Portrait Photography How To

Earlier this week we featured an easy five-minute fix for poorly exposed photos using Layer Masks in Lightroom. But that simple task provided just a taste of what these powerful tools can do.

Lightroom masks are very effective for quickly fixing photos that are improperly exposed, like when some areas in the scene are too dark or too bright, or perhaps even both when shooting in mixed light.

Boudoir photography is an increasingly popular genre of portraiture, particularly among those who shoot people pictures with available light outdoors, or others with a home “studio” that doesn’t rely upon complicated artificial illumination—like when using light streaming through a widow to brighten the scene.

Hot spots and highlight blowouts are the bane of portrait photographers and others. They can occur with images shot in the studio under artificial illumination, as well as those captured with natural light outdoors. Fortunately there’s a simple and effective Photoshop fix, as you’ll see in the quick tutorial below.

Have you ever captured what you thought was a great photograph, only to discover ugly white edges when viewing the image on your computer? These image-killing artifacts are known as “halos,” and today you’ll learn how to quickly eradicate them in Photoshop.

Creating soft, blurry backgrounds is a popular technique for making subjects stand out from their surroundings. It’s also useful for eliminating clutter, and directing a viewer’s eye to the most important element of a scene.

Some photographers spend a lot of time fretting about aperture settings, and how they affect depth of field (DOF) in their photos. In today’s quick tutorial you’ll learn why it’s not necessary to worry about aperture as much as you think.