Portrait Photography How To

Shutterbug columnist Scott Kelby recently gave a great lecture on the ethics of portrait retouching, and offered some valuable tips on how to improve your people pictures without making your subjects look fake.

We usually turn to Mathieu Stern for insight on adapting bargain vintage lenses for use with modern digital cameras. But in the quick video below, Stern gives a 30-second tutorial on making eyes “pop” with Photoshop.

Have you ever captured a photo, looked at it on your camera’s LCD, and said to yourself, “Wow! This looks perfect,” only to view the image closely on the computer and find a bunch of distracting imperfections? If that’s a familiar scenario, this tutorial is for you.

Inexperienced photographers typically strive for maximum sharpness from foreground to background in every image they shoot. A more sophisticated approach often involves strategically adding lens blur to accentuate a key subject within frame. And you'll learn an effective way to do exactly that in this tutorial from the Park Cameras YouTube channel.

The late Mr. Newton was certainly onto something. I believe the overwhelming desire of most portrait photographers is to please the client, with seduction, amusement, and entertainment far from their minds. Let me submit this idea: shoot what the client says they want and then shoot something challenging their assumptions. Most wedding clients tend to be traditional but even introducing black and white or infrared images can increase sales and show clients you’re thinking outside the veil.

I’ve been writing about and playing with—emphasis on play—Lensbaby lenses since they were introduced in 2004 and ten years later they’re still coming up with new ideas. All their products, including the Medium Format 3G with "Marvin the Martian"-like antennae, have been interesting and the new Lensbaby Velvet 56 portrait lens not only looks like fun but appears to be the most practical Lensbaby product ever.

Yesterday we brought you a timesaving tutorial for streamlining Lightroom so the workspace displays all the tools you use in the order you want, with everything else hidden from view. We have another great trick today, this time it's a simple hack for using the Histogram to achieve perfect White Balance.