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 […]
Tutorials
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 […]
How to add age and drama with texture effects
Digital images don’t have much texture. Your subjects might, of course, but the way cameras render tones is glassy-smooth (at low ISO settings anyway) and sometimes a little sterile. Adding a texture digitally can make a picture look more interesting, more tactile and more ‘hand made’. Textures can be very subtle, like the fine texture […]
See the world in infra red
Infra red photography creates an unusual and surreal view of the world that can also be very beautiful. You can do it in black and white or colour, but the techniques used today with digital cameras are rather different to those used with film. Infra red film photography is relatively straightforward – you simply use […]
Rediscover dodging and burning in black and white
Back in the days of film, a ‘straight’ black and white print was only a stepping stone. A properly finished print was almost always enhanced with some skilled ‘dodging and burning’. Dodging and burning is a classic technique in black and white, where certain areas of a print are held back (dodged) under the enlarger […]
How to use the ON1 Photo Texture and Border filters
ON1 Photo RAW has a huge library of preset effects and you can try them all out just by browsing through the categories and clicking on the ones you like the look of. But that doesn’t really get you any closer to figuring out how its effects filters work and how you can use them […]
How to use the Luminar Accent – AI Filter
The Luminar 1.2 Neptune update brought a bunch of new and interesting tools, and one of them is the AI Accent filter. AI stands for ‘artificial intelligence’, which is used to analyse different parts of the picture for objects, structure, colour, light and dark tones and more. When you drag the slider it intelligently enhances […]
Using the Luminar Quick & Awesome workspace
When MacPhun (or Skylum, as it is now) updated its innovative photo-editing app to Luminar 1.2 ‘Neptune’, it added a number of new features. One of these is the new Luminar Quick & Awesome workspace, which is designed to bring three key filters for getting awesome results quickly. These are the new Accent – AI Filter which […]