Browsing all articles by Helen Bradley.

How to Sharpen Photos: An Introduction

We’ve received quite a bit of feedback from Post production readers asking us to look at the issue of sharpening photos. Sharpening is one of those everyday tasks that most photos can benefit from. In this post I’ll explain what sharpening is, when you should perform it and how to do it. The information here, [...]

Photoshop Inspiration: Police CD Label

Need an excuse to go music shopping? I love to browse the CD covers at my local secondhand music store – the cover images are a great resource when I’m looking for new ways to showcase my photos. As an added bonus, when you copy an effect you’ll find yourself developing new Photoshop skills along [...]

Making sense of Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation in Lightroom 2

In Lightroom 2 the collection of Basic fixes available for your image includes three Presence sliders that sit together in the Develop module: Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation.

This week I’ll explain the differences between these three adjustments and how they affect your photos. In each of the screenshots below I have set the slider value to [...]

How to Convert an Image to a Duotone in Photoshop

A duotone is an image made up of just two colors. It’s often used in the printing world where a photograph is included in a publication and where the publisher wants to use some color on the page but not pay for full color printing. As a duotone, the image is created as a mix [...]

Introduction to Spot Fixing with the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom

One of the exciting new features in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the adjustment brush which lets you to make spot fixes to your image in Lightroom. These fixes apply to only the area you select rather than the entire image. This means you can make local adjustments for contrast, saturation, exposure, brightness, clarity and [...]

Extracting Lines from an Image in Photoshop

Step 1

Open a new image and duplicate the background layer by right clicking it and choose Duplicate Layer. Click this new top layer and choose Filter > Noise > Median and set the radius to around 4 – 5 pixels. You want to see a general softening of the image with the beginnings of loss [...]

Removing Partial Color from a Photo: Photoshop Techniques

While there are lots of ways that you can convert an image into black and white in Photoshop sometimes you want to remove some of the color but not all of it.
One method to do this, is to use a tool such as an adjustment layer to remove the saturation from the image or to [...]

DIY Photoshop Brushes

One of the most popular searches involving Photoshop on the web is, perhaps not unsurprisingly, for free Photoshop brushes. Photoshop brushes can be used for a range of editing and creative tasks and while it’s fun to find and download great looking brushes it’s also possible to create them yourself and to do this very [...]

How to Replace a Sky in Photoshop

One of the most disappointing things that can happen to you as a photographer is to have a once in lifetime chance to take a photograph of something and to have the weather let you down. So, instead of luscious blue skies you’ll get grey or dull skies in your image.
You can replace the sky [...]

Working with Gradient Maps: Photoshop Creative

The Gradient Maps tool has a serious side in creating custom black and white conversions and a more frivolous one in adding color to an image. I’ll show you how to use it for both purposes.
Before we start a word about how the Gradient Map works. It is an adjustment so you can find it [...]