Digital Photography Software & Techniques

May 7, 2021

Make Skin Tones Pop in Portraits with This Photoshop Technique

Add depth and shape to skin by creating "Zones" during editing

By Dan Havlik

Portraits don’t always look the way you want them to straight out of the camera. One of the biggest issues can be your subject’s skin tones, which may look dull or flat if not properly lit or if make-up – or a lack thereof – is off. Fortunately, there are many ways to tweak a portrait during post processing. And, of course, one of the... Read more

May 4, 2021

How I Made It: The Story Behind Anabel DFlux’s Powdery Pooch Photo

Dog photographer combines Holi powder and leaping Belgian Malinois into an exhilarating image

By Dan Havlik

Some photo concepts take months of brainstorming to produce. Others hit you like a bolt of lightning. Put Anabel DFlux’s striking shot of a colorfully powered dog leaping through the air in the “bolt of lightning” category. The powder, as we later learned, is similar to Gulal, a non-toxic substance used during the Hindu festival known... Read more

January 25, 2021

Lightroom Pro Tip: How to Use Range Masks to Make Targeted Edits on Photos

Speed up your Lightroom workflow with this great tool for making refined localized adjustments

By Dan Havlik

Adobe Lightroom is an incredibly deep image processing and organizing program full of more editing tools than most of us have the working hours to test out. But what if there was one Lightroom feature that could transform your photos in minutes without compromising their professional quality? If you’re not aware of it already, that tool is called... Read more

June 19, 2019

Adobe Lightroom CC Mobile For Portraits And Candids

Make the most of the mobile version of Lightroom, connect with your subjects and make your potential clients see results in real time

Text & Photography By Brian Matiash

I’ve never been the most prolific practitioner of portrait photography. But I’ve admired those photographers who are as skilled at interacting with their subjects as they are interacting with their camera. So, if I’m working on shooting portraits or candids, as I often am when my wife and I visit family in Nebraska, especially my four adorable... Read more

July 17, 2017

B&W Conversions

Try these creative adjustments using Photoshop, Lightroom and third-party software programs for striking black-and-white images

Text & Photography By Tom Bol

Ballet dancer in Cuba. Photography began with black-and-white images and the darkroom process, where images came to life. Today, photographers have many more choices. Some photographers still shoot black-and-white film and develop in the wet darkroom. But for most photographers, we capture in digital color and decide later if we want to convert to black-and-white.... Read more

May 10, 2017

Adjustments With A Restrained Hand

Faithfully and creatively reproducing your images with careful post-production techniques can yield huge dividends

Text & Photography By Brian Matiash

The left half of this frame shows the original photo, as taken by my camera. I had a 6-stop ND filter applied, which not only allowed me to get this long exposure, it also applied a visible blue tint. The right half is the exact same photo except I applied a custom white balance that targeted the gray part of the rushing water. The improvement is quite... Read more

November 16, 2016

In Your Face: Photography In The Age Of Virtual Reality

Photography In The Age of Virtual Reality

By David Schloss

Just as this issue was going to press, Pokémon GO swept the country. Overnight it seemed like everyone was looking face-down at their phones, flicking pretend balls at pretend creatures. Thanks to the intelligent use of a smartphone’s camera, developer Niantic is able to superimpose the various wild Pokémon in a video stream of the real world, a... Read more

September 8, 2016

DxO OpticsPro 11

The latest iteration of DxO’s RAW Raw converter and image processing software, OpticsPro 11, offers a couple of new features that really piqued our interest.

Theano Nikitas

DxO is best known for DxOMark.com, a website that publishes a vast database of quantitative measurements for thousands of lenses and cameras. That information is not gathered for consumer information but to power its image-editing software. The DxO suite of tools uses the analysis of the imaging characteristics of camera equipment to correct any inherent... Read more

June 15, 2016

Going Retro: Antiquing In The Digital Darkroom

Take your portraiture down Memory Lane with some easy and versatile after-capture techniques

Text and Photographs By Jim Cornfield

Oliver “Pork Chop” Anderson was an impromptu tap dancer on New Orleans street corners for many years. I photographed him on Polaroid 55 P/N film for a gallery exhibit themed around characters in the picturesque French Quarter during Mardi Gras. To connect Pork Chop to his folksy style of entertainment and also to the historic neighborhood where... Read more

January 18, 2016

The Art Of Seeing Details

Legendary photorealistic illustrator Bert Monroy knows how to pay attention to the little things, a skill all photographers should develop

By Mark Edward Harris, Paintings By Bert Monroy

It’s not often that we profile an illustrator in Digital Photo Pro, but Bert Monroy isn’t your average artist. He’s part painter, part retoucher, and as far as we can tell, part camera. Monroy’s complex, intricate work includes a level of detail that seems impossible for a human to appreciate, let alone duplicate. For decades, Monroy has not... Read more

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