Adobe’s enthusiast-level photo editor has been upgraded, but are the changes just cosmetic? Find out in our Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 review.
Some photographers employ the processing powers of packages like Photoshop CS5 or Photomatix to bracketing exposures to combine into a single composite high dyanmic range image that reveals fine detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights. HDR photography editing techniques add rich (and sometimes false) colours that enhance the artistic look of a shot,
and many even like the way the HDR process can add artefacts such as halos around object edges.
Take your photography to extreme wide angles. Our new tutorial shows you how to stitch 360-degree pictures to create amazing polar panoramas.
There are lots of ways to make a black and white conversion, but the number of choices depends on the software you’re using. Here we show you how to take control of the process by learning how to use your tools effectively to control the shade of great of each colour in your original image.
When it comes to portraits, everyone wants to look their best. But with today’s high-resolution SLRs, every spot, blemish and flaw can appear in startling detail. There are of course a few shooting techniques you can use to minimise these, such as bouncing light with reflectors to avoid strong shadows, and using off-camera flash to control the direction of the light to complement the model. However, you don’t need to get bogged down with different techniques and equipment to get great portraits, because Elements has a range of tools specially designed for seamless Photoshop retouching.
Learn how to use Adobe Camera Raw to sharpen photos for printing without exacerbating noise or creating halos in our latest Photoshop Elements tutorial.
Flat, grey skies are a common difficulty when the sky in your scene is much brighter than the land beneath, especially towards the beginning and end of the day. The classic solution is to use a graduated Neutral Density (ND) filter. However, they can be fiddly to set up, especially when using lenses in which the front element rotates. Follow our Photoshop Elements tip’s three steps below and you’ll find a much easier way to transform your dull, grey skies into a darker blue.
It’s often said that a face is like a visual biography. Deep wrinkles, smile lines and faded scars all hint at a life that’s been full of incidents, regrets and laughter. If you can capture these features effectively, you’re half way to achieving the most crucial aspect of
any portrait – character.
To shoot these details, strong directional light works best (we’ve used the evening sun). Expose for the highlights and you’ll record perfect skin texture with rich shadows.
But Photoshop offers ways to tease out even more detail, so if a face really is like an autobiography, we can make the chapter titles stand out in big bold lettering with a few subtle enhancements.
The ability to sharpen an image after you’ve taken it is a saving grace. Sometimes a shallow depth of field or a wrongly chosen autofocus point can mean that key details in an image are soft. Using the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop can bring back these lost details, and prevent an otherwise great photograph from being destined for the recycle bin.
In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll show you how to blur the background in Photoshop and sharpen detail in your foreground interest. Here we’re going to apply two layer masks to our snowy egret image: one to sharpen the fine feather details and one to blur out the background.
W hen on location, your peripheral vision tends to give you a much wider perspective than your camera’s lens, which is why landscape shots often lack the sense of space you experienced at the scene. Here, we’ll show you how to use Photoshop Elements’ picture-stitching powers to combine six shots into a 360° panorama composite that reveals much more about the location. We’ll also show you how to adjust the image to get a more balanced composition, which is especially important when creating an architectural 360° panorama.
