Photoshop

Curves vs. Levels in Photoshop: Which One Should You Actually Be Using?
Video Tutorials

Curves vs. Levels in Photoshop: Which One Should You Actually Be Using?

For years I used Levels for everything. Exposure fix? Levels. Quick color correction? Levels. Basically anything that required me to not completely ruin a client’s photo? Levels. It felt safe. Predictable. And I won’t lie, part of the reason I avoided Curves was that the interface looked like something out of a seismograph reading and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. Then I watched this Aaron Nace tutorial from PHLEARN and it genuinely reframed how I think about both tools.

Lightroom First, Photoshop Second: Why Your Edit Order Is Wrecking Your Photos
Video Tutorials

Lightroom First, Photoshop Second: Why Your Edit Order Is Wrecking Your Photos

There’s a version of me from a few years ago who would open every photo straight in Photoshop. Raw file, JPEG, screenshot of a meme — didn’t matter. Photoshop was the big tool, so obviously that’s where the real work happened, right? Wrong. It took embarrassingly long for me to figure out that jumping past Lightroom (or Camera Raw) wasn’t a power move. It was leaving quality on the table before I’d even started.

Building Rain From Scratch in Photoshop: What I Learned From Aaron Nace's Motorcycle Edit
Video Tutorials

Building Rain From Scratch in Photoshop: What I Learned From Aaron Nace's Motorcycle Edit

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from spending an afternoon on a composite that still looks fake, and you can’t quite put your finger on why. For me, it’s usually the atmosphere. The subject is sharp, the lighting is close enough, but the scene feels like a cutout dropped onto a background. Rain, when it’s done right, is one of the fastest ways to sell a scene as real.

How to Make Dramatic Black & White Photos in Photoshop (Without Guessing)
Video Tutorials

How to Make Dramatic Black & White Photos in Photoshop (Without Guessing)

There’s a particular kind of black and white photo that stops you mid-scroll. Deep shadows, bright highlights, real tension between the two. Then there’s the other kind, which is just a color photo with the saturation turned off and a vague sense of disappointment. For a long time, most of what I was producing fell into that second category. I’d desaturate, maybe nudge the contrast slider, call it done. The results looked flat, lifeless, and honestly kind of embarrassing given how much time I’d spent on them.

Paint Realistic Eye Makeup in Photoshop Using Actual Makeup Artist Principles
Video Tutorials

Paint Realistic Eye Makeup in Photoshop Using Actual Makeup Artist Principles

I do a lot of portrait retouching. Skin cleanup, dodging and burning, the occasional dramatic color grade. But for years, whenever a client asked me to “add some makeup” to a shot, I’d fumble around with a brush tool, slap some color on a normal layer, and wonder why it looked like I’d painted the model’s face with Microsoft Paint. Which, yes, I have experience with. It wasn’t pretty. The real problem wasn’t the tools.

Lifting the Blacks: How to Nail That Moody Dark Film Look in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Lifting the Blacks: How to Nail That Moody Dark Film Look in Photoshop

Client work has a way of forcing you to learn things fast. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to fake that moody, washed-out film look by just dragging the exposure slider down and hoping for the best. The result was always the same: muddy, flat, and nothing like the cinematic shadow work I was going for. The problem wasn’t my eye. It was that I was using the wrong tool for the job.

Stop Guessing If Your Buildings Are Straight — Use Photoshop's Grid Like This
Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing If Your Buildings Are Straight — Use Photoshop's Grid Like This

Architectural photography has this sneaky way of making you feel like everything looks fine until you slap a straight line next to it and realize your building is leaning like it lost a fight. I’ve handed off composites with slightly tilted structures more times than I’d like to admit, usually because I was eyeballing it and convinced myself it was “close enough.” Spoiler: clients notice. So when I came across this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial on using Photoshop’s grid system to analyze and correct building lines, I sat up a little straighter in my coffee shop booth and paid attention.

How to Slap Any Image onto a Building (and Actually Make It Look Real) with Photoshop's Vanishing Point
Video Tutorials

How to Slap Any Image onto a Building (and Actually Make It Look Real) with Photoshop's Vanishing Point

A friend of mine once spent three days building a composite where he placed a graphic onto the side of a building. Manually warped it. Nudged every corner point. Matched the lighting. It looked… fine. Plausible. Then someone in his feedback thread said “couldn’t you just use Vanishing Point for that?” and his soul briefly left his body. I watched this happen in real time. I also had no idea what Vanishing Point was, so I stayed quiet and nodded like I absolutely knew.

Build a Repeating Lightning Bolt Background in Photoshop (The Step-and-Repeat Method)
Video Tutorials

Build a Repeating Lightning Bolt Background in Photoshop (The Step-and-Repeat Method)

There’s a specific kind of panic that hits when a client asks for “something more interesting” in the background of a portrait shot that’s already been edited, color-graded, and basically signed off. You don’t want to blow up the existing work. You just need to add a layer of visual energy without rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. This is exactly the situation Aaron Nace tackles in this PHLEARN tutorial, and the approach he takes is genuinely clever.

Stop Fighting Your Colors: How Color Range Masking Gives You Surgical Control
Video Tutorials

Stop Fighting Your Colors: How Color Range Masking Gives You Surgical Control

There’s a specific flavor of frustration I know too well: you brighten a photo, and suddenly everything looks like it’s been left out in the Texas sun for three days. The thing you actually wanted to pop, say a product, a piece of clothing, a neon sign, gets lost in the wash because you were editing the whole image instead of just the part that needed it. For a long time, my answer was to mess around with the HSL panel, nudge a slider, and hope for the best.

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: A Camera Raw Workflow That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: A Camera Raw Workflow That Actually Works

Exposure problems are the dirty secret of a lot of client work. You get a great shot, the composition is solid, the subject looks fantastic, and then you open it in Photoshop and realize half the image is either blown out or buried in shadows. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. The temptation is to reach for Curves or Levels and start dragging things around until it looks “good enough” — which usually means you’ve overcorrected the highlights trying to save the shadows, or vice versa.

Build a Photoshop Photo Book Template That Actually Saves You Time (Scott Kelby Method)
Video Tutorials

Build a Photoshop Photo Book Template That Actually Saves You Time (Scott Kelby Method)

Client photo books used to wreck my workflow. Not the creative part, I enjoy that. The part where you build twelve nearly-identical pages and have to manually swap out every image, resize it, reposition it, and pray nothing shifts. I burned more hours than I’ll admit before I stumbled across a smarter approach. In this Scott Kelby tutorial from his three-part photo book series, Kelby walks through building photo book pages directly in Photoshop CS4.