Video Tutorials

Two Ways to Kill Red Eye in Photoshop (And When to Use Each One)
Video Tutorials

Two Ways to Kill Red Eye in Photoshop (And When to Use Each One)

Portrait retouching has a way of humbling you. You can spend an hour perfecting skin tones, dodging and burning like a fine art printer, and then someone points out the glowing demon eyes in the background that you somehow stopped noticing. Red eye is one of those problems that feels embarrassing to have and equally embarrassing to fix badly. A heavy-handed correction leaves you with flat black blobs where pupils should be, and that looks almost worse than the original.

How to Crop, Straighten, and Expand Photos in Photoshop Like You Actually Know What You're Doing
Video Tutorials

How to Crop, Straighten, and Expand Photos in Photoshop Like You Actually Know What You're Doing

Bad composition has cost me real money. Not in some abstract “your brand doesn’t feel cohesive” way, but in the very literal “the client wants more headroom in this shot and you already delivered the final files” way. I’ve been there, staring at an image where all the visual weight is crammed into one corner, wondering if I can just… nudge the canvas and pray nobody notices. Spoiler: they notice.

How to Fake Andy Warhol in Photoshop (And Why Trying Weird Stuff Makes You Better)
Video Tutorials

How to Fake Andy Warhol in Photoshop (And Why Trying Weird Stuff Makes You Better)

There’s a certain type of creative project I used to avoid. You know the one. It doesn’t fit your usual workflow, it’s not something a client is paying you for, and it looks like it might take a weirdly long time. Pop art effects fell squarely into that category for me. I got comfortable doing clean composites, product mockups, the occasional portrait retouch. Then a friend sent me Watch the full tutorial on YouTube and I realized I’d been sleeping on an entire corner of Photoshop I barely touched.

Soft & Dreamy Photos in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Aaron Nace's Technique
Video Tutorials

Soft & Dreamy Photos in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Aaron Nace's Technique

There’s a specific kind of wedding or portrait photo that stops you mid-scroll. Everything looks slightly luminous, the edges fall off gently into softness, and the light seems to glow from inside the image rather than just land on top of it. It’s not an accident, and it’s not magic. It’s a handful of Photoshop moves that, once you know them, take maybe ten minutes to execute. The problem is that most tutorials either gloss over the “why” behind each step or bury the useful stuff in forty minutes of preamble.

The Electrical Tape Trick That Saves Your Polarising Filters From an Expensive Death
Video Tutorials

The Electrical Tape Trick That Saves Your Polarising Filters From an Expensive Death

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from watching an expensive piece of glass hit pavement. I’ve never personally dropped a polarising filter, but I’ve watched enough photographers do it, and the sound alone is enough to make you question your career choices. Polarising filters aren’t cheap. A decent circular polariser can run you $100 to $200 without blinking, and the square or rectangular versions used in modular filter systems can cost significantly more.

Fix Messy Hair in Photoshop Using Liquify and Clone Stamp (No Hairspray Required)
Video Tutorials

Fix Messy Hair in Photoshop Using Liquify and Clone Stamp (No Hairspray Required)

I do a lot of portrait retouching. Not because I planned for that to be my thing, but because once people find out you know Photoshop, suddenly every photographer friend you have wants a favor. And the one area that consistently takes longer than it should? Hair. Flyaways, gaps, weird shapes that looked fine in the viewfinder and look chaotic on a 27-inch monitor. For a long time, my approach was just… keep painting and hope for the best.

I Let Photoshop's AI Colorize a Black-and-White Photo So You Don't Have To Guess How It Works
Video Tutorials

I Let Photoshop's AI Colorize a Black-and-White Photo So You Don't Have To Guess How It Works

There’s a specific kind of photo that lands in my inbox more often than I’d like: someone’s grandparent at 25, shot on black-and-white film, slightly underexposed, and the client wants it to “look normal.” Colorizing by hand is doable, but it’s one of those jobs where the time investment versus the result is a brutal negotiation. So when Adobe quietly dropped a one-click colorization tool inside Photoshop’s Neural Filters, I paid attention.

Stop Culling in the Dark: How to Sync Multi-Camera Timestamps Before You Select a Single Shot
Video Tutorials

Stop Culling in the Dark: How to Sync Multi-Camera Timestamps Before You Select a Single Shot

If you’ve ever shot a wedding or any multi-camera event and then stared at a folder of 3,000 images trying to figure out what’s happening when, you already know the pain. Camera A is an hour ahead. Camera B is three seconds behind. Nothing lines up. You’re essentially trying to read a story where someone shuffled the pages. The selection process becomes guesswork, and guesswork leads to missed moments, bad edits, and a client who wonders why you left out the one photo where grandma cried.

LUTs in Photoshop: The Fastest Way to Give Your Photos a Cinematic Look
Video Tutorials

LUTs in Photoshop: The Fastest Way to Give Your Photos a Cinematic Look

Here’s a problem I run into constantly: a client wants their photos to have that moody, film-like quality you see in high-end editorial work, and they want it yesterday. I can spend an hour manually pulling curves, tweaking hue/saturation layers, and nudging color balance until my eyes cross — or I can use a LUT and be done in about 90 seconds. For a long time I thought LUTs were strictly a video editor’s tool.

Stop Drawing Terrible Shapes in Photoshop — Here's How Custom Shapes Actually Work
Video Tutorials

Stop Drawing Terrible Shapes in Photoshop — Here's How Custom Shapes Actually Work

I spent an embarrassing amount of time in my early freelance days using the Marquee tool and Fill to fake shapes. Not because I didn’t know the Shape tool existed, but because every time I opened that toolbar I felt like I was reading a menu in a language I kind of spoke but not really. Turns out I was skipping over one of the most flexible, non-destructive toolsets in all of Photoshop.

How to Create a Dreamy Fantasy Photo Effect in Photoshop (Without Overdoing It)
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How to Create a Dreamy Fantasy Photo Effect in Photoshop (Without Overdoing It)

There’s a specific kind of edit that shows up constantly in editorial and portrait work - that soft, ethereal, almost-painted look that makes a photo feel like it exists somewhere between reality and a fever dream. I’ve tried to reverse-engineer it a hundred times from finished images, usually ending up with something that looks like I smeared Vaseline on my monitor. So when I came across Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Jessica Kobeissi, I paid attention.

Stop Blaming Light Pollution: How to Add Realistic Stars to Any Night Photo in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Stop Blaming Light Pollution: How to Add Realistic Stars to Any Night Photo in Photoshop

Night photography is a cruel joke sometimes. You drive forty minutes outside the city, set up your shot, nail the foreground, get home, and open Lightroom to find a sky that looks like a slightly dark version of your backyard. No stars. Just a gray-purple smear of light pollution and broken dreams. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and for a while I thought the only fix was to reshoot or just… accept it.