A Guest Post by Andrew Mills from Andrew Mills Photography.

Many of us spend a small fortune on our camera equipment trying to get the best quality we can, yet so many of us miss out on an important step that can make a huge difference to our photos.

That step is to calibrate your monitor. You can view the same image on the same computer, and just swap the monitor for another and that image will look different on each monitor you try (even monitors of the same brand and model may not be exactly the same).

As a result, you can’t be 100% sure that your images’ colour balance, hue, contrast and brightness are set correctly. You may be lucky in that your monitor is set up fairly well by default, but this can not be expected.

The image below …

I typically don’t edit my shots heavily, yet one that I brought back from Nepal demanded some help and was eye catching enough by itself to warrant an attempt. My hope is in walking through these steps, you might glean a an idea or two on a similar shot if you really like night photography.  Click on any images in this post to see a 3000px wide rendition for higher detail not possible in the 600px representation.

Starting with the original:

This shot was taken at the basecamp for a climb of a remote peak in Nepal known as Kyajo Ri.  Basecamp is situated in a gorgeous 1.5 mile long hanging valley, a valley that has a steep drop off at its …

When you assemble a book template, diptych, triptych or collage in Photoshop (or other editing software), do you arrange them so they work together or do you just pop them in? In this post, I want to talk about the things to consider when assembling an attractive collection of images that can work together nicely.

{Colours}

You can compile images into a collage that aren’t necessarily from the same session or of the same topic. They can complement one another through the use of color schemes or even be edited to look similar even if they’re strikingly different for a quirky feel. The image below is taken from a vol25 album template with photography by Jen Johner. The images are so different yet work beautifully together in this collage:

{Looking inward}

I always make …

I was shooting a wedding once and the father-of-the-bride ‘knew a lot about photography’. I was literally laughing out loud (trying so terribly hard to hold it in) when I would adjust the dials and hear him say over my shoulder “mmmm oh yes you’re probably changing the white balance hmmm?” And best of all, “if you’re really professional you shoot in raw.”

Raw. It’s the ultimate test of someone’s acceptance of your status as a professional because it’s one of the first things that a mildly keen just-starting-out-er will pick up on in their search for photography knowledge. But even though it’s one of the first things you’ll likely learn, it’s also one of the most confusing elements for a beginner.

I’m a control freak. I don’t want to work …

Let me start off by saying that I don’t use textures all that often, but there are certainly times where I feel that an image could use just a little something extra. Textures are just another one of those things in digital photography that can be overused and overdone if you’re not careful, and there are certainly right and wrong ways of going about it.

So, for those that have never heard of this before or have yet to try it, you may be wondering what it means to add a texture to a photograph? Simply put, it means taking one image (usually of some sort of texture like peeling paint, a scratched surface, a textured wall or fabric) and applying it as an overlay to your actual image. The effect is achieved by changing the blend mode of the texture …