Video Tutorials

Photoshop at 35: What Happens When You Actually Use Version 1.0 in 2025
Video Tutorials

Photoshop at 35: What Happens When You Actually Use Version 1.0 in 2025

I started making graphics in MS Paint. Terrible, pixelated, deeply embarrassing stuff - word art on birthday cards, memes with white borders because I didn’t know how to crop. So when I finally got my hands on Photoshop, it felt like going from a tricycle to a sports car. I still feel that way, honestly. But it’s easy to forget just how far the software has actually traveled when you’re living inside the current version every day.

Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed

I’ll be honest with you. My relationship with Camera Raw masking has always been “good enough.” Select sky, paint in the foreground with a gradient, argue with a brush tool for fifteen minutes over some tree branches, call it done. It works. It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done between my third and fourth coffee of the morning. Then I watched this Matt Kloskowski tutorial on the April 2025 Photoshop update and realized I’d been doing the equivalent of cutting a steak with a butter knife.

Tattoo Be Gone: A Three-Step Photoshop Removal Workflow That Actually Holds Up
Video Tutorials

Tattoo Be Gone: A Three-Step Photoshop Removal Workflow That Actually Holds Up

I do a fair amount of portrait retouching for clients — headshots, lifestyle stuff, the occasional album cover for a band that takes itself way too seriously. And every so often someone slides into my inbox asking if I can “just remove” a tattoo from a photo. Sometimes it’s for a corporate headshot. Sometimes it’s for a family portrait where grandma is going to lose her mind if she sees it.

How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)

There’s a specific kind of photo that shows up in everyone’s catalog and causes a small amount of existential dread: the backlit candid. You know the one. The light is beautiful, the moment is real, and the subject looks like they’re being interviewed in a witness protection program. I have folders full of these from outdoor events, and for a long time my solution was to either slap a Lightroom preset on them and hope for the best, or just quietly move them to trash.

Vignettes, Warm Skin, and Bright Eyes: A Practical Photoshop Workflow for Kids' Portraits
Video Tutorials

Vignettes, Warm Skin, and Bright Eyes: A Practical Photoshop Workflow for Kids' Portraits

Kids are basically impossible to photograph well. They’re moving, they’re squinting, they’ve got something unidentified on their face, and the lighting is whatever chaos the universe handed you that afternoon. So when the photo technically comes out okay, you want the edit to actually do it justice without spending two hours in Photoshop wrestling with it. That’s exactly what this tutorial from Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN delivers. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after reading through this breakdown.

Levels vs. Curves in Photoshop: When to Use Each (And Why You've Probably Been Guessing)
Video Tutorials

Levels vs. Curves in Photoshop: When to Use Each (And Why You've Probably Been Guessing)

For an embarrassingly long time, I picked between Levels and Curves the same way I pick a parking spot — just grabbed whatever felt right and hoped for the best. Both tools live in the same neighborhood, both mess with tonal values, and neither one comes with a sign that says “use me for THIS.” So I’d open Curves when I felt fancy, open Levels when I felt lazy, and pretend I had a system.

Lightroom's Curves-in-Masks Combo Is the Local Adjustment I Didn't Know I Was Missing
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Curves-in-Masks Combo Is the Local Adjustment I Didn't Know I Was Missing

I’ll be honest. For the longest time I treated Lightroom like a place where I did the boring stuff before bringing an image into Photoshop to do anything actually interesting. Rough global adjustments, maybe a quick crop, then over to the real tool. That workflow made sense until I started watching what photographers like Nigel Danson were pulling off without ever touching Photoshop. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube In this Nigel Danson tutorial, the focus is on a relatively recent Lightroom update that most people glossed over in the release notes: you can now use the Curves tool inside masks.

Bringing the Dead Back to Life: How to Restore a Torn Photo in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Bringing the Dead Back to Life: How to Restore a Torn Photo in Photoshop

Old photos are brutal. Not emotionally (okay, sometimes emotionally) but technically. Torn edges, yellowed paper, creases running straight through someone’s face. If a client or a family member ever slides one of these across a table at you, the gut reaction is to smile and nod while internally spiraling. I’ve been there. The good news is that Photoshop has everything you need to bring these things back from the brink. The bad news is that the workflow isn’t obvious if you’ve never done it before.

How to Fake a VSCO Film Look in Photoshop Without Actually Using VSCO
Video Tutorials

How to Fake a VSCO Film Look in Photoshop Without Actually Using VSCO

Client work has a funny way of humbling you. I spent the better part of an afternoon once trying to reverse-engineer that warm, slightly faded, film-ish look that’s all over Instagram and Lightroom preset packs, and I kept overshooting it. Everything either looked like a sepia disaster from a 2008 photo booth or a blown-out mess with a yellow tint that made the subject look unwell. The problem wasn’t my eye for color.

Why Your Drum Mix Sounds Weak (And How Sample Layering Fixes It)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Drum Mix Sounds Weak (And How Sample Layering Fixes It)

I’ll be straight with you: I came to this tutorial as someone who spends most of his life in Photoshop, not Pro Tools. But the core problem Eyal Levi is solving here is one I recognize immediately from visual work. You’ve got something that looks (or sounds) fine in isolation, and then it gets completely swallowed the moment it sits next to everything else. For drums in a heavy mix, that’s a death sentence.

Fake Bokeh That Actually Looks Real: A Photoshop Trick You'll Use On Every Portrait
Video Tutorials

Fake Bokeh That Actually Looks Real: A Photoshop Trick You'll Use On Every Portrait

There’s a specific kind of client feedback that haunts me. The photo is sharp, the subject is well-lit, the composition is solid, and then: “Can you make it look more… dreamy?” Dreamy. Great. Super specific. What they almost always mean, even if they don’t know the word, is bokeh. Those soft, glowing orbs of out-of-focus light that make a photo feel expensive and editorial. The problem is you can’t go back and reshoot with a wider aperture, and generating fake depth of field that looks convincing is a whole other ordeal.

Holiday Gear Guide for Photographers and Designers: What the Photoshop Guys Actually Use
Video Tutorials

Holiday Gear Guide for Photographers and Designers: What the Photoshop Guys Actually Use

Every November I do something dangerous. I start browsing gear lists. It usually costs me money I didn’t plan to spend and earns me a look from everyone in whatever coffee shop I’m camped in. This particular rabbit hole started when I stumbled onto a holiday episode of Photoshop User TV from the KelbyOne crew, where hosts Corey Barker, RC Concepción, and Pete Collins sat down to share the tools and gadgets they actually reach for as working photographers and designers.