Indholdsfortegnelse for Teach Yourself Creative Photography i Teach Yourself Creative Photography

Whether you’re a beginner and you want to know the easy techniques for taking professional-looking photos, or you’re a seasoned photographer in need of some inspiration, Teach Yourself Creative Photography has everything you need and more. We’ve packed in hundreds of crucial tricks and techniques that are certain to improve your photography skills. The first chapter provides expert guides to help you master key photography techniques for shooting everything from slow-shutter seascapes that tame raging seas to amazing multiple exposures. Each of these projects focuses on how to set up your equipment to capture the photos, along with photo-editing tips to create finished pictures that are good enough to hang on your wall. Chapter two is packed with tutorials that you can follow in Photoshop Elements, while chapter three moves…

Who says you need a lens attached to a camera to take a photo? The art of ‘freelensing’ can give you some truly intriguing images. The technique involves detaching the lens and holding it just in front of the camera. This produces some striking effects, in particular letting you alter the plane of focus similar to a tilt-shift lens. You can easily pick up an old, cheap manual lens, and you don’t have to worry about the fit since it doesn’t need to be attached – we used a Fujica 50mm f/1.9 lens from a 35mm film camera. Freelensing does take a little practice. Start with very minor movements, as leaving a large gap will allow major light leaks and significant vignetting from the edge of the lens. Manipulate the…

Setting a Custom white balance is easier than you might think. It’ll save you tons of editing time after a shoot, but more importantly, it’ll make sure you capture the colours and tones of your subject more accurately. Although your Canon’s Automatic White Balance (AWB) setting will usually do a fair job of recording the scene at hand, it’s far from perfect. In tricky lighting conditions (or when you’re shooting products or portraits) the colours need to be spot on. So, take control of the white balance yourself, and tell the camera the colour temperature of the light that’s falling onto the scene. Forget tweaking white balance manually in post – get it right first time on the shoot. The ExpoDisc (£39/$49; www.expodisc.com) we used to take a light reading…

There are a variety of techniques you can use to add creative blur and soft-focus effects to your shots for artistic results. It can involve fiddly camera techniques, expensive novelty filters or time-consuming post-production. However, we’re going to show you a cheap and simple method to achieve effective results. All you need to do is smear a tiny amount of petroleum jelly, such as vaseline, on the front of a UV or skylight filter. It produces instant results for unique images, whether you want to create soft-focus portraits or abstract landscapes. In this tutorial we’re going to head down to the woods to show how you can transform even the simplest subject, trees, into beautiful, abstract art. Although it’s an easy technique to master, there are a few tricks to…

In 1882, pioneering photographer Georges Demeny attached light bulbs to an assistant and told him to jump. Ever since then photographers have been combining moving lights and long exposures to ‘paint’ with light. For a fresh approach to the technique, we thought why not use reflective surfaces to enhance the effect? Whether it be water, glass, mirrors or even simple Photoshop imageflipping, a little reflected symmetry can take amazing light-painted patterns to a whole new level. If you’re new to light painting, you’re in for a treat. It’s one of those wonderful techniques that demonstrates just how exciting photography can be once you start experimenting with your exposure. A light painting is created by moving any light source through a dark scene while the camera’s shutter is locked open. In…

Capturing light trails is often associated with shooting outdoors, when it’s dark and cold. So you’ll be pleased to hear that you can achieve similar effects in the comfort of your own home, no coat or gloves required! However, we won’t be shooting conventional light trails, such as traffic trails, fairground rides or light paintings created by hand. In this project we’ll be capturing physiograms; geometric patterns created by photographing a long-exposure of a light source spinning in a regular pattern. The results take on the look of a drawing from an old-school Spirograph toy. All this technique requires is a simple setup and a little long-exposure know-how. To get started you need a dark room; if you’re shooting in the daytime you’ll need some heavyduty curtains or an extra…

Shooting with a beautiful model? Tick. But what happens when you’re looking for a good portrait location, and everywhere seems a bit dull? Using a couple of coloured gels and two flashguns, it’s possible to make an image in the plainest of environments. In this project we had a model booked, but little time to find an attractive surrounding. There was no grand architecture or natural elements to use as an interesting backdrop, and we’d come to a local studio with a fairly industrial background. Fortunately, our Speedlites and the Lastolite Strobo Kit (with some coloured gels) were ready to liven things up. This kit snaps on to the end of the flash gun and can hold any of the gel sets it comes with. Here, we used the blue…

