Software How To

French photographer Serge Ramelli is known for spectacular landscape images. Yet, despite his mad skills, every so often Mother Nature needs some help because of poor light, pale skies, or weak colors. In this tutorial, Ramelli provides 27 free Photoshop presets, and demonstrates how to use them, so you can turn good photos into great ones.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave recently the amazing images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have likely blown your mind. But did you know they’re available as a free download on a NASA website?

There are many reasons you may want to cut out the background of a photo and create a composite image. Sometimes the goal is to replace a boring sky with something more compelling. Other times you may just want to place a portrait photo on a more interesting background.

Are you ready to expand your mobile photography skills by learning how to shoot eye-popping spots/action photos with an iPhone? This comprehensive tutorial from the iPhone Photography School explains everything you need to understand for capturing the moment with precision and ease.

It's super easy to add drama and visual interest to wildlife and nature photos by emphasizing dark tones in Lightroom. This tutorial from Park Cameras, a leading retailer in the UK, explains a simple post-processing technique that accentuates colors, separates the subject from surrounding areas, boost contrast, and much more.

DxO Optics Pro Version 7 is a Raw converter for Mac and Microsoft Windows with some nifty tricks up its sleeve. It offers its own brand of nondestructive image editing, with tonal, exposure, geometric, and optical corrections that make it stand apart from the crowd. As was true of Version 6.6, Optics Pro 7 supports the company’s new FilmPack 3 film emulator plug-in (see sidebar below). We will have a more complete review of the film emulator in a future issue.

Optics Pro Version 7 is a dramatic departure from earlier releases. The Select pane is gone, so you no longer have to deal with tedious Projects (unless you want to). Now you go straight to work after opening a folder. Double-click on an image and that takes you right to the nondestructive editing phase, in Customize. Beyond this point the Mac and Windows versions part ways in one key respect: the Windows version runs faster than the Mac version, which continues to be laborious.

Ever since DxO acquired the popular Nik Collection of image-editing software from Google last October, photographers have eagerly awaited an update to the powerful free suite of Photoshop and Lightroom plugins. The good news is that Nik Collection 2018 is now available on the DxO website, although the download is no longer free.