Videos

In basic terms, Luminosity masks are selections based upon the brightness (or darkness) of various portions of a scene. As you’ll see in the quick tutorial below, they enable you to discretely select the bright, dark, or midtone pixels in an image and then make whatever adjustments you desire.

Photo composites are a lot of fun to make, and they enable you to create eye-catching images by combining two or more shots. The problem is that there are a few hurdles to understand if you want to achieve natural looking results.

As the great Ansel Adams once said, “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationship.” And that holds true whether you’re working with film in the darkroom or editing digital images on the computer.

If you’ve been following our ongoing Lightroom tutorials you know Adobe has made great strides with their most recent updates, and the latest masking tools have created quite a buzz—with several new portrait-related masks that work pretty well.

Experienced landscape photographers prefer shooting at two primes times of day, early morning or late afternoon. That’s because Blue Hour, just before sunset, is a great opportunity to make images with calm, blue tones. Golden Hour, at the end of the day, enables you imbue scenes with striking warm colors as the sun is about to set.

Many inexperienced photographers make a simple mistake than can compromise the quality of their photos, and that’s thinking of a camera’s metering-mode options as a set-it-and-forget-it feature. If you’re guilty of this common error, the video below is for you.

What should you do when creativity is at low ebb, there’s no time to travel to a compelling destination, and you’re simply out of fresh ideas? One simple solution is to take a photo walk in the town where you live (or even around the block from your home).