How to Create a Perfect Selection of Clouds in Photoshop

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Creating a perfect selection of clouds in Photoshop can be a real challenge. They're fuzzy and have no well defined edge in most cases. How do you create a good selection (or layer mask) in this case, for example, in order to process the blue sky and the white clouds differently? In this video tutorial, I'll show you a technique for achieving this. We will use Photoshop's Channels panel to create a base mask. Then I will use the Brush tool in overlay mode to work on the mask and make the blue sky parts darker and the clouds brighter. Bit by bit, we will get a perfect mask that allows us to apply selective editing to the sky.

How to Stack Your Images in Lightroom to Clean up the Mess

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If you're like me, you are bringing home all kinds of exposure series, panorama sources photos and macro images that you want to combine using focus stacking. Or maybe you like shooting whole sets of image in a street scene to be able to choose the best one later. All these multi-exposure photography techniques can create a complete mess in your Lightroom catalog so that you may not find anything or know which exposures belong to which. Thankfully, Lightroom brings a very effective tools to get rid of this chaos without having to delete any of your images: Stacking. Stacking is a photo management technique by which you group together a number of images that are then displayed as a single stack. So, you may have shoot 1000 images in the field, but when you apply stacking properly, you may only see 100 or them which make your task of organizing them so much more pleasant. In this video, I am showing you how stacking works and how I apply it to my mess... umm... my images. ;)

How to Add More Depth to Your Images in Lightroom

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Did you ever wonder why some images give you that feeling of being in the scene instead of just viewing it? There are many different techniques for achieving this in your own photography, but one very simple trick is to add a slight vignette to your image. For most images, this creates a sense of being close and of intimacy. It draws the eyes of the viewers into the image, and it can simplify your photos. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to simply add a vignette in Lightroom and create that depth and closeness in your own images.

How to Create a Perfect Sky Selection in Photoshop

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In landscape photography, you often need to process the sky separately from the rest of your image, for example to give it more color and definition. But selecting the sky in a complex scene can be really difficult. You have to deal with all kinds of objects that you need to exclude, like trees that create extremely complex shapes. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to create a perfect selection of the sky in these situations using Photoshop's Channels palette.

Advanced Color Correction in Lightroom Using the Color Tab

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You probably know the Vibrance and Saturation sliders that let you control colors in Lightroom. These controls do a great job of equalizing the colors throughout the image (Vibrance) and controlling the overall saturation. But what if you need to work only on a narrow range of colors and not the entire image? In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to use the controls in Lightroom's Color tab to correct the Hue, Saturation and Lightness of different colors.

How to Bring Color Back Into Backlit Areas in Photoshop

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When you photograph into the sun, you often have areas in your image that lack color and look washed out due to the sun overpowering those regions. Getting the color and saturation back in those areas can be quite hard. If you simply increase the saturation, you'll get a wash of colors that do not resemble those that you saw at the actual scene. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to use a Photo Filter layer in Photoshop to bring back color into theses regions. This technique also works in other situations where color is lacking in some areas of your image.

Adding Splashes of Light to Your Image in Lightroom

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Sometimes you shoot a scene that you think has great light, but when you're back home, you're disappointed with the result. The intensity and color of the lights does not match your expectations. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to to intensify and shape those lights in post-processing using Lightroom. We will work with the Radial Filter tool to bring splashes of light into those regions where you want to have them.

How to Enhance Details in Photoshop

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Enhancing the details in your images is one aspect of your editing work that Photoshop traditionally does not excel in. That's why numerous plugins have been created that you can use from within Photoshop to increase mid-tone contrast and enhance the edges in your image. In the video below, I'll be showing you a simple technique for doing this right from within Photoshop without requiring any plugin. This technique gives you lots of control over the details in your images without having to buy, install and fire up a plugin each time. You also get to change the strength of the effect in isolation, independently from the rest of the pixels which is a big bonus over the use of plugins that typically create an entire new image layer with the effects backed in.

How to Treat Noisy Images in Lightroom

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Fighting noise in your images is one of the most common task during post-processing. But it's also a very challenging thing to do because with every bit of noise reduction, you lose details in your image that you need to get back somehow. So, it's a fine balance between noise reduction on the one side and sharpening on the other side. Both are necessary and both can easily be overdone. In this excerpt of my Personal Workflow for Lightroom course, I will show you how I am applying noise reduction to images that are somewhat noisy.