Software How To

Regardless of the type of images you shoot most throughout the year, the gorgeous warm tones of autumn landscape scenes are simply too good to pass up. If you’ve tried before, you know that certain lighting conditions can make beautiful fall colors appear less intense than you’d like.

If you're a landscape photographer and use Lightroom to process images the tutorial below is likely to improve your workflow by explaining four "hidden" tools you may not know exist. After all, Lightroom is such a robust package that it's almost impossible to keep track of everything it can do.

There are numerous reasons for poorly exposed photos when shooting in the field under difficult lighting conditions, including harsh light, dark foregrounds, and bright washed-out skies to name a few. When you're faced with challenges like these, photos often  turn out to be a compete mess.

I have always had mixed feelings about so-called “film simulation” software, programs that offer one-click presets that add effects and options for manipulating digital images. On one side, I am unsure why the designers use visual references to types of film for their preset IDs. It strikes me that an increasingly small proportion of folks relate to them. On the other side, I admire their offering programs that open up a raft of image expressions in easy to attain fashion. I will not revisit that discussion here, although the near concomitant release of two such programs, Alien Skin’s Exposure 5 and DxO’s FilmPack 4, makes it tempting to do so.

You don’t need three magic wishes to make your Mac or PC more digital photography-friendly. Here are five ways anyone can upgrade their computer to improve the speed and efficiency of Photoshop, expand storage space for all those Raw image files, add room for unlimited back-ups of your photo archive and make the whole shebang more secure—without touching a screwdriver.

Have you ever noticed ugly banding artifacts in the gradients you create in Photoshop? Well, here's the good news: There's a quick Photoshop fix that you'll learn in the four-minute tutorial below from the globally popular PIXimperfect YouTube channel.