For photographers, by photographers, our weekly video show covers all topics of photography

Lets talk about specific Photoshop techniques, we’re going to go over fill light, color correction, healing brush/patch tool, and dodging and burning. Starting off with fill light adjustments; changing fill light basically adjusts the mid tones of a photo while preserving most of the highlights and shadows. This is important when the subject of your photo very close to the midtones and you want to brighten the subject without affecting the other parts of the image. These situations are common when photographing a person/subject and the person/subject appears underexposed. Note: it is typically better to underexpose an image as to overexpose it because once an image is overexposed (burned out) it is very difficult to retain the details of the image, where as if it’s underexposed there’ still information that’s hidden in the shadows. But too much boosting of an underexposed image could reveal a lot of noise/digital artifacts/crap that you won’t want.

Next lets brief through healing brush/patch tool which is an amazingly useful tool, and every girls best friend. Lets admit that nobody has perfect skin, we all have pores, pimples, scars, blemishes, and etc. etc. Luckily for everybody, in Photoshop we can remove them digitally, and make people look a lot better than they actually do.

Before: Taken by Erich

After: The changes are subtle because the model doesn’t have a lot of blemishes, but theres still a couple under the chin and left cheek that are gone in the edited photo

Color Correction is tricky but definitely a life saver. Anytime you photograph indoors with artificial lighting, there’s going to be different colors of light. Tungsten radiates a yellowish warm tone, while fluorescent gives off a cooler tone, then if you have any natural light its a neutral tone. Its a little bit more complicated than that sometimes, and its really hard to get the right white balance for the camera, so Photoshop/Lightroom has to come in help out. In Photoshop you could play with levels/color balance/curves to try to fine tune the colors, but in Lightroom there the color correction color picker where you click on an area of your photo that is supposed to be white, and it ‘automatically’ fixes it for you. But just like anythings that is done ‘automatically’ its never always accurate.

Finally we’ll talk about dodging and burning, the technique is as old as photography itself. It’s lightening and darkening certain areas of the photo used for emphasizing and de-emphasizing. A lot of dodging can help create a bright photos, where as a lot of burning can help create dark and edgy photos. In the example below the highlights and the shape of the women is emphasized because there’s some slight dodging in the midtones and some obvious burning in the darker areas to really accentuate the figure of the woman’s body and figure. Furthermore, the back half of the woman’s body has completely been burned in to create a slimmer, more dramatic image.

Before: Photo taken by Erich

After:

Thats it for this week! Stay tuned for more tips on next weeks episode!