All Day I Dream About Photography

This post is a guest post by Lara Zankoul.

I’ve always been attracted to the tones of Lara’s pictures so I tried to talk her into sharing with us her retouching techniques and here goes her first tutorial.

This Photoshop tutorial is brought to you by Pascal Khattar and the picture is by Toni Abi el Hessen

Today we are going to use Adobe Photoshop to fix a bad exposed shot and make it look much better in all ways.

First of all open the picture in Photoshop

Tip: double click in the empty area of Photoshop it will brings the open dialogue

Straighten the picture

Now that we have our document opened, first we will start by leveling the photo, as you see the scene is rotated slightly counter-clock wise (CCW) will fix that with the help of the river line as a guide to our horizontal level.

In photography vignetting, or light fall-off, is the loss of brightness at the borders of an image and it is a lens characteristic or weakness.

Usually vignettes are not desired however it is not uncommon to add them during post-processing for example to draw the attention of the user to a particular portion of the image or to give it an aged look.

I am going to show you how to add vignetting to your image using Adobe photoshop in just a few simple steps.

Picture by Antoine Khater

In the last tutorial we discussed how to shoot star trails pictures and we agreed that, in digital photography, you’d better go for multiple shots of 30 seconds each rather than one long shot to keep the noise under control.

So you’re back home with a handful of pictures, let’s see how to turn this exposures into one star trails pictures using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

This is a guest post from Tage Solberg from Solberghifi. Tag was kind enough to share with us his post processing method to control noise that can appear the shadows/dark parts of any digital image.

Even with a low noise cam like Canon EOS1DmkIII, “lifting” the shadows in an image will increase noise considerably. I often expose for the highlights to avoid clipping, and raise the shadows i post-processing.

When printing large I use this following method to get noise-free, saturated and detailed shadows.

The downside is; it will only work with static objects because it needs a +2 to +3EV bracketed shot.

I’m not talking about an awful HDR result here, but an natural looking image with shadows as clean as the highlights!!