Category Archives: Tutorial

Straighten Horizon Line

By Paul Kerins | Published: March 24, 2012

Three easy methods for straightening your photographs. It is very easy to end up with a crooked photograph, especially when you are shooting hand-held. Even the most seasoned pro photographers make photographs that need to be straightened, usually this is because you are so focused on the subject, trying to a capture a moment that [...]

How to Photograph People using Direct Sunlight

By Paul Kerins | Published: March 2, 2012

How to use direct sunlight to make your portrait photographs beautiful. Ambient light, studio light, available light and the most important light of all, star light. That gigantic mass of hydrogen and helium we call the sun that produces 386 billion billion ( not a typo ) mega-Watts of energy, that is created by so [...]

Ambient High-key Beauty Lighting

By Paul Kerins | Published: March 2, 2012

How to do ambient high-key beauty lighting using only one light source. The most beautiful light is often the simplest, coming only from a single light source. In this beauty photograph of Emma that light source was a large bay window that was behind her, and the light was simple indirect ambient sunlight being channelled [...]

Selective Sharpening

By Paul Kerins | Published: February 2, 2012

Selective sharpening for print output. Sharpening photographs for prints is more subtle practice than sharpening JPEG or PNG files for the world wide web. Only certain areas of a photograph may require sharpening. A portrait or beauty photograph will most likely need selective sharpening, perhaps on the mouth, nose, cheek bones, hair, or eyebrows, and most [...]

Vignetting

By Paul Kerins | Published: January 19, 2012

Vignetting Photographs for Artistic Effect. Vignetting to put it simply is the darkening of the outside edges of a photograph. In photography there are many types of vignetting, mechanical vignetting, optical vignetting, natural vignetting, pixel vignetting and finally vignetting for artistic effect. All the different types of vignetting ( excluding vignetting for artistic effect ) [...]

Understanding Histograms

By Paul Kerins | Published: December 5, 2011

How to Use Histograms Introduction Probably the most useful as well as the least used and understood tool in your digital camera is the histogram. Histograms are the reason why I don’t have to bring my light-meter with me anymore when I am out photographing landscapes ( I will always use a light-meter when photographing [...]

Photoshop Performance Preferences

By Paul Kerins | Published: December 1, 2011

How to get the best performance out of Photoshop. The first thing everyone should do after installing Photoshop is set up their performance preferences. On a PC  go to menu “Edit”, “Preferences” > “Performance”, or “Photoshop” “Preferences” > “Performance” if you are using a Mac. The fastest way to access preferences is to use the [...]

Burning and Dodging, Non-Destructive Technique using a Fill Layer

By Paul Kerins | Published: November 26, 2011

How to burn and dodge in Photoshop. Back in the days before computers, blogs, digital images, and electricity ( well…, okay maybe not that far back ), photographers used a variety of special techniques in the darkroom to help their negatives reach the maximum in potential on photographic paper. Probably the most popular and most [...]

How to Use Content Aware Fill.

By Paul Kerins | Published: October 30, 2011

[ Video Tutorial ] How to use content aware fill to easily remove objects from your photographs. You should always try and find a way to remove unwanted objects in your photographs, by manually removing them first before you make the photograph, or by hiding them, by finding a different camera angle or blocking them [...]

A Incredibly Cheap and Easy to Make Portable Camera Stabilizer.

By Paul Kerins | Published: October 26, 2011

[ Video tutorial ] How to make portable camera stabilizer. In my last article I wrote about ways to make your photographs work, without using a tripod. Breaking the “You Must Use a Tripod” Rule. In it I talked about how to hold the camera correctly, how to breath while making photographs, and about using [...]