You no doubt have heard the good news, that Adobe launched its public beta of Lightroom 4, and there’s plenty to be excited about! For this tutorial we’ll take a quick look at the brand new Map module, which allows…

Earlier this week, Topaz Labs announced a free upgrade (for existing users) to its Lens Effects plugin. One of the more interesting and useful features it offers is a simulated Fog Effect (who doesn’t enjoy a nice holiday mist? ),…

This month I thought it would be fun to cover a Photoshop plugin that I discovered this summer, which has quickly become one of my favorites. Topaz BW Effects (from Topaz Labs) contains a wide range of creative presets that…

This week Adobe released the latest version of their prosumer photo editing package, Photoshop Elements 10. This new release offers several new features that are useful to photographers and scrapbookers. One of my favorites is a new option within Guided Edits, that allows…

One of the more useful improvements to Photoshop CS5 is the addition of the HUD (or Heads Up Display) Color Pickers. A bit of random trivia: this name was borrowed from military aviation. The idea is that vital flight information…

When you need to improve the contrast in your raw photos, Parametric Curves are a great way to simplify the thought process and task of making a Curves adjustment. Instead of guessing or arbitrarily placing your points along an abstract…

 
For a prior tutorial, I demonstrated how to create a vignette effect around
the subject of a photograph, using Lightroom 3. Today we’ll take a look at a
subtly different technique, which is to create a “soft focus vignette”…

For this tutorial we take a look at how the Post-Crop Vignette feature in Lightroom 3 helps us to add a bit of style to the image, but more importantly, it also helps to direct the viewer’s focus towards the…

Happy 2011! We’ll kick off the new year by talking about one of the most important things you can do, as part of your image adjustment workflow in Photoshop.
The Shadows/Highlights adjustment allows you to perfect local areas of contrast…

Happy Holidays everyone! For this final TipSquirrel installment of 2010, we’ll take a look at how you can help protect your photos by applying important copyright and contact information (metadata) to your files, directly from Photoshop. Once that’s done we’ll…

Here we take a look at a simple way to limit our Photoshop Image Adjustment Layers to affect only certain regions of the photograph. We’ll have a look at setting up the Adjustment Layer using the Color Picker, then limiting…

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at one of my favourite tricks for improving photographic contrast more quickly and more accurately, using the Histogram sliders in Curves. This technique also works with the Levels command in Photoshop.

Quick Contrast…

In this video tutorial I look at using Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom to blur out details in the background. To do this I utilise Auto Masking to localise the adjustments I make with the adjustment tool.

Blurring the Background…

In the second instalment of the “fun with Liquify” series, Dan focuses on brush parameters and useful masking options to help ‘carve’ a Halloween Jack-o-Lantern.There’s also a few extras at the end to help bring the image together.
See part…

In this first part in a 2 part series we look at the often over looked Liquify Filter.
Liquify can do a great job both for traditional retouching workflows and more creative, illustrative edits. Here we take to the task…

In this video tutorial Dan Moughamian opens Lightroom’s Develop panel and uses the Adjustment Brush.Using the auto mask feature he’s able to quickly edit his image’s exposure, saturation and hue levels in a non destructive and selective manner.…

This video looks at how to compare two  compositions, in detail, so that you can decide which one you would like to spend time working on. We can then give one a star rating and, if we so wish, reject…

For this new Colortrails tutorial, you’ll see how easy it is to create a classic BW film grain look in ACR 6. This technique also works in Lightroom 3.

Remember to join us again on Monday for the start of…

Dan  is back with a new tutorial (and more cool tips on the way for September!). In this segment he takes a look at the considerations from ACR to Photoshop CS5, for creating a nice black and white image and…

It’s great to welcome back Dan Moughamian to TipSquirrel.com. Here Dan takes a look at how to refine your layer masks by using Photoshop’s Masks panel in combination with an adjustment layer.

Keep a look out for Dan’s new book…