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The Step and Repeat Slice Effect That Made Me Feel Like a Photoshop Insider
Video Tutorials

The Step and Repeat Slice Effect That Made Me Feel Like a Photoshop Insider

There’s a specific kind of embarrassment that hits when someone shows you a technique you’ve never heard of and you realize you’ve been doing it the hard way for years. I’ve been freelancing in Photoshop long enough that I thought I had a pretty solid handle on the non-destructive workflow stuff. Then I watched Aaron Nace’s latest PHLEARN tutorial on building a portrait slice effect from scratch and immediately learned about “step and repeat,” a technique I had somehow never encountered.

Color Grading Video in Photoshop: Local vs. Global Adjustments (And Why It Actually Works)
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Color Grading Video in Photoshop: Local vs. Global Adjustments (And Why It Actually Works)

Most of my work lives in still images. Composites, retouching, the occasional logo a client describes as “clean but also edgy.” Video always felt like someone else’s problem. Then a client handed me raw footage and asked me to “make it look cinematic,” and suddenly it was very much my problem. I didn’t want to learn Premiere for one project, and After Effects felt like jumping into the deep end wearing a backpack full of bricks.

Content-Aware Fill Isn't Dead — Here's When to Reach for It Over Generative Fill
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Content-Aware Fill Isn't Dead — Here's When to Reach for It Over Generative Fill

I’ll be honest with you. For the past year or so, I’ve basically been treating Content-Aware Fill like that one keyboard shortcut you memorized years ago and stopped using once something shinier came along. Generative Fill showed up, I became a convert, and Content-Aware Fill quietly got pushed to the back of the toolbox. Then I watched a tutorial from Matt Kloskowski that made me feel genuinely embarrassed about that decision.

One Click and It's Gone: Photoshop 2023's Delete & Fill Feature Is Kind of Ridiculous
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One Click and It's Gone: Photoshop 2023's Delete & Fill Feature Is Kind of Ridiculous

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time manually patching out unwanted objects in photos. We’re talking tedious clone stamp work, content-aware fill with mixed results, patching layer by layer while drinking my third coffee of the morning. It’s the kind of task that makes you question your life choices right around the 45-minute mark. So when I stumbled onto this PHLEARN tutorial from Aaron Nace showing off a legitimately new one-click removal tool baked into Photoshop 2023, I had to stop what I was doing and watch the whole thing.

How to Recolor Plants and Foliage in Photoshop (Without Making a Mess of Everything Else)
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How to Recolor Plants and Foliage in Photoshop (Without Making a Mess of Everything Else)

There’s a certain kind of photo edit that looks incredibly complex but is actually embarrassingly simple once someone shows you the right approach. Changing the color of plants and foliage in Photoshop is one of those edits. I used to do it the hard way, making selections, painting on separate layers, swearing at my screen in a coffee shop while the person next to me slowly edged their chair away. Then I watched this tutorial from Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN and felt that particular mix of relief and mild personal insult that comes from realizing you’ve been overcomplicating something for years.

Photoshop 2021's Best New Features for Photographers (And Why You Should Actually Care)
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Photoshop 2021's Best New Features for Photographers (And Why You Should Actually Care)

Hair. It’s the thing that has humbled every Photoshop user who ever thought they were good at this. I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of time trying to isolate a subject with flyaway strands against a busy background, painting around individual hairs with a brush like some kind of digital monk. It’s the kind of task that makes you question your career choices around hour two. So when Photoshop 2021 dropped during Adobe Max week in October 2020, I went straight for the selection improvements, because that’s where the pain lives.

Cinemagraphs in Photoshop: How to Make the Internet Stop Scrolling
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Cinemagraphs in Photoshop: How to Make the Internet Stop Scrolling

Client work comes in waves. One week you’re doing banner ads, the next someone slides into your DMs asking if you can make “something that moves but also doesn’t really move.” That’s a cinemagraph. And the first time I tried to figure one out on my own, I wasted an afternoon producing a GIF that looked less like art and more like a broken webpage. What I needed was someone to walk me through both sides of the problem: what you do on set before you touch Photoshop, and what you actually do inside Photoshop to make the loop work.

Liquify Without the Mess: A Practical Breakdown of Photoshop's Most Misunderstood Tool
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Liquify Without the Mess: A Practical Breakdown of Photoshop's Most Misunderstood Tool

I used to treat the Liquify tool like a blunt instrument. Push here, pull there, hit OK, and spend the next ten minutes wondering why my subject’s arm looks like it’s made of warm taffy. If you’ve ever handed a client a portrait and quietly hoped they wouldn’t zoom in too hard on the edges, you already know the problem. Liquify is genuinely powerful, but it’s the kind of tool that rewards patience and punishes anyone who rushes in without a system.

Making Realistic Water Bubbles in Photoshop with the Liquefy Filter
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Making Realistic Water Bubbles in Photoshop with the Liquefy Filter

Every water composite I did in my first two years of freelancing had the same problem, and I couldn’t figure out why they looked fake. The lighting was fine. The color grading was decent. But the bubbles – oh, the bubbles. Perfect little circles, every single one of them, floating around like clip art from a 2003 PowerPoint presentation. Turns out, that’s exactly what was wrong. Real bubbles in turbulent water are not spherical.

The Laziest (and Best) Way to Add Duotone Color to Any Photo in Photoshop
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The Laziest (and Best) Way to Add Duotone Color to Any Photo in Photoshop

I have a complicated relationship with duotones. They look incredible, clients love them, and every time someone asks me to make one I’ve historically spent way too long fumbling through Hue/Saturation layers and gradient maps wondering why the result looks muddy instead of cinematic. I knew roughly what a duotone was supposed to do: split highlights and shadows into two distinct colors. But translating that concept into something clean and repeatable?

How to Build a Lego Man Head in Photoshop 3D (Without Losing Your Mind)
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How to Build a Lego Man Head in Photoshop 3D (Without Losing Your Mind)

I’ll be straight with you: I avoided Photoshop’s 3D tools for an embarrassingly long time. Every time I cracked open that menu it felt like I’d wandered into someone else’s software. Then I watched Cory Barker work through a Lego man build on Photoshop User TV and something finally clicked. Not because the technique is simple, exactly, but because he frames it around shapes you already understand. Cylinders. Rounded boxes. Half-profiles that get spun into full objects.

Get Low, Go Wide: Two Compositional Tricks That Change How Your Landscapes Hit
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Get Low, Go Wide: Two Compositional Tricks That Change How Your Landscapes Hit

I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time wondering why my landscape shots looked flat. Same location as photographers I admired, similar gear, roughly similar light. The photos just sat there. Turns out I was committing the cardinal wide-angle sin: standing up like a normal human being and pointing my camera at things from eye level like I was taking a mugshot of the horizon. The foreground, which is literally the most interesting part of a wide-angle landscape, was barely there.