Browsing all articles by Helen Bradley.

Understanding Filters in Photoshop Elements

When I was young, my dad told me that if at first you don’t succeed you should try and try again until you do. In today’s post, I am going to tell you why this adage relates to editing photos by working with filters in Photoshop Elements and in Photoshop.
Step 1

Add a light Source in Lightroom in 5 Easy Steps

The Lightroom Graduated Filter tool can be used to add a secondary light source to an image where one was not in existence when you shot it. This often works better to rescue an unexposed area of an image than, for example, applying a Shadow/Highlight fix in Photoshop.

1. This image is extremely dark on the [...]

How to Fix Keystone issues in Photoshop Elements

One issue you’ll often encounter when you photograph tall buildings is a keystone effect caused by the angle at which you are forced to photograph from. The bottom of the building often looks wider than the top making it look out of proportion.
Most photo editing programs have tools for fixing keystone problems and, in this [...]

How to Batch Resize in Photoshop

While it’s relatively easy to write an Action to resize a series of images in Photoshop, it’s easier still to get Photoshop to do all the work for you. Photoshop comes with an image processor script that will open, resize and save a series of images for you – very quickly.
Step 1
Choose File > Scripts [...]

Smart Scaling with Content-Aware Scale in Photoshop CS4

New to Photoshop CS4 is its Content-Aware Scale tool which allows you to transform an image in a way that you’ve never been able to do before in Photoshop. The technology itself has been around for some time and you may have been familiar with the website rsizr.com which offers content aware scaling as an [...]

Working with Virtual Copies in Lightroom

The Virtual copy feature of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom lets you experiment with multiple editing options for an image without duplicating the original image. So, for example, if you have an image that you think would look good either with its color enhanced or rendered in black and white you can apply both fixes to the [...]

Moving a Lightroom Catalog

Helen Bradley explains how to successfully move Lightroom files and a catalog to a new disk.

One issue that stumps many people is how to successfully move a Lightroom catalog from one computer to another or from a local hard drive to a removable one.
Having just faced this situation head on and having made a right [...]

Smart Dodge and Burn in Photoshop Elements

In the traditional darkroom, you could adjust the relative lightness or darkness of parts of an image using processes called dodge and burn. If you were dodging or lightening the image you would expose parts of the image for a shorter length of time to lighten them. If you wanted to darken a portion of [...]

An Adjustable Black and White Conversion in Photoshop Elements

Most photo editing programs offer multiple ways to convert to black and white and Photoshop Elements is no exception. In fact it has a great Black and White conversion tool which is marred by the very small preview images you get to work with. Additionally, there is no zoom feature so you’re stuck with seeing [...]

Fixing Blemishes in Lightroom

When you have an image which needs some spot fixing before printing you can often do the work in Lightroom and avoid the necessity of a round trip to Photoshop. Lightroom has both a Clone and a Heal tool available for fixing blemishes and removing problems such as spots caused by dust on your camera’s [...]