Video Tutorials

Stop Sending Pixelated Logos to Print — Here's How to Vectorize Them in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Stop Sending Pixelated Logos to Print — Here's How to Vectorize Them in Photoshop

If you’ve done any kind of client work, you’ve been here before. Someone emails you a logo, you open it up, and it’s a 200x200 pixel JPEG that looks like it was exported from a website in 2009. They need it on a banner. Or a t-shirt. Or, my personal favorite, “just make it bigger.” And there you are, staring at a pixelated mess, trying to figure out how to not make it look terrible at three feet wide.

Photoshop's Object Selection Tool Will Make You Feel Like You've Been Working Too Hard
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Photoshop's Object Selection Tool Will Make You Feel Like You've Been Working Too Hard

I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time wrestling with the Quick Selection Tool, painting over subjects pixel by pixel like I was defusing a bomb. Zoom in, paint a little, zoom out, swear, undo, repeat. It worked, but “it works” is a pretty low bar when you’re billing a client by the project and not the hour. So when Photoshop 2020 dropped the Object Selection Tool, I genuinely felt a little cheated that I hadn’t had it sooner.

Photoshop's New Hair Selection Is Embarrassingly Good (June 2020 Update)
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Photoshop's New Hair Selection Is Embarrassingly Good (June 2020 Update)

Hair selection has been the thing that separates “I know Photoshop” from “I know Photoshop” for as long as I’ve been doing this. Client sends you a photo of someone with long, wispy, flyaway hair against a complicated background? That used to mean clearing your afternoon. I’ve spent entire evenings coaxing individual strands out of a background with Refine Edge, channel masking tricks, and a level of stubbornness that probably isn’t healthy.

Photoshop 2025's Frame Tool Just Got a Serious Upgrade (Here's What's Actually New)
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Photoshop 2025's Frame Tool Just Got a Serious Upgrade (Here's What's Actually New)

I’ll be honest with you. For most of my Photoshop life, the Frame Tool has lived in my toolbar the same way a treadmill lives in most apartments. I know it’s there. I appreciate the idea of it. I never really use it. That changed when I watched this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial on the updated Frame Tool in Photoshop 2025. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube. The short version is this: the Frame Tool used to cap out at rectangles and ellipses, which made it useful for roughly two scenarios in a professional workflow.

Moody Portrait Retouching: Contrast Splitting and Color Lookup Tables the Smart Way
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Moody Portrait Retouching: Contrast Splitting and Color Lookup Tables the Smart Way

Client portraits are where I earn my keep, and “moody black and white” is one of those requests that sounds simple until you actually sit down and try to nail it. Crushing the blacks and calling it a day gives you a flat, muddy mess. Trying to hand-paint a vignette looks fake the second anyone zooms in. I’ve wasted real billable hours chasing that rich, atmospheric look that separates a compelling character study from a snapshot with a black-and-white filter slapped on top.

Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down
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Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down

There’s a specific kind of disappointment that hits when you open a photo on your computer and it looks absolutely nothing like what you saw with your own eyes. You were there. The light was incredible. You felt it. And now your screen is showing you something flat, dull, and vaguely depressing. I’ve been editing photos and graphics professionally long enough to know this feeling doesn’t go away – but the gap between “what the camera captured” and “what you actually saw” gets a lot smaller once you have a reliable editing process you can move through quickly.

Stop Settling for Flat Backgrounds: How to Fake Depth of Field in Photoshop Like a Pro
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Stop Settling for Flat Backgrounds: How to Fake Depth of Field in Photoshop Like a Pro

I shoot a lot of product and portrait work on whatever camera is available, which sometimes means a phone, sometimes means a borrowed DSLR set to completely wrong settings, and occasionally means something that was technically fine but came out looking like a passport photo. The background is sharp. The subject is sharp. Everything is equally, brutally sharp. It looks like a surveillance photo, not a portfolio piece. Blurring that background in post is one of those techniques I kept putting off learning properly because I assumed it would look fake.

How to Turn a Blown Landscape Shot into a Stunning Black and White Using Filters and Long Exposure
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How to Turn a Blown Landscape Shot into a Stunning Black and White Using Filters and Long Exposure

There’s a specific kind of photography frustration I know too well. You show up somewhere beautiful, the light looks promising, and then the clouds roll in and eat everything. You’re left standing there with a thermos of lukewarm coffee and a card full of “almost” shots. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and my instinct is usually to pack up and call it a loss. Thomas Heaton didn’t do that.

Macro Photography on a Budget: What Extension Rings, Tiny Lights, and One Very Uncooperative Camera Taught Me
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Macro Photography on a Budget: What Extension Rings, Tiny Lights, and One Very Uncooperative Camera Taught Me

I’ve spent most of my creative life working at the pixel level, so you’d think “getting closer to the subject” would be something I’d have figured out by now. But there’s a difference between zooming into a layer in Photoshop and actually photographing something at 1:1 magnification in the real world. One requires pressing a plus key. The other, apparently, requires firmware updates in a muddy forest. In Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, landscape photographer Thomas Heaton documents his first serious attempt at macro photography with brutal honesty, and what makes it worth watching is precisely that it doesn’t go smoothly.

Two Tricks for Fixing Panoramic Photo Edges (Without Cropping Into Your Shot)
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Two Tricks for Fixing Panoramic Photo Edges (Without Cropping Into Your Shot)

Panoramic photos are one of those things that look incredible until you open the stitched result in Photoshop and realize the edges are a jagged, transparent mess. Every time. If you’ve shot a wide scene, handed it off to Photoshop’s auto-stitch, and then stared at those ragged borders wondering how much of your beautiful composition you’re about to sacrifice to the crop tool, this one’s for you. In this CreativeLive tutorial on cropping panoramic photos, the instructor walks through two genuinely clever ways to handle those problem edges without nuking your image with a heavy crop.

Photoshop AI Fails So You Don't Have To: What Generative Fill Can't Do (Yet)
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Photoshop AI Fails So You Don't Have To: What Generative Fill Can't Do (Yet)

I spend a lot of time in coffee shops convincing clients that yes, Photoshop’s AI tools are worth learning. And for the most part, I mean it. Generative Fill has genuinely saved me on deadline more than once. But I’ve also quietly regenerated the same selection twelve times, watched it hallucinate something completely unhinged, and pretended that was all part of the plan. So when I came across Watch the full tutorial on YouTube where Matt Kloskowski deliberately pushes Photoshop’s AI into the wall, I felt deeply, personally seen.

30 Days of Photoshop 2025: What's New, What's Changed, and Why Now Is Actually a Great Time to Learn
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30 Days of Photoshop 2025: What's New, What's Changed, and Why Now Is Actually a Great Time to Learn

I’ll be honest with you. Every few months I see someone in a design forum ask “is Photoshop still worth learning?” and every time I have to resist the urge to close my laptop and go stare at the wall for a while. Yes. It’s still worth learning. It has always been worth learning. But I do understand the hesitation, because Photoshop in 2025 is a genuinely different piece of software than it was even three years ago.