An anamorphic illusion is a picture or scene that only makes sense from a particular vantage point. As an artistic trick its origins go back well beyond the advent of photography. Leonardo da Vinci painted an anamorphic eye in 1485, but perhaps the most famous example is the Church of St Ignazio in Rome. During the 17th century, artist Andrea Pozzo was commissioned to paint the flat ceiling of the church so that, from a single vantage point, the ceiling looks like a dome. More recently, Marcel Duschamp and Salvador Dalí used anamorphosis in their surreal artworks, and in modern times we often see the effect daubed on a sports pitch so that – from the overhead TV camera position – the sponsor’s advert appears to stand upright. No matter…

Zoom burst photography is a technique achieved by zooming in to your subject during an exposure. The change in focal length creates streaks of colour and light that appear to burst from the centre of the frame. It’s a great way of adding a sense of movement, or to simply enhance a scene by giving it an abstract feel. Scenes full of colour or patterns work particularly well, as the end result will be an array of colourful streaks and lines. At the time of year we took our shot the landscape wasn’t looking overly colourful, so we came to a woods to make the most of the strong graphic lines created by the trees. By shooting on a sunny day, any bright spots will be elongated by the zoom.…

A swimming pool might not be the easiest environment for photography, but the floating effect the water has on hair and clothes can’t be achieved anywhere else. This makes it the ideal location for a fashion shoot with a difference. With a few inexpensive pieces of kit, a willing subject and a good set of lungs, anyone can do it. An underwater pro might use a hard waterproof case that matches the camera’s controls, with extra ports for lenses, underwater flashes and sync cables. But this type of kit could cost thousands, and is designed to withstand scuba diving in the open seas. In the pool we can take a few shortcuts and cut costs dramatically. Instead of the hard housing, for a fraction of the cost you can get…

Plane-spotters may be the butt of all kinds of jokes, but when you get up close to aircraft at the airport you can begin to see the appeal of such a curious hobby. It’s genuinely thrilling to see these huge machines soaring upwards in a graceful, endless procession. What’s more, there’s a surprising amount of variety between planes. They come in all sizes, with differing markings, wings and noses. As such, they make the perfect subject for an epic composite image. With a tripod, a clear sky and a few hours to spare, anyone can do it. So perhaps plane-spotting isn’t as nerdy as many of us think. What’s more, when planning our shoot we realized how most of the problems we might encounter had already been tackled by these…

Capturing a still-life shot of a flower is straightforward enough, but shot against a plain backdrop using natural light can look rather mundane. In this photography project we’re going to show you how you can transform a simple close-up of a sunflower head into a cool, monochrome work of art by replicating a traditional darkroom technique called solarisation in Photoshop CS/CC. This magical effect will add visual interest by giving the tones an almost negative and metallic look. This clever darkroom technique was mistakenly discovered by surrealist artist Man Ray in the 1920s after his assistant, Lee Miller, accidentally turned the light on while processing film in the darkroom. The effect it had on the image’s tones proved to be far from catastrophic, and the pair honed the technique to…

Seeing the world devoid of colour could be construed as rather depressing, but as we’re setting out to prove, black and white is actually a way to enhance the world around you – and a brilliant way to improve your photos. By nature and design, colourful objects stand out in your shots – and sometimes they stand out in a bad way. By converting your colour shots to black and white, you remove colour as a distraction, and the eye then homes in what’s the most dominant part of your shot – be it a tall building, a person’s face, or tree in a landscape. A monochrome image also only deals in tones; a mixture of various degrees of highlights, midtones and shadows. So you need to be creative and…

A star filter adds an interesting effect to a composition that includes a light source or bright reflected highlights. Where we’d usually struggle to combat such bright lights in our photography, these filters produce an attractive starburst effect, creating a dazzling focal point. Star filters are etched with a fine pattern of lines that catch the light. The bigger and brighter the light source the better, which is why the sun or street lamps are a favourite starburst subject. Most filters can be rotated, allowing for creative compositions to get the desired effect. Working with bright lights, exposure and focus are key. In sunlight, you can get away with shooting handheld, using Aperture Priority mode for more creative freedom. In low light, use a tripod so you can increase the…

