Posts Tagged ‘Photoshop tutorial’

Clean white backgrounds can work well for some images, particularly product photography. There are two different ways that a white background is normally achieved:

• Aiming a light at the background so the bright light bounces back off the background.
• Using a semi-transparent background, and placing a light behind the background to shoot through it.

However, there can be a bit of a problem if you only have one light to work with. If you use your light to blow out the background to pure white, then how are you going to light your subject? And vice versa if you use the light to light your subject.

Thankfully Photoshop (or most other image editing programs) can come to the rescue.

Adding a texture overlay to a photo can be a quick and easy way to create a distressed, vintage look. Depending on the texture and any other effects applied, you can achieve looks from a slightly old photo to a painting on canvas.

In this article I'll cover how to add a texture to a photo in Photoshop Elements / CS. The process is very similar in other image editing software as well, so if you don't have a copy of Photoshop, hopefully this guide will still give you a good idea of how the texturing process works.

In this article we'll look at how to use image editing software to blur the background of a photo while keeping the subject sharp. This is a good way to help draw viewer's attention to your subject, rather than the background.

Although it is best to achieve a blurred background in-camera (see previous article: How to take photos with a blurred background by using a shallow depth of field), this is not always possible. In this case we can use image editing software to simulate the effect of a shallow depth of field instead.

Recently I was asked to create a poster to advertise an event. As a background image for the poster, I decided I wanted a nice sunset image with sunbeams emanating from the clouds.

Looking at my (rather meager) stock library of cloud photos, I couldn't find anything that looked like what I wanted. But I knew that with a little help from Photoshop I could get the image I was looking for.

So, I thought I'd share how I created the background image for the poster. Hopefully you will find it helpful.

In this tutorial I'll show you an easy way to add a dreamy glowing effect to a portrait photo. As usual, I'll demonstrate the process using Photoshop Elements, but the process is the same in the full version of Photoshop CS, and should be similar in other image editing software.