Photoshop How To

It doesn’t take an experienced photographer to realize that uninspiring city scenes by day are often transformed into spectacular cityscapes once the sun drops below the horizon. What does require expertise, however, is an understanding of how to properly capture everything you see through the viewfinder at night.

As the great Ansel Adams once said: "You don't take a photograph, you make it." But what makes a dramatic landscape photo? There are, of course, lots of things but photographer Mark Denney zeros in on one specific effect that can make or break a shot.

If you want to punch up your landscape photos in Photoshop, the best way to enhance them is to draw out elements that are already there, not try to create something entirely new. (We’ve all seen landscapes that are so heavily edited in Photoshop they look like scenes from another world. HDR effects can be a blessing and a curse.)

Beginner portrait photographers should check out the below tutorial from Bach Photography.  Titled "How to Instantly Improve Your Natural Light Portrait Photography," it's a great starting point for anyone wanting to shoot beautiful portraits using only natural light.

Photographer Jamie Windsor always has a few hidden Photoshop and Lightroom tricks up his sleeve. Or, rather, Photoshop and Lightroom always have their hidden tricks; it’s people like Windsor who know these programs so well, they can tell you about these sometimes-overlooked hacks.

In the simple portrait editing how-to below, PiXimperfect's Unmesh Dinda shares "a powerful trick to get perfect skin tones with just one button in Photoshop."

Want to give you photos a dramatic, black-and-white look similar to master landscape photographer Ansel Adams? Watch the below video from software expert Serge Ramelli who shows you how to create an Ansel-like style for your images in few clicks using Lightroom presets.