Elements13 has three different guided edits that allow you to make all, or part, of your image black and white. Spot colour effects like this used to involve all manner of complicated masking and adjustments, but the process has been simplified in Elements 13 so that even the most inexperienced user can pop one or more colours in their image. There are three guided pop colour effects to choose from. They’re called ‘B&W Colour Pop’, ‘Black and White Selection’ and ‘Black and White’, and they’re found within the Guided mode under the Photo Effects panel on the right. The first option, B&W Colour Pop, enables you to leave part of an image colour while the rest is changed to black and white. It’s ideal if you have a block of…

Retro effects are very much in vogue at the moment. It seems that, with modern DSLRs offering crystal-clear picture quality, many of us are pining for the imperfections of days gone by. Those endearing flaws – colour shifts, light leaks and so on – can make pictures seem so much more individual, and add a different quality to all kinds of subjects. There are lots of ways to give your digital images an aged look in Photoshop Elements, and while it takes a little longer than it does with an instant smartphone app, the results you’ll get are far more interesting and realistic. In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to rough up a brand new image by adding a texture of scratches and other blemishes, and rounding…

Photoshop offers a bag of tricks that makes pulling portraits into new shapes all kinds of fun. In this tutorial, we’ll take inspiration from Christian Girotto’s surreal series of portraits and show you how to turn an adult into a grumpy child. To reverse the aging process, it’s worth thinking about the differences between a child’s and an adult’s facial features. In general, children have smaller noses, less defined cheeks, chubbier features, bigger eyes and flatter eyebrows. We can make all these alterations with the amazing Liquify filter, which enables you to push, pull and morph pixels. Once done, we’ll finish off by removing any other tell-tale signs of age, like wrinkles and blemishes, then add rosy cheeks. We’ve used two portraits, taken moments apart. For the second shot we…

Master a few simple skills and you can create all kinds of amazing creative effects in Photoshop. Here we’ve combined three such features – layer styles, clipping masks and layer groups – to give us the ethereal text-covered portrait you see above. Layer styles are one of the jewels in Photoshop’s crown. They work by adding an effect to a layer, either across the entire surface of it, or more commonly around the edges. We’ve used the Drop Shadow layer style here. Beloved by designers for the way they help text stand out against a background, drop shadows are useful for all kinds of design tasks. But here, we’re going to put them to a different use. This brings us onto the next key feature – clipping masks. This is…

In an era when our lenses are ever-crisper and image resolutions evermore astronomical, we can produce photos that display a level of detail that users of 35mm film could only dream of. But there’s still something to be said for a lack of detail. Just as modern-day blockbuster movies are arguably no more pleasing than old black-and-white classics, photos stripped of colour and detail can sometimes enhance the mood. A grainy, black-and-white treatment is a classic look for street photography, evoking a documentary style that matches the subject matter perfectly. In the days of film, graininess – an uneven clumping of silver particles – was more noticeable in the fast films photojournalists used, and emphasized even more when photographers pushed their ISOs by combining underexposure and over-development. The lack of…

Polygon portraits like this are very popular at the moment, but before we get stuck in to this tutorial, first a warning: it’s going to take a while. There aren’t any magic filters that will do the job, instead each triangular shape you see in the image here has been patiently plotted out by hand. So it’ll take at least an hour or two to achieve a decent level of detail. But thankfully, once the initial steps are out of the way and everything is set up, plotting the triangles is the kind of repetitive job that can be done while listening to the radio or even half-watching TV. And all the effort only serves to make the finished effect even more rewarding. We’ve supplied a starting image, but far…

The sea: a monumental force of nature that is both powerful and serene; familiar yet mysterious. But how do you capture the essence of this ever-moving mass in a single, static frame? One way is to use a long exposure to blur the motion of the water for a tranquil effect. This technique is achieved with the use of longer shutter speeds, where the shutter is held open for several seconds – or minutes – at a time. Anything that moves during that time will be blended together. Rapidly moving waters, such as waterfalls, can blur in less than a second; still waters, such as a calm sea, require much longer. But even on an overcast day, and shooting at the narrowest available aperture, there will be far too much…

Something as simple as a piece of lightweight fabric can add an incredible burst of colour and shape to your portraits– especially if you can find a windswept location and a willing subject who doesn’t mind being buffeted by the breeze. Not only is the fabric fantastic for conventional photos, it can also be used to create beautiful effects, like our ghostly figure. In this project, we’ll explain how it’s done using a cunning combination of shooting skills and simple Photoshop techniques. The fabric in question here is a shiny dress-lining material – light enough to get picked up by the wind and thin enough to define the shape of the figure underneath, but also not so transparent that it gives the game away by showing the person in too…

