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 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.

If you are a Lightroom user you’ve probably experimented with the very cool Split Toning tool in the Develop module. However, you can achieve a similar effect in Photoshop with just a little more work.

Here’s how to create the effect 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:

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 to create a Lightroom preset and in a future post, I’ll show you how to download and install Lightroom presets you find on the web and also explain how you can share your own presets with others.

In this post Laura Charon from Beyond Megapixels shares a process for adding a Neutral Density Gradient Filter to an image using PHotoshop CS3.

A key piece of equipment in a photographer’s gear is a neutral density gradient filter. This is a filter that affixes to the camera’s lens. One half of the filter is darkened and one half is light or clear. The purpose is to reduce the brightness difference between the top of the photo and the bottom. It’s typically used in landscape photography where the sky’s brightness needs to be compensated.

Even if you don’t own a physical filter, it’s easy to adjust your photos in Photoshop CS3 (the technique is common to other versions of Photoshop as well) to achieve the same effect.

This is a photo that I took in Yellowstone National

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