Photoshop

Stop Fighting Your Backgrounds: A Smarter Photoshop Trick for Messy Shots
Video Tutorials

Stop Fighting Your Backgrounds: A Smarter Photoshop Trick for Messy Shots

I spent three days once trying to fix a background in a client’s outdoor portrait. Clone Stamp. Healing Brush. Content-Aware Fill. I cycled through every removal tool Photoshop has like I was spinning a broken roulette wheel. The result was technically fine and visually unconvincing, with those telltale smudgy patches that scream “someone was in here messing around.” There’s a better way, and I wish I’d known it sooner. In this Matt Kloskowski tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Matt walks through how to simplify a distracting background using a technique that’s almost embarrassingly straightforward once you see it.

Lasso Tools in Photoshop: Which One to Use and When (Because You're Probably Defaulting to the Wrong One)
Video Tutorials

Lasso Tools in Photoshop: Which One to Use and When (Because You're Probably Defaulting to the Wrong One)

Most of my early Photoshop disasters came down to using the wrong selection tool for the job. I’d reach for the regular Lasso like it owed me something, spend ten minutes wrestling with a wobbly outline, and then wonder why my composites looked like they were cut out with safety scissors. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize Photoshop gives you three distinct Lasso tools for a reason, and each one has a specific sweet spot.

Stop Guessing White Balance in Post — Use a Color Chart Like a Pro
Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing White Balance in Post — Use a Color Chart Like a Pro

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from getting back to your desk after a shoot, opening your RAW files, and realizing every single image has a different color cast. You shot under mixed light, you didn’t account for it, and now you’re staring down a folder of 300 photos that all need individual attention. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. The fix isn’t always in Photoshop’s sliders.

Fake Autumn in Photoshop: How to Add Fall Color to Any Landscape Photo
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Fake Autumn in Photoshop: How to Add Fall Color to Any Landscape Photo

Living in Austin, I get maybe two weeks a year where the light turns golden and the trees do something interesting. By the time I’ve cleared my schedule and driven somewhere worth photographing, peak color is already halfway to bare branches. It’s a genuinely frustrating problem if you shoot landscapes or do any nature-adjacent editing work, because clients don’t care that the timing was bad. They want the moody, warm, amber-drenched image they had in their head when they hired you.

Fix Messy Hair in Photoshop Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Pixels)
Video Tutorials

Fix Messy Hair in Photoshop Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Pixels)

Hair is the one thing that can make a technically perfect portrait look like a disaster. You nail the lighting, the expression is great, the skin looks clean – and then there’s one rogue strand doing its own thing right across the subject’s face. Or the whole silhouette just looks a little… collapsed. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat at my laptop in a coffee shop, staring at a portrait, wondering whether I should go back and reshoot or just fix it in post.

Photoshop's New Hair Selection Is Embarrassingly Good (June 2020 Update)
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Photoshop's New Hair Selection Is Embarrassingly Good (June 2020 Update)

Hair selection has been the thing that separates “I know Photoshop” from “I know Photoshop” for as long as I’ve been doing this. Client sends you a photo of someone with long, wispy, flyaway hair against a complicated background? That used to mean clearing your afternoon. I’ve spent entire evenings coaxing individual strands out of a background with Refine Edge, channel masking tricks, and a level of stubbornness that probably isn’t healthy.

Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down
Video Tutorials

Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down

There’s a specific kind of disappointment that hits when you open a photo on your computer and it looks absolutely nothing like what you saw with your own eyes. You were there. The light was incredible. You felt it. And now your screen is showing you something flat, dull, and vaguely depressing. I’ve been editing photos and graphics professionally long enough to know this feeling doesn’t go away – but the gap between “what the camera captured” and “what you actually saw” gets a lot smaller once you have a reliable editing process you can move through quickly.

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.

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

Adobe Capture Is the Secret Weapon in Your Photography Subscription (And You're Probably Ignoring It)
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Adobe Capture Is the Secret Weapon in Your Photography Subscription (And You're Probably Ignoring It)

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve squinted at a logo on a coffee cup, a sign on the street, or some packaging at the grocery store and thought “what font is that?” I’d spend twenty minutes reverse-engineering it in Photoshop, eyeballing letter curves like some kind of typographic detective. Turns out I had a tool in my Adobe subscription the whole time that would’ve solved this in about thirty seconds.

Animated Layer Masks in Photoshop: The Secret to Title Screens That Don't Look Cheap
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Animated Layer Masks in Photoshop: The Secret to Title Screens That Don't Look Cheap

Client work has a way of exposing every gap in your skill set. For the longest time, my video work in Photoshop stopped at color grading and slapping some text on screen. If a client wanted a logo reveal or a title that actually did something, I’d either fake it with a hard cut or quietly apologize and suggest they “keep it minimal.” Minimalism is a great cover story until a client asks why their competitor’s intro looks so much slicker than theirs.

Fake Latte Art in Photoshop Is Easier Than Making an Actual Latte
Video Tutorials

Fake Latte Art in Photoshop Is Easier Than Making an Actual Latte

I spend an embarrassing portion of my working life in coffee shops, which means I’ve stared at a lot of latte art. Rosettes, hearts, little fern fronds that the barista clearly spent four seconds on but somehow looks incredible. It never occurred to me that recreating that effect in Photoshop would be this achievable until I stumbled across Aaron Nace’s tutorial over at PHLEARN. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after reading this breakdown.