Browsing all articles by Helen Bradley.

Spot Fixing Images in Photoshop

Many of the images that you take particularly cityscapes, like most portraits, can do with some spot fixing. I’ve been traveling through Europe a lot lately and because it’s considered almost de rigeur to smoke there, many of the photos that I have are littered with cigarette butts and assorted garbage.
And although you may [...]

Lightroom: What is it and When Should You Consider it?

There have been questions posted as comments recently asking about the role of Lightroom in a photographer’s workflow. Many posters who are not currently using Lightroom aren’t sure whether Lightroom it is an alternative to Photoshop or where it fits if you have Photoshop too. I thought it was a good time to look at [...]

Lightroom 3 Print Improvements

With Lightroom 3 Beta having just been released, the first thing that most people will do – as I did – is to look and see if the features that you’ve always wanted in the program have been added.
One of the areas that Lightroom 2 fell a little short on in my book was the [...]

Master Repeating Patterns in Photoshop

In a recent post I showed you how to create a kaleidoscope using Photoshop. As one of the techniques for using a kaleidoscope, I suggested you could create a repeating pattern from it. One reader posed the question as to how a repeating pattern could be created given that there were spaces around the original [...]

How to Create Kaleidoscope Patterns from Your Photos

If you are like me you had a kaleidoscope as a kid. You would look through one end and turn a dial and the world would be displayed as a mirrored fractured shape. Thanks to Photoshop you can create kaleidoscopes from your photos. Any image with interesting color and shapes will work just fine.
Step 1
Convert [...]

Lightroom: Controlling the Before and After

One of the nice things about Lightroom is that it lets you view before and after versions of your image. Lightroom can do this so easily because it does not make permanent changes to your image as you work on it. Instead, Lightroom keeps a log of the edits that you have made and only [...]

How to Download and Install Lightroom Presets

In an earlier post, I explained how to create a custom Lightroom preset that you could use to edit your photos in Lightroom. In addition to creating your own Lightroom presets you can download and install presets from the web into Lightroom so you can use them anytime you like.

Split Toning in Photoshop

Split Toning is an effect which has its origins in the days of film and it involves tinting the highlights in a black and white image one color and the shadows another color. The best results are where you use opposite colors for each, such as yellow and blue, green and magenta and so on. [...]

Painting a Photo in Photoshop

While Photoshop includes some filters you can use to apply a painted effect on your photos, you can also paint them yourself very easily. This way you can achieve a custom look as you paint.

The process involves using the little known Art History brush in Photoshop to do the work, here’s how:

How to Create Lightroom Presets

One of the cool things about Lightroom is its ability to store develop settings as Presets so you can use them again later to edit other images.

In addition to creating and saving your own presets, you can also download presets from the web and use them in Lightroom.
In this post, I’ll show you how [...]