Photo Editing

Fake a Stunning Sunset in Photoshop (Without Waiting for Golden Hour)
Video Tutorials

Fake a Stunning Sunset in Photoshop (Without Waiting for Golden Hour)

There’s a specific kind of client email that used to stress me out. The one that goes: “We love this shot but can it feel more… golden hour?” And the photo in question was taken at 2pm in flat Texas sunlight. Not exactly magic hour material. For years I’d either reshoot or apologize. Then I started actually learning what’s possible with Photoshop’s adjustment layers and gradient tools, and that panic evaporated.

Fog, Light Beams, and a Free Brush: Aaron Nace's Photoshop Atmosphere Trick Is Actually Brilliant
Video Tutorials

Fog, Light Beams, and a Free Brush: Aaron Nace's Photoshop Atmosphere Trick Is Actually Brilliant

There’s a specific kind of photo that drives me crazy. You know the one. Great composition, solid exposure, interesting subject, and then – a flat, dead bottom half that looks like the photographer just forgot that gravity exists. I’ve had this problem more times than I want to admit, especially with moody indoor shots where the lighting drama is happening up top but the floor is just… there. Embarrassing and beige.

From Flat to Gallery-Worthy: Fixing Vacation Landscape Photos in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

From Flat to Gallery-Worthy: Fixing Vacation Landscape Photos in Photoshop

Every photographer knows the feeling. You’re standing at the rim of something genuinely breathtaking, the light is doing that thing, your camera is out, and you’re sure you’re capturing a moment you’ll show people for years. Then you get home, open Lightroom or Photoshop, and the photo looks like you took it through a foggy shower door. Flat, hazy, weirdly blue. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and for a while I just wrote it off as “skill issue, buy a better lens,” which is exactly the kind of expensive wrong answer I specialize in.

Light Adjustment Layer: Why Adobe's Latest Photoshop Feature Is a Game-Changer
News

Light Adjustment Layer: Why Adobe's Latest Photoshop Feature Is a Game-Changer

Adobe’s Latest Gift to Photoshop Users Adobe’s been on a mission lately, and I’m here for it. They’ve started migrating some of Lightroom and Camera Raw’s most beloved features straight into Photoshop, and honestly? It’s making my workflow significantly smoother. The headliner in this round of updates is the new Light Adjustment layer, and it’s exactly the kind of feature that makes you wonder why it took this long to arrive.

Stop Ignoring Blend Modes: The Photoshop Feature That Changed How I Work
Techniques

Stop Ignoring Blend Modes: The Photoshop Feature That Changed How I Work

The Friend Who Wrecked My Confidence in 20 Minutes A few years back, I spent three days on a composite. Three full days, multiple coffee shop sessions, probably a combined 18 hours of masking and color grading. I was proud of it. Sent it to a designer friend for feedback and he came back with, “cool, took me about 20 minutes to do something similar.” He’d used a workflow built almost entirely around blend modes that I had never seriously explored.

Vignettes in Lightroom: Why You're Probably Using the Wrong Tool for the Job
Video Tutorials

Vignettes in Lightroom: Why You're Probably Using the Wrong Tool for the Job

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time applying vignettes in Lightroom the lazy way — drag the Post Crop Vignette slider left, call it a day, move on. And honestly, for a long time it worked fine. Until it didn’t. The problem crept up on me during a client edit where the sky in the upper-left corner was blowing out, the lower-right foreground was already deep in shadow, and slapping a uniform darkening across all four corners made the whole thing look like I’d developed the photo inside a cave.

How to Build a Diptych Collage in Photoshop Without Making a Mess of It
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Diptych Collage in Photoshop Without Making a Mess of It

Client work has a funny way of exposing the gaps in your workflow. For years, whenever someone asked me to combine two photos into a single polished layout, I’d go full Frankenstein on it. Drag things around, eyeball the spacing, swear at the alignment, and end up with something that looked like a ransom note assembled by a graphic design student at 2am. Functional? Barely. Repeatable? Absolutely not. That changed when I sat down with this Aaron Nace tutorial from PHLEARN on building a diptych in Photoshop.

From Flat RAW to Moody Black and White: A Full Lightroom-to-Photoshop Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

From Flat RAW to Moody Black and White: A Full Lightroom-to-Photoshop Walkthrough

I’ll be honest – black and white photography used to feel like something I’d slap on a photo when the colors were too ugly to save. Hit the desaturate button, call it art, move on. It wasn’t until I started paying closer attention to how working photographers actually approach monochrome that I realized how much I’d been leaving on the table. In this KelbyOne tutorial, the whole round-trip is laid out from a completely untouched RAW file all the way through Lightroom adjustments and into Silver Efex Pro for the final black and white conversion.

You're Using Photoshop Filters Wrong (And So Was I)
Filters & Effects

You're Using Photoshop Filters Wrong (And So Was I)

Last year I was working on a product composite for a client, a skincare brand that needed clean, glowy imagery for a launch campaign. Tight deadline, decent budget, straightforward brief. I ran a Surface Blur to smooth out some texture on the packaging, flattened the layer because I was moving fast and being an idiot, and then the client came back and said the blur looked too heavy. I stared at that file for a solid 30 seconds before accepting that I had no way back.

Stop Sleeping on Adobe Camera Raw: A Landscape Photographer's Editing Workflow That Actually Makes Sense
Video Tutorials

Stop Sleeping on Adobe Camera Raw: A Landscape Photographer's Editing Workflow That Actually Makes Sense

I’ll be honest with you. For an embarrassingly long time, I treated Adobe Camera Raw like a tollbooth I had to pass through before getting to the “real” editing in Photoshop. Tweak the exposure a little, maybe nudge the whites, click Open, move on. It wasn’t until I started watching photographers who actually live inside Camera Raw that I realized I was basically skipping the best part of the meal.

How to Remove Tan Lines in Photoshop (Without Making It Obvious You Did)
Video Tutorials

How to Remove Tan Lines in Photoshop (Without Making It Obvious You Did)

Tan lines are one of those problems nobody thinks about until the photos come back and suddenly there’s a perfectly geometric stripe across someone’s shoulder that screams “I wore a tank top to the beach three days before my wedding.” I’ve had clients hand me images from bachelorette weekends, beach vacations, and outdoor engagement shoots where the tanning situation was, let’s say, enthusiastically visible. It’s a more common retouch request than most people realize, and if you don’t have a reliable method, you end up spending way too long pushing pixels around hoping nobody notices the patchy mess you left behind.

Content Aware Move: The Photoshop Tool I Kept Ignoring (And Shouldn't Have)
Video Tutorials

Content Aware Move: The Photoshop Tool I Kept Ignoring (And Shouldn't Have)

Here’s a confession: for years I treated Content Aware Move like that gym membership I kept paying for but never used. I knew it existed. I’d seen it in the flyout menu tucked under the Spot Healing Brush. I just assumed it was one of those tools that sounds magical in a demo and falls apart the second you try it on a real photo. So I kept defaulting to my trusty Rectangular Marquee and Move Tool combo, patching up the seams afterward with varying degrees of success.