Here’s part 2 of my mini-series on creating a basic image filing and naming system. Part 1 explains the basic folder and file naming structure and how to batch rename photos in Adobe Bridge. This part looks at specific situation that lots of us face – what to do when you shoot RAW+JPEG pairs with […]
Tutorials
Here’s the simple photo filing system I use
This is part 1 of a mini-series on how I organise my photo library. I’m posting this because keeping an ever-growing library of photos organised is a challenge for all of us, and I thought I’d explain a system that’s worked for me for fifteen years – so I’m guessing it must be half right. […]
How to relight a scene in Lightroom
In photography, things don’t always come together as you’d want them to. Sometimes you get wonderful lighting but there’s no effective subject in front of the camera for bringing it out, and sometimes you’ve got a good subject but the lighting isn’t right. This is one of those situations. I thought the couple walking a […]
How to create a selective colour effect in Lightroom Classic
There’s colour photography and there’s black and white, but sometimes there’s something in between which has its own very distinctive look. This tutorial is all about selective colour – making a black and white image but with one single colour preserved. In this case it’s red, which is usually the most popular choice for this […]
How to add a new sky to a landscape without selections
Very often in landscape photography you get the landscape or the lighting you want, but not the sky. In the perfect world you’d keep going back again and again until everything was perfect. In our not-so-perfect-world, however, it’s sometimes useful to be able to add a new sky later, as the final touch to an […]
Hand coloured black and white with a bi-colour filter
It does seem a bit perverse, adding colour to a black and white image which used to be colour in the first place, but hand-coloured (or digitally-coloured) black and white has a very particular ‘look’ that colour images just don’t have. So this image (below) is one I originally shot in colour but then reworked […]
Add zoom blur with a twist
Zoom blur is a popular bit tricky little technique where you zoom the lens during the exposure so that you get a kind of radial blur from the centre of the picture. This means using a shutter speed long enough to capture this rapid zoom movement, which usually means you get plenty of regular blur […]
Try this soft focus effect on landscapes
You normally associate soft focus effects with portraits, but they can work on all kinds of images, adding a romantic, dreamy feel to an everyday scene. Landscapes, for example, are often given a dramatic, brooding look when sometimes the emotion we feel is much lighter. Here’s an example. This tree-lined avenue felt bright, airy and […]
Restore faded art using levels and curves
With careful use of levels and curves adjustments you can rescue even the faintest and most faded artworks and restore both saturation and contrast. Levels and curves are two of the most basic adjustment tools in any image-editing program, but there’s often confusion about which to use and when, and it often appears as if […]
Add depth and drama with a vignette effect
Modern lenses are pretty good at creating even illumination across the frame, and if there is some corner shading (vignetting) you can use software to eliminate it. However, sometimes vignetting is good! Especially if you can control it creatively to improve your picture’s composition and contrast. This image below has all the ingredients for a […]