Tag Archives: Photoshop

Long Exposure SKy Replacement Pack

Transform your photos with these royalty-free sky replacement images

Create images that recreate a long exposure look with my Long Exposure Sky Replacement Pack

I’m happy to announce the immediate release of 30 royalty-free replacement sky images. Each image allows you to create the look of a long exposure image with your own photographs.

  • 30 long exposure skies
  • Royalty-free
  • 24 megapixel file resolution
  • Personal and commercial use license
  • Compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Luminar, and other editors that support layer compositing

Camera RAW 13.2: Super Resolution

Double the size of your RAW files without losing detail

Today, Adobe released Camera Raw 13.2. Like most updates to Camera Raw, this one includes new camera and lens support. However, Adobe has added a new feature in Camera Raw 13.2 called “Super Resolution.” This new feature uses AI technology to double the linear pixel dimensions of your image files, including RAWs. The result is an image with 4x the resolution of the original with remarkable detail preservation. This new feature creates a “supersized” DNG format raw file from your camera raw image that can be opened in Photoshop. This new feature is not yet in Lightroom, but it will be arriving soon.

Dealing with a blown-out moon in landscape photos

Using Photoshop to create natural landscape photos that include the moon

In landscape photography at twilight, the moon will most likely be blown-out. Here’s how to get a natural moon exposure in your images by using Adobe Photoshop.

When photographing landscapes at twilight that include the moon, proper exposure can be nearly impossible to achieve. That’s because while the dim light of twilight requires a relatively long exposure, the moon requires nearly a sunny-16 exposure. As a result, there is no one camera exposure setting that will get the scene right. Your options are:

  • Under-expose the scene and recover shadows & highlights in post
  • Properly expose for the landscape and blow out the moon
  • Bracket exposures and combine them in post

All of the above options have drawbacks. In an under-exposed image, you’ll be prone to getting noise when you try to recover shadow details, and you may or may not be able to recover detail in the moon. If the moon is very small in the frame (as with wide-angle lenses), you can make the conscious choice to just allow it to blow out completely. Bracketing exposures is another option, but I’ve found that traditional exposure blending or HDR tone-mapping just doesn’t quite produce the results I’d like, because the blown-out areas around the moon often bleed into the sky or are exacerbated by thin clouds.

Recently while I was in the field, I decided to try a variation on exposure blending. I captured two shots: the first was exposed only for the moon, and the second shot was properly exposed for the landscape. I then used Adobe Photoshop to combine the images, but instead of just blending them (as with a traditional composite), I had to completely remove the blown-out moon from the landscape photo using Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool.

Video: Processing Landscape Photos with the Moon (Photoshop)

How to Fix Banding in Digital Images

Remove Banding Artifacts with Photoshop

Mirrorless cameras converted for infrared capture can be prone to banding artifacts.

When I got my infrared-converted Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera, a colleague told me to watch out for banding in my images. I have never seen banding in images from my normal Nikon Z cameras, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

It turns out that in rare instances, I can detect slight banding patterns, especially if I’ve made strong local contrast adjustments, like the Structure slider in Silver Efex Pro 2.

Removing banding from digital images with Photoshop
Continue reading How to Fix Banding in Digital Images

The Photoshop Techniques Every Lightroom User Needs To KNow

Live Training Sunday, October 20th

12-3pm Eastern Time

REGISTER HERE

While Adobe Lightroom Classic is a powerful image editor and workflow management tool in its own right, there are certain things that it cannot do. To go beyond Lightroom, you need a pixel editor such as Adobe Photoshop.  In this class, I will teach you how and why to utilize Adobe Photoshop alongside Lightroom.  I will present a coherent Lightroom/Photoshop workflow strategy and take you through the features of Photoshop that every Lightroom user should know, including:

  • How to prepare images for Photoshop in the Lighroom Develop Module
  • Sending images from Lightroom to Photoshop
  • Understanding Layers/Adjustment Layers/Layer Masks
  • Cloning/Healing/Content Aware Fill Tools
  • Adding text to your images
  • Using Plug-in software in Layers and as Smart Filters
  • High-Pass Sharpening
  • Working with RAW Smart Objects in Photoshop
  • How to finish Photoshop files in Adobe Lightroom