Creating a reflection using Photoshop is one of those things that at first glance looks really hard, but really isn’t, once you break down the steps (just light Light Painting which I covered in another two part series). In this article I’m going to demystify creating a reflection, a technique that works particularly well on images with open pavement, and HDR processed images which tend to make the pavement look wet already.

We’re going to learn how to go from this . . .

To this!

In less than 10 minutes!

I recently showed one my HDR classes how to do this, and they all followed along with me step by step.  Some of …

A Guest Contribution by Anotherphotograpbynoob.com.

What this tutorial will show you
In short: how I made the photo on the right become the photo on the left.

In this tutorial, we will cover basic tools of the free photo editing software GIMP.
Here is a quick rundown of the features covered in this tutorial:

• Crop a photo in GIMP
• Increase contrast with the Levels panel
• Make the colors pop with the Hue & Saturation panel
• Adjust colors with the Color Balance panel
• Add a color filter to boost the warm colors in your photo.

Sound hard? Don’t worry. I’ll guide you through the whole process, step by step.

Resources

First of all, you need to have GIMP installed. Click here to download GIMP, and then follow the instructions provided with the software.

If you want to follow along with me in this tutorial, …

Introduction

The following is an excerpt from the SLR Lounge Lightroom Workflow System Workshop on DVD, a system designed to increase your post production speed by 5 to 10 times! Click here to learn more.

In this article, we are going to talk about creating a develop preset that you would like to apply to all of your images when they are first imported into Lightroom.

Although Adobe’s RAW image processing is extremely powerful, one common complaint is that your images may look flat and colorless at first. Often photographers will lament how beautiful their colors looked on the back of their camera.

Well, in an effort to fix this problem and make our images automatically look a little more crisp and vibrant when we first bring them into Lightroom, we’re going to create a “Standard Import” preset.

For this tutorial we will use …

In Part One of  the Light Painting Tutorial I went over how to do the photography part: equipment, camera settings, set up, lighting, potential pitfalls, and step by step instruction on how to do light painting shots.  In this article Part Two, we’re going to take a look at how to combine multiple exposures in Photoshop.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS TUTORIAL

• how to create one big layered file of all your images
• what layer settings to use to “turn the lights on” with each added image
• how to get rid of any unwanted areas of each image
• how to easily “dim the lights” on any shots that were too bright
• saving your final combined image as a masterpiece

Combining images in Photoshop is surprisingly

…

A Guest Post by Nick Rains.

Do you ever shoot a bunch of exposure-bracketed shots and then never get around to blending them together?

Maybe you don’t shoot multiple exposures in the first place because you don’t want to spend hours in front of the computer blending together the individual images. If you are like me, the thought of individually exposure-blending a whole load of images is just not what photography is all about – I know I can produce better images with better tonal range this way but it seems like a lot of work in front of the computer.

What if I told you I do most of my exposure blends automatically?

Here’s how :

You need Lightroom and a Lightroom plug-in called LR/Enfuse.

This is free to download but is restricted to work only on low …