Video Tutorials

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
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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)
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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
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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
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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.

Stop the Fringe: Three Ways to Clean Up Messy Selection Edges in Photoshop
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Stop the Fringe: Three Ways to Clean Up Messy Selection Edges in Photoshop

Fringe is the enemy. That gross little halo of color that clings to your subject after you’ve cut them out - the ghost of the background they came from - has killed more composites than any other single thing in my workflow. I’ve been there a dozen times: I spend an hour on a careful selection, drop the subject onto a new background, zoom out to admire my work, and there it is.

Steal Light From Your Own Image: Aaron Nace's Channel-Based Lighting Trick
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Steal Light From Your Own Image: Aaron Nace's Channel-Based Lighting Trick

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from staring at a photo that’s almost great. The composition is solid, the subject is sharp, but the light feels flat and lifeless, like the scene was lit by a dentist’s office. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and my usual fix was to slap a Color Balance adjustment layer on it and hope for the best. Spoiler: it never looked great.

Rough, Fast, and Good Enough: How to Composite in Photoshop Without Losing Your Mind
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Rough, Fast, and Good Enough: How to Composite in Photoshop Without Losing Your Mind

A few years back, I spent three full days on a composite. Three days of careful pen tool paths, obsessive masking, color matching that made my eyes water. A friend looked at it, nodded, then sat down and knocked out something that looked equally convincing in about twenty minutes using a workflow I’d never even considered. I wanted to flip my desk. Instead, I went home, opened YouTube, and started paying closer attention to how people who actually move fast think about this stuff.

Blend Two Exposures Into One Perfect Landscape Shot (No Filters Required)
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Blend Two Exposures Into One Perfect Landscape Shot (No Filters Required)

I’m a freelance designer who mostly lives in the land of composites, logos, and whatever a client needs done by Thursday. But landscape photography editing crosses my desk more than you’d think, and the number one problem people bring me is the same every time: the sky looks great but the foreground is a muddy mess, or vice versa. Graduated ND filters solve this in the field, but what happens when you’re halfway up a hill and you left your filters in the car?

Painting Away Beards in Photoshop: The Manual Method That Actually Works
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Painting Away Beards in Photoshop: The Manual Method That Actually Works

Retouching facial hair is one of those jobs that sounds simple until you’re forty-five minutes deep and your subject looks like they lost a fight with a rubber eraser. I’ve had clients send me portraits where the brief is something like “can you just clean him up a bit” - and that phrase, “clean him up,” almost always means removing a beard, a patch of stubble, or some combination of both.

When the Light Dies, You Adapt: Long Exposure Black and White Landscape Techniques from Thomas Heaton
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When the Light Dies, You Adapt: Long Exposure Black and White Landscape Techniques from Thomas Heaton

There’s a moment every photographer knows. You’ve hiked to the spot, the scene is gorgeous, and then the wind picks up and kills any hope of a mirror-flat reflection. You either pack up or you adapt. I’ve packed up. I’ve also stood there like an idiot waiting for calm water that never came. What I hadn’t fully internalized until recently is that adapting isn’t a consolation prize — it’s a legitimate creative decision that the best landscape photographers make constantly, often producing stronger work than the original plan would have.