Photoshop brushes are a brilliant way to add interest to your photos but did you know you can use brushes on layer masks? Say, for example, you want to create a bird made of fire, you could take a picture of fire, add a black layer mask to it and then using a bird-shaped brush […]
Hello friends! I’ve made the painstaking decision to move from weekly to fortnightly posts. I always intended the blog to be fortnightly but I got a little overexcited in the early days.I plan to spend the extra time working on business aspects of my photography (meeting a printer this week!), upskilling, doing more on-location shooting and really […]
One of Photoshop’s coolest features is the ability to customise and import different brushes. Until now you might only have used Photoshop’s standard round brush to paint masks that hide and reveal layers. But if you spend some time with the brush panels you’ll discover that using different brushes not only makes your work easier but will give […]
Hi everyone I’ve decided to take a break from the blog this week to catch up on the business side of things. Here’s a sneak peek of next week’s image which I’m really excited about!
Continuing on from last week’s miniature theme, another trick for making big things look small is the tilt-shift technique. Tilt-shift works by selectively blurring parts of your photo to give a very narrow band of focus, which you’d usually only see in macro photos. This has the effect of making a life-size scene look like a small scale […]
A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit obsessed with miniatures. There’s just something about dioramas, terrariums and the work of artists like Thomas Doyle, Slinkachu, and Lori Nix that thrill me beyond explanation. Because of this I went through a fun phase of photographing Smurfs and other toys around my house. But […]
HDR is photography’s most controversial technique because when overused it produces garish results capable of making your eyes bleed. Cameras are limited in the tones they can capture, meaning if you expose to get detail in the shadows, your highlights will blow out, or if you expose to get detail in the highlights, the […]
Compositing gives photographers the magical power to change the weather. Most people crave a sunny sky but for conceptual and landscape photographers the more colour and cloud in the sky the better. We go to so much effort to make a scene beautiful and interesting and are often let down by those bright, washed out […]
I’ve been serious about photography for about five years now but even before that I always had a camera within reach. As a result I have over 80,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue that I thought would never see the light of day, and the really exciting thing about compositing is that I can now […]
The word compositing has a boring textbook definition that in a nutshell means “how the magic happens”. Compositing made it possible for Harry Potter to fly around a Quidditch pitch, for Spider-Man to swing between buildings, and for men to walk on the moon. (Just kidding.) (Or am I?) By combining elements from different pictures […]
