on product that costs less than fifty bucks? Then here’s good news: you can. 

The folks who brought you PortraitPro, the software that turns average looking men and women into superstars (or as John Oliver might say, “Turns ones into tens faster than a South American counterfeiter”) now brings you LandscapePro, a similar application you should think of as “cosmetic surgery for Mother Nature.” But is this a case of “liking what you get,” or “getting exactly what you like?” That, my friends, is the $59 question