Stock Photography Articles and Tips

In the digital age, color-correction is a much more attainable skill than it was in the film age. Anyone who knows how to read numbers can color-correct a photo with a computer. Read more»

Trying to get the colors right on your prints can be an exercise in frustration. If you've explored this to any degree, you've undoubtedly come across the voodoo art known as Color Management. Contrary to what it might seem though, Color Management is not really that hard, it just appears that way at first. Trying to make sense of it all so far may have left you feeling a bit lost, but there is hope. Read more»

Contrary to popular belief stunning nature pictures can be taken when shooting into the light. Whilst this may contradict advice given to beginners to always shoot with the light coming from behind the camera the art of backlighting is a technique that can produce wonderful nature photography. Read more»

"Always remember the importance of detail". I can still clearly hear these words that were repeatedly drummed home by my college lecturer. Whilst they seemed unimportant and irrelevant to me at the time, they have over the years taken on a much greater significance and have become ingrained in my philosophy. Read more»

Without doubt there is something awe inspiring and wholesome in the big view. Every year there are vast arrays of calendars all full of pretty landscape and nature pictures adorning our high street shops. Many we can relate to and one day would like to see for ourselves. Read more»

Cropping slides scanned into Photoshop can be tricky with a photo that has abundant dark areas at the edges, especially silhouettes. But an easy way around this problem is achieved using Adjustment Layers. Read more»

One of the wonderful things about digital images is the ability to crop and manipulate them in a variety of sizes and orientations with such relative ease. However, sometimes you need to be able to determine with some accuracy the size that a digital image will occupy when presented. Read more»

Replace a background in a photograph with a completely different one. Read more»

Portrait photographers sometimes employ special "soft" lenses to impart a glowing, flattering and "dreamy" feel to their subjects. Learn how to simulate this effect digitally. Read more»

Learn how to effectively retouch images to enhance skin tone, remove blemishes and wrinkles, whiten teeth, etc. Read more»

Photographers using prosumer-level digital cameras have very little ability to effectively employ shallow depth of field techniques because of the small sensor size these cameras use. Learn a powerful technique to simulate shallow DOF for enhancing portraits and other images that could benefit from shallow DOF. Read more»

Learn how to convert color images to black and white and then selectively restore color to certain areas for artistic appeal. Read more»

Sharpening images is a necessary step in the digital image workflow, but it can exacerbate noise or film grain to unacceptable levels. Learn effective ways to sharpen without affecting the noise. Read more»

Learn how to combine two different exposures of the same scene to create composite images with greater dynamic range than the film or sensor would otherwise be able to handle. Read more»

Digital cameras, like slide film, are notoriously unforgiving of overexposure; overexposed areas tend to blow out to completely white highlights with no chance of recovering the lost detail. Learn how to salvage such images. Read more»

Although lens vignetting of the unintentional variety is usually unwanted, vignetting can also be used intentionally to create a sort of "spotlight" effect that, if done subtly, draws the viewers eye to the subject of the photograph. It is particularly well suited to portraits. Read more»

In this tutorial I will show you how to simulate black and white infrared film. Infrared film is sensitive to both ultraviolet and infrared wavelength light. Green foliage reflects a lot of infrared light, which is why infrared film is often used to take "supernatural" landscapes. Cameras do not focus infrared light the same way they do visible light, which is one reason infrared photographs tend to be a little blurry. Read more»

Learn a fast and effective technique for removing hot pixels (dark current noise) from nighttime and long exposure digital camera images. Read more»

In this tutorial I will show you how to sepia tone a color or black and white image. This technique is modeled on the traditional darkroom method of sepia toning in that the sepia color is applied "unevenly" to areas of different tonality. Read more»

Learn an effective technique for reducing excessive contrast. A contrast mask allows you to reduce overall contrast, simultaneously bringing out more detail in highlights and shadows. Read more»

Savvy photographers often use a neutral density filter to compress the dynamic range of a scene to allow the film or sensor in their camera to properly expose it. Learn how to tweak images with large underxposed areas to appear to have been properly exposed using an digital analogue of this technique. Read more»

Learn a dead simple technique for matching the toning of one image in another. A trivially easy way to do sepia, selenium, platinum, palladium, cyanotype and other classic tonings! Read more»

Digital cameras are prone to sensor noise, the digital counterpart to traditional film grain. Learn how to ameliorate the problem of sensor noise. Read more»

Learn a variety of different ways to convert your RGB color images to black and white. There are more ways than you think! Read more»