Photo How To

Photoshop’s Neural Filters are so amazing that it’s tempting to reach for them first whenever editing images that need work. Despite the magic, however, sometimes a more “traditional" approach is almost as easy and delivers more faithful results.

One “rule” many photographers learn when first starting out is to “always shoot with the sun at your back.” This advice may work well for “Kodak Moment” snapshots, or for predictable photos of average scenes, but a different approach is called for if you’re after eye-catching imagery that stands out from the crowd.

One of the few mistakes that can totally ruin a photo is failing to achieve precise focus on the primary subject in a scene. There are a variety of camera settings and shooting techniques for increasing your odds of success, and today we’re going to concentrate on one of the most helpful.

Photographer Benjamin Jaworskyj has a message for beginner photographers: sometimes what you do after you snap the shutter during image processing can be half the battle.

One of the most difficult challenges when photographing landscapes is balancing the wide range of tones from deep shadows to bright highlights that often occur in outdoor scenes. In fact, sometimes the density range is so great that’s it’s impossible to precisely exposure the image.

Remember the philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”? Put in photographic terms, “If nobody notices your photos, do they really matter?”

We’ve all inadvertently shot cockeyed photos, and it’s usually because we weren’t paying attention. The most common example is a horizontal landscape image with a tilted horizon, but this problem can also occur with vertical lines when shooting in portrait orientation.