For a new take on the standard cityscape, we are going to turn busy, inner-city life upside-down. By playing with perspective – and a sheet of perspex – we can double up the view of the city for a strikingly sharp reflection. Reflections are all around us, visible in everything from rivers to windows, and every shiny surface in-between. But in this technique we’re going to create an artificial reflection by placing a reflective sheet of material in front of a cityscape to create a mirror image of the scene, for perfect symmetry and incredible clarity. While there are a wide variety of surfaces that will work, we’ve opted for a sheet of black-tinted perspex. The reflective qualities of the perspex are enough for a mirror-like reflection, while the darkness…

When photographing a moving subject such as a dancer, it can be a challenge to convey a sense of graceful motion in a still image. But something as simple as a handful of flour can show off the action in a wonderfully atmospheric way. The fine white powder hangs in the air, shifting with the action and creating dusty whorls that catch the light. It also makes an almighty mess – to your gear, the surroundings and your plucky subject – but that’s a price worth paying for the extra dimension which the flour gives the shoot. In this tutorial we’ll explain how to get set up and shoot your own flour portraits. You’ll learn how to light the scene, pose your subject and apply the magic ingredient. Lighting plays…

Flash might not seem very versatile when it comes to shooting portraits, but used in the right way it can create dramatic hard-lit results. Modifying your flash needn’t be a complex task, either. The trick is in using honeycomb grids to create a narrow beam of light, which stop it from spilling everywhere. These grids are ideal for dramatic lighting setups when you need a contrasty photo. In this project, we’ll show you how to use Lastolite’s Strobo kit with a honeycomb attachment. It’s a compact, creative, yet simple to use light-modifying system for flashguns. For this shoot we used the Lastolite honeycomb grids on a Speedlite to highlight the facial features of the model and separate her from a dark background. The method is extremely simple, but the results…

Very few things show the motion of the earth more beautifully than a good star trail photo. By taking a series of long exposures throughout an evening we can capture the changing position of the stars as the earth rotates on its axis. In this tutorial we’ll explain how to shoot your own star trails, and then blend the images together using Photoshop and our free stacking action. In the days of film, star trails were ‘done in one’, with a single, super-long exposure, but this leads to too much noise on digital sensors, so we take a series of exposures instead and blend them in software. You don’t need a lot of kit either, just a tripod and cable release. But before gathering your gear, the first consideration is…

This is one of those photo tricks that makes viewers think, ‘How did they do that?’ The answer is surprisingly simple and, like all the best Photoshop techniques, the real skill begins in-camera. To create a seemingly levitating figure we capture two versions of the scene – one with the person perched on a stable support like a bench or ladder, and the other of the empty scene. Both versions need to be in perfect alignment. So the actual camera technique is dead easy, we just use a tripod and take two shots – one of our subject, another without them or their perch. Then we piece it together in Photoshop, which – even for a complete Photoshop novice – is a pretty simple job. But if we leave it…

Blurred motion is one of the most exciting visual effects we photographers have at our disposal. That magic combination of sharp and soft detail never fails to impress, and as any landscape photographer knows, works wonders shooting moving water or clouds. But it’s not something normally associated with portraits, where the aim is usually to freeze the action. However, sometimes a bit of motion blur can be used to great effect in your people shots. The basic technique here is very simple. We need our subject to stay perfectly still while objects around them are in motion. If we use a slightly longer shutter speed than normal, then the motion is recorded as blur. A patterned umbrella works perfectly. Gently twirled, it creates beautiful circular streaks of colour. However, this…

A ‘gobo’ is a term that originated in the film industry, where lighting plays a huge part in creating a mood to match the unfolding drama. It’s used to describe anything that ‘goes between’ the light source and the subject or background that creates a pattern of shadows. As such, gobos come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. There are natural gobos – think of the sun shining through leaves, creating a pattern of shadows underneath. Then there are the kind of gobos that we create ourselves to change the mood of our scene. A classic example is the film noir look we’ve evoked here, where a blind between the light and subject creates stark horizontal shadows. We’ll look at a variety of gobo lighting techniques you can use…

