Kens Photoshop Blog

This tutorial is a continuation of the Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial and builds on what you learned there. If you didn’t complete and internalized the techniques from there, please go and do that now or you won’t be able to follow along. In the Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial we [...]

This is going to be a long one so get comfy and go grab a cuppa first, we are going to learn how to mask and remove backgrounds in photoshop the right way. First, lets look at some of techniques that many people use, that are usually the wrong way. I say usually, because there [...]

Bloom is a popular effect, used a lot in computer games to cover up boring areas. The effect is a simulation of bright light flooding a camera lens creating blurred washed out areas. Used well, bloom can be a very powerful effect, especially for landscape or interior photos

While you can get a long way in proper positioning of your lights to minimize highlights, sometimes it’s just much faster to retouch them in post. What would you rather do? Spend ages messing with stands and gobos and moving lights around, or, spend 5 minutes in photoshop to tame them down? Sometimes it’s just [...]

Still using image/canvas size to resize your images? The canvas size dialog is fine if you know the exact dimensions, but what if you want to recompose an image and want to visualize your resizing? Enter the photoshop crop tool. First make sure you change the background layer to a normal layer, just hold down [...]

You may have come across photos that looks allmost like a 3D rendering, model and fasion photos, or product photos that look so smooth as to be allmost CG generated. This is done by skillfull retouchers using dodge and burn in Photoshop. Basically you have to learn about light and shadow and how they shape [...]

This technique requires the photoshop plugin Nik Color EFX Pro, a bit spendy but this plugin is massive and contains a closely guarded secret tool that can create images that looks insanely sharp with no haloing or other artifacts.

When doing drawing intensive work in photoshop it would be great if you could rotate the canvas to get a less awkvard drawing orientation. Unfortunately Photoshop CS3 doesn’t have this feature. But we can fake rotating canvas pretty well with a little trick.

When you crop in Lightrooms Develop module, normally you get a grid layout. But the much more usefull Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, Golden Triangle, and Golden Spiral are just a keyboard click away. To flick through the Crop Overlay modes, first hit the crop button in the develop module. Then hit the O key [...]

In Photoshop there’s many ways to dodge and burn, layer copies set to lighten and darken, gray layer set to overlay, dodge and burn directly on a copy of the original etc.. However, when you are working on large images, for example medium format RAWs every layer you jump eats HUGE amounts of ram, when [...]

You have probably seen this effect on sports shots, wrestling, boxing etc.. it gives a gritty bronze glow to the skin, almost makes people look like video game characters. This is done by perfect control over what’s called Local Contrast.

In RGB, which is the color space that your monitor is also running in, the lightest any color channel can be is 255, when all 3 channels R G and B is at 255 we get white, and that’s as far as you can go. In LAB however we have luminance (The L channel) split [...]

There’s a filter for fixing camera shake in photoshop (Smart sharpen) but there’s a better way.. emboss. Sounds crazy but it works great.

Ever had photos (useually shot against bright background light, cromed surfaces is always realy bad) show ugly purple, blue or yellow edges? That’s called chromatic aberration and is a problem with cheaper lenses, but even expensive L type lenses can bite you with chromatic aberration if you are unlucky. You can deal with chromatic aberration [...]

If you have not used smart objects in photoshop yet, it’s time to start. When you turn a layer into a smart object you can do most edits on the layer totally non-desctructively. You can for example scale the image to your hearts content without ever loosing image quality because photoshop is working in the [...]

The difference and exclusion blending modes in photoshop comes in very handy when doing exposure blending, a technique used a lot when photographers has to deal with a scene that has to high a dynamic range for the camera to handle.

Well if the names doens’t give them away you probably don’t know what dodging and burning is. Dodging and burning is a technique from the wet darkroom where the photograper would let the emulsion darken or lighten areas to control the exposure and for artistic effects.

Some people just want to click a few buttons and pull up a filter without being bothered with knowing what to do, when and why, and that’s fine I guess, but a skilled photoshop user that knows how sharpening works and how to apply it intelligently will beat any plugin any day, if the preset [...]