Photo Editing

Two Tricks for Fixing Panoramic Photo Edges (Without Cropping Into Your Shot)
Video Tutorials

Two Tricks for Fixing Panoramic Photo Edges (Without Cropping Into Your Shot)

Panoramic photos are one of those things that look incredible until you open the stitched result in Photoshop and realize the edges are a jagged, transparent mess. Every time. If you’ve shot a wide scene, handed it off to Photoshop’s auto-stitch, and then stared at those ragged borders wondering how much of your beautiful composition you’re about to sacrifice to the crop tool, this one’s for you. In this CreativeLive tutorial on cropping panoramic photos, the instructor walks through two genuinely clever ways to handle those problem edges without nuking your image with a heavy crop.

Photoshop AI Fails So You Don't Have To: What Generative Fill Can't Do (Yet)
Video Tutorials

Photoshop AI Fails So You Don't Have To: What Generative Fill Can't Do (Yet)

I spend a lot of time in coffee shops convincing clients that yes, Photoshop’s AI tools are worth learning. And for the most part, I mean it. Generative Fill has genuinely saved me on deadline more than once. But I’ve also quietly regenerated the same selection twelve times, watched it hallucinate something completely unhinged, and pretended that was all part of the plan. So when I came across Watch the full tutorial on YouTube where Matt Kloskowski deliberately pushes Photoshop’s AI into the wall, I felt deeply, personally seen.

Stop Ignoring Your Lens Distortion: A Flat-to-Fabulous Photoshop Rescue Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

Stop Ignoring Your Lens Distortion: A Flat-to-Fabulous Photoshop Rescue Walkthrough

I have a folder on my hard drive called “salvage.” It’s full of photos I liked enough to keep but never liked enough to actually edit. Bad perspective, warped buildings, that particular kind of flat, sad look a photo gets when the camera did its best and still kind of failed. For a long time I just accepted that some shots were unfixable without a ton of manual fussing. Then I started paying closer attention to how working photographers actually move through Camera Raw, and a lot of those “salvage” files started looking a lot more promising.

Stop Butchering Bodies in Photoshop: The Right Way to Use Liquify for Subtle Posing Fixes
Video Tutorials

Stop Butchering Bodies in Photoshop: The Right Way to Use Liquify for Subtle Posing Fixes

There’s a moment every retoucher knows. You’re looking at an otherwise great photo and something just feels slightly off. The lighting is good, the focus is sharp, but the pose is fighting you. Maybe an arm is angled weird, or a hip is jutting out in a way that looks awkward instead of dynamic. You could go back to the client and ask for a reshoot. Or you could spend ten seconds in Liquify and quietly fix it before anyone notices.

Make Your Subject Pop With a Quick Color Isolation Trick (Times Square Cab Edition)
Video Tutorials

Make Your Subject Pop With a Quick Color Isolation Trick (Times Square Cab Edition)

There’s a specific kind of photo that lives in everyone’s Lightroom catalog: technically fine, compositionally okay, but somehow flat. The subject is there. The light is decent. But nothing jumps. I’ve wasted more hours than I’d like to admit trying to fix these images with global adjustments, nudging sliders until the whole thing looks like a fake HDR postcard. The real fix is usually more surgical than that – isolate what matters, then amplify it.

Fake the Bokeh: How to Use Photoshop's Tilt-Shift Blur to Make Any Photo Look More Cinematic
Video Tutorials

Fake the Bokeh: How to Use Photoshop's Tilt-Shift Blur to Make Any Photo Look More Cinematic

There’s a specific kind of jealousy you feel when you see a photo where the subject just pops off the background. You know the shot. The subject is razor-sharp, the background melts into a creamy blur, and the whole thing looks like it was taken with a lens that costs more than your rent. I’ve been on both ends of that feeling. Some shots I’ve edited genuinely had that optical depth of field baked in.

Skip the Stock Photo Rabbit Hole: Generate Custom AI Backgrounds in Midjourney and Composite Them in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Skip the Stock Photo Rabbit Hole: Generate Custom AI Backgrounds in Midjourney and Composite Them in Photoshop

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’ve got a great portrait shot and a terrible background. You know the feeling. The subject is lit perfectly, the expression is exactly right, and then there’s… a white wall. Or worse, a beige wall. You could spend an hour digging through stock photo sites hoping to find something that doesn’t look immediately generic, or you could just generate exactly what you need from scratch in about five minutes.

Content Aware Fill Has Two Modes — Here's Why That Actually Matters
Video Tutorials

Content Aware Fill Has Two Modes — Here's Why That Actually Matters

There’s a very specific kind of frustration that comes from watching Photoshop confidently replace a distracting branch with a smear of abstract garbage. You ran the tool. You did the thing. The thing looked terrible. And now you’re sitting in a coffee shop wondering if you should just clone stamp it by hand like it’s 2009. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. What I didn’t realize for a long time is that Content Aware Fill isn’t one tool with one behavior.

One Tool to Rule Them All: How the Photoshop Remove Tool Changed My Retouching Workflow
Video Tutorials

One Tool to Rule Them All: How the Photoshop Remove Tool Changed My Retouching Workflow

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’re three tools deep into removing a distraction from a photo and you can still see the seam. Clone stamp, healing brush, patch tool, content-aware fill – I’ve cycled through all of them on a single edit before, and half the time I end up with something that looks like the photo has a skin condition. So when I came across Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Matt Kloskowski, the promise of handling all of that with a single tool made me sit up straighter in my coffee shop chair.

Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos
Video Tutorials

Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos

A few months back I watched a friend spend twenty minutes in Photoshop stacking curves layers, luminosity masks, and a lighting adjustment layer to fix the exposure on a landscape shot. It looked great. It also could have taken three minutes in Lightroom. I didn’t say anything because I’ve made the same mistake plenty of times, including recently, when I caught myself reaching for Photoshop out of pure habit when the RAW editor was sitting right there, already open, already better equipped for the job.

Lightroom vs. Photoshop: An Honest Look at When You Actually Need Both
Video Tutorials

Lightroom vs. Photoshop: An Honest Look at When You Actually Need Both

There’s a question that floats around photography forums like a bad smell: do you even need Photoshop, or is Lightroom enough? I used to roll my eyes at it. Now I think it’s actually worth sitting with for a minute, because the honest answer is more nuanced than either camp wants to admit. I came across this debate again while watching a tutorial from Matt Kloskowski, where he responds to a viewer comment suggesting that photos edited only in Lightroom are somehow lesser, more basic, not serious work.

Stop Reaching for the Lasso Tool First — A Smarter Way to Think About Photoshop Selections
Tools & Techniques

Stop Reaching for the Lasso Tool First — A Smarter Way to Think About Photoshop Selections

I was sitting at my usual corner table at once coffee shop, headphones in, trying to cut out a product shot for a client on a deadline. The object was a glass bottle, semi-transparent, with a label that had soft edges on one side and hard edges on the other. I spent 45 minutes with the Pen Tool before I stopped, stared at my screen, and genuinely asked myself whether I had any idea what I was doing.