Software How To

Photographer Colin Smith of Photoshop Café is known for easy-to-follow Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials that can make a big difference when processing your images. Here he focuses on color and tone adjustments for turning good images into great ones.

When shooting scenes with a wide range of tones, it can be difficult to balance exposures and details across highlights, midtones, and shadows. One way to do that, that’s recently fallen out of favor, involves High Dynamic Range (HDR) adjustments than often deliver unnatural results.

Everyone has their own approach to processing images in Photoshop, depending on their skill level and the type of work they do. That’s why Photoshop’s default settings are essentially a compromise, and rarely meet the specific needs of anyone.

Image-editing expert Nathaniel Dodson periodically releases a tutorial revealing his favorite Photoshop and Lightroom tips, tricks, and hacks, and those you see below are designed to clean up your workflow, streamline your editing, and help you create better images than ever before.

If you're a new Lightroom user bewildered by the software's vast array of features, this quick post-processing tutorial will calm you down and set you on a path for quick and effective edits—with three simple "must-use" tools that a respected pro says she uses for virtually every edit.

It's easy to become overwhelmed when editing photos in Lightroom because there are virtually endless tools and features one can employ. This beginners guide is designed to simplify your workflow with a trio of basic methods you can put to work now.

Continuing on the theme of photography projects you can do at home, here's a super helpful video from Anthony Morganti with three Lightroom editing tips for beginners. Even though this Lightroom tutorial is geared toward novices, more experienced photo editors can use it as a handy refresher course.