Video Tutorials

How to Make a Cinemagraph in Photoshop and After Effects (Falling Petals Tutorial Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Make a Cinemagraph in Photoshop and After Effects (Falling Petals Tutorial Breakdown)

Client work has a funny way of making you learn things you’ve been putting off. I’d been dodging cinemagraphs for years, nodding along whenever someone mentioned them like I totally knew what I was doing, then quietly changing the subject. The format kept showing up on mood boards and in briefs, and I kept delivering static images with a confident expression on my face. That ended when I finally sat down with Watch the full tutorial on YouTube - Aaron Nace’s PHLEARN walkthrough on animating a photograph using Photoshop and After Effects.

Filter Mistakes That Are Quietly Ruining Your Photos (And How to Avoid Them)
Video Tutorials

Filter Mistakes That Are Quietly Ruining Your Photos (And How to Avoid Them)

I shoot a lot of reference photography for compositing work. Stock images are fine until they’re not, and when a client wants something specific, I’m the one dragging a camera somewhere inconvenient and hoping for the best. Filters have always felt like the “serious photographer” move to me, the kind of gear that signals you know what you’re doing. Turns out, slapping a filter on your lens without understanding its quirks is a great way to hand yourself a problem you’ll spend an hour trying to fix in Lightroom later.

How to Restore Damaged Family Photos in Photoshop (Without Losing Your Mind)
Video Tutorials

How to Restore Damaged Family Photos in Photoshop (Without Losing Your Mind)

Photo restoration used to be the kind of job I’d quietly dread. A client would email asking if I could “fix up” an old photo, and I’d spend an entire afternoon cloning out scratches pixel by pixel while questioning my life choices. I got decent at it, but decent felt like a lot of suffering for mediocre results. That’s why this tutorial from Matt Kloskowski landed so well for me. In it, he walks through restoring a physically torn, water-damaged photograph using tools that honestly didn’t exist in a useful state until the last couple of years.

Fake Sun Rays That Don't Look Fake: A Photoshop Trick Worth Stealing
Video Tutorials

Fake Sun Rays That Don't Look Fake: A Photoshop Trick Worth Stealing

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing a photo is almost great. You’ve got the composition, the moment, the light is doing something interesting in the background, and then you look closer and realize the sun is just sitting there like a flat white circle, not actually contributing anything. I’ve been in that situation with client work more times than I want to admit, staring at a landscape shot and wishing I could pull just a little more drama out of it.

How to Change a Shirt Color in Photoshop Without Making It Look Painted On
Video Tutorials

How to Change a Shirt Color in Photoshop Without Making It Look Painted On

Client asks if you can “just swap the shirt to blue.” You say yes, obviously, because you are a professional. Then you spend forty minutes pushing sliders around wondering why the result looks like someone dumped a bucket of paint on the model. I have been that person more times than I care to admit. The good news is there’s a clean, methodical way to do this that doesn’t involve guessing.

Photoshop 2023's Best New Tricks: Smarter Selections and One-Key Object Removal
Video Tutorials

Photoshop 2023's Best New Tricks: Smarter Selections and One-Key Object Removal

There’s a specific kind of workflow misery that comes from spending twenty minutes carefully lassoing around an object you need to remove, only to have the fill look like the background was painted by someone who had heard of the concept of “texture” but never actually seen it. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, usually in a coffee shop, usually on a deadline, usually making quiet, frustrated noises into my cold brew.

Fake It Till You Make It: How to Sculpt Six-Pack Abs in Photoshop Using Light and Shadow
Video Tutorials

Fake It Till You Make It: How to Sculpt Six-Pack Abs in Photoshop Using Light and Shadow

Body retouching gets a bad reputation, and honestly, some of it is deserved. But there’s a category of techniques that sit more in the “photo illustration” or “creative enhancement” space, and understanding how light and shadow sculpt the human form is genuinely useful knowledge, whether you’re touching up a fitness brand’s campaign, mocking up a magazine cover concept, or just trying to understand why certain retouching looks convincing and other retouching looks like someone melted a wax figure.

10 Photoshop Tips That Made Me Feel Like I'd Been Doing This Wrong for Years
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10 Photoshop Tips That Made Me Feel Like I'd Been Doing This Wrong for Years

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when someone shows you a technique in Photoshop that takes them 10 seconds to do something you’ve been spending 10 minutes on. I’ve been using this software long enough to feel embarrassed by how many of these moments I’ve had. Scrubbing handles around a giant image because I forgot I could just type a number. Burning generative credits on tools that apparently don’t even charge for them.

How to Edit Wedding Photos in Photoshop: A Practical Breakdown of Aaron Nace's Workflow
Video Tutorials

How to Edit Wedding Photos in Photoshop: A Practical Breakdown of Aaron Nace's Workflow

Wedding photography editing is one of those things that looks approachable until you’re actually staring at a raw file at midnight, a client deadline looming, and your go-to adjustments making the whole thing look like a stock photo from 2009. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit. The problem isn’t usually the big stuff. It’s the pile of small decisions — how to handle mixed lighting, how to make the image feel cinematic without killing the skin tones, how to deal with architectural distortion when you shot in a venue with beautiful straight lines and a lens that gently lied to you about all of them.

Puppet Warp for Retouching: The Tool I Wrote Off That Changed How I Work
Video Tutorials

Puppet Warp for Retouching: The Tool I Wrote Off That Changed How I Work

I’ll be honest with you. When I first heard about Puppet Warp, I did what a lot of people did: I watched someone use it to contort a cartoon character, thought “that’s a gimmick,” and went back to my liquify-everything workflow. It sat in my menu like a piece of gym equipment I kept promising myself I’d use. Then I watched a segment from a KelbyOne tutorial, specifically episode 282 of Photoshop User TV hosted by Scott Kelby and his crew, and one throwaway comment stopped me cold.

Animated GIFs in Photoshop: How to Swap Prints Inside a Frame Animation
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Animated GIFs in Photoshop: How to Swap Prints Inside a Frame Animation

I’ve done a lot of work creating promotional graphics for clients, and one request that comes up more than you’d think is: “Can you make it… move a little?” Not full video, not a complex After Effects production. Just a clean, looping GIF that cycles through a few variations of something. A product. A print. A lineup of options. Simple idea, but if you’ve never built a frame animation in Photoshop before, it’s surprisingly easy to overcomplicate it in your head.

Gear Got Stolen, Brain Got Smarter: The Tiny Camera Kit Worth Actually Building Around
Video Tutorials

Gear Got Stolen, Brain Got Smarter: The Tiny Camera Kit Worth Actually Building Around

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when you realize something expensive and irreplaceable is gone. I know it from the creative side – I once came into a coffee shop, opened my laptop, and found an entire client project folder somehow corrupted beyond recovery. Pierre T. Lambert apparently had a rougher version of that morning when someone broke into his place and walked off with a chunk of his camera gear.