A popular style of contemporary portraiture is to use dilapidated urban locations with decaying walls, worn-out wooden doors, and rusty metal shutters as backgrounds. In this project, instead of trying to find locations in dodgy downtown places outdoors, we’ll show you how to instantly get cool portraits indoors using the combination of a collapsible pop-up backdrop and both natural and LED lights. Pop-up backdrops were once traditionally limited to basic white, black or grey, but now you can find a variety of real-world urban looks for contemporary portraits. Lastolite (by Manfrotto: www.manfrotto.co.uk/lastolite) offers a range of ‘creative collapsible’ pop-up backdrops, from out-of-focus autumn and summer foliage to staircases and graffiti. We’ve chosen two double-sided urban backdrops, that take seconds to set up, along with the handy Lastolite Magnetic Background Support…

The key to successful tabletop home studio photography is the lighting, and how to use it to create a variety of effects without spending a fortune on professional equipment. So in this project we’re going to look at four simple setups that anyone can shoot, covering everything from making your eBay listings look more attractive to arty shots of fruit and flowers. We’ll use a variety of light sources – window light, a pocket torch and couple of lamps (we used LED lights, but anglepoise desk lamps will do). A macro lens is great for getting close to still-life subjects, but you can use your kit lens to shoot all four setups. You’ll also benefit from a few inexpensive extras – such as some fabric and paper for the backdrops,…

From Brassai to Brandt, there’s a rich history of the fine art nude in photography. A nude shoot enables you to present the most celebrated form in the history of art – the female body – in any way you like, from a striking silhouette to an abstract array of simple lines and shapes. However, there are fine lines between fine art, erotica, and porn. So how do we go about creating art from a naked body? Over the these four pages we’ll explore several ways to approach the subject, with the emphasis on form, shape and light rather than titillation; think understated rather than X-rated. Studio lights are a must, but you don’t necessarily need a full studio setup for a shoot like this. Most of our shots were…

Sometimes the weather can be a photographer’s perfect ally, creating beautiful light or dramatic skies.However, at other times you can arrive at a scene only to find the atmosphere isn’t quite what you wanted. There’s no substitute for capturing real-life weather in all its glory, but if you haven’t got the time to wait for the perfect combination of light and clouds, it’s possible to change the atmosphere of a scene using Photoshop Elements. In the start image, the bright and sunny day doesn’t really suit the mood of the stark Welsh castle and barren foreground, so we’ve blown in a few misty swirls of cloud and cooled down the colours to simulate the look of early-morning fog lifting. This is easier than it looks. Using a combination of the…

Some Photoshop ‘special effects’ tend to look a little generic, and not all that impressive, especially if, as with most filter effects, they’re simply slapped on top of an image. One way to make effects stand out from the crowd is to give them the appearance of depth and have them interact with the figures or objects in your image, like these fantastic glowing lines. Curved lines aren’t the easiest of shapes to create, as Photoshop Elements lacks the Pen tool found in its bigger brother Photoshop CC, so to create smoothly curling, tapered lines we’ll need to use a combination of tools and filters. For simplicity, we’ll create our lines against a plain background, and to make the lines glow we’ll use one of Elements’ layer styles. Once we…

Headover to Photoshop Elements’ Quick edit mode to discover a range of easy-to-use controls for simple tonal adjustments and one-click effects. The beauty of Quick adjustments is being able to manually fine-tune the settings to get the look you’re after by switching back to the Expert mode. Along with the other useful ready-made effects, introduced with Elements 14 is a category called Smart Looks, which gives you a choice of five different one-click image effects to change the look and feel of an image. Once you’ve opened the image you want to work on in Quick mode, select the Effects tab at the bottom of the tools sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen. The top item is the Smart Looks category, and if you hover the mouse over…

In traditional chemical processes, infrared film was sensitive to infrared light, rather than the visible spectrum, resulting in images with a glowing, dreamlike atmosphere. In particular, scenes that include trees or foliage take on an otherworldly quality, as the leaves are strongly reflective of infrared light so they glow very bright. We can achieve a similarly ethereal effect with a few simple Photoshop tools. Used in the right image, it can transform a scene into a work of analogue art. As with traditional infrared film, the effect works best on images that feature trees or plants, as the greens and yellows are made to glow. Sunny blue skies also work well, as the blues take on an intensely dark appearance, and sunlight makes the colour of the trees and foliage…

Photography, portraiture and surrealism have a long and colourful history, and since Photoshop came along, it’s easier than ever to create subversive images or fantastical scenes. With a few Photoshop skills, you can take your images wherever your imagination wants them to go. Here we’ve combined a face with a set of wooden blocks for an offbeat portrait effect. It may seem complicated, but with a few blending tips and tricks, it’s actually much easier than it looks. The key to success lies with a combination of Photoshop blending modes, along with the powerful Blend If controls. The Multiply blending mode multiplies the darkness values of each layer. So when used with the bricks here, it allows all the crevices and shadows in the bricks to show on top of…

Love landscapes but never seem to chance upon the perfect scene? Then why not make your own fantasy location? With a few simple Photoshop skills, you can combine elements from a range of images into a single, perfectly composed frame, and you get to choose exactly where everything goes – a tree here, an animal there, a snowy mountain, even a few sun rays to add to the drama. If you want to piece together your own personal paradise, the first thing to learn is how to cut out parts of an image. But beyond this, the key to success is matching up the colours and tones so that everything looks like it belongs together. Any old Photoshop dabbler can cut out and combine a few images, but it takes…

It’s not always easy to arrive at a location at the right time – often the light isn’t right, or the angle of the sun too high, or the colours too dull. While there’s no substitute for nailing the shot in-camera, if you want to change the mood after the fact there are a few simple tools in Photoshop that can help. In this tutorial we’ll explain how to completely alter the atmosphere in our woodland scene here with a combination of brush skills, layer blending modes and adjustment layers. With these tools, you can change the colours to give the scene a dreamy atmosphere, add in spots of dramatic flare, and even suggest mist floating through the forest. We’ve suggested specific colours and settings for you to try out,…

Whether you want to replace a bland sky or make any kind of montage, then learning a few simple Photoshop compositing skills will serve you very well. More often than not, making composites is all about precise selections and layer masks, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what we’ve done here, by cutting out the buildings then dropping in the new sky. This would be a perfectly fine way to do things. But as usual with Photoshop, there are several ways to skin the same cat, and there’s another method that offers greater control and speed. This is where Photoshop’s oft-overlooked Blend If command comes in. The command lets you blend layers based on the brightness or colour of certain pixels. The key to understanding how it works lies…

The term ‘high key’ means images with a bright, airy look that are dominated by light tones, usually with a blown-out background. It’s a lighting setup you often see in studio fashion or family portraiture, but it doesn’t require a studio and a load of expensive lighting gear. All you need is a white wall and a pair of flashguns. To get the high-key look we simply need to overexpose the background, so that it comes out brighter than our subject, which is easily done with two flashes. Train one on the subject, with the other angled towards the background at a higher power setting. Of course, we need to be able to trigger the flash off-camera; it helps if one can have its settings controlled wirelessly by your camera’s…

Traditional landscape and seaside shots are usually taken using a wide-angle focal length, such as 16mm (or 10mm on an APS-C sensor), and narrow aperture, such as f/16, so you can capture a large part of the vista, and ensure it’s sharp from the foreground to the horizon. In this project, however, we’re going to show you how creative your scenic shots can look if you do the opposite… We’ve come to Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier, in Somerset, as it offers a clear focal point with lots of sand for our foreground. We have timed our visit so that the tide is out – it’s easy to check tide times in advance online (try www.tidetimes.org.uk). Be aware of how the high and low tide times vary on each day, and how…

A ‘bokehrama’ is a series of images stitched together to create a scene that’s far bigger and more detailed than could normally be achieved. It’s similar to the conventional panoramic photograph, but instead of only stitching images horizontally to form a wider-than-normal scene, images are also stitched vertically to create a final image that’s both wide and tall, effectively increasing the sensor size of the camera. This ingenious technique, developed by wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer, enables you to create an image with the intimacy and natural-looking perspective of a wide angle of view combined with a really shallow depth of field for beautiful blur in the foreground and background, which is impossible to achieve in a single shot taken with a wide-angle lens. Our image was created from nearly 100…

Taking photos of splashes and spills might not be anything new, but it’s always fun to try. Freezing motion using high-speed photography feels like magic, because it gives you a glimpse into everyday moments that usually happen too fast for our eyes to process. Many splash photographers make use of softboxes, Speedlites and a maze of triggers, but we’re here to show you how it can be done using just your Canon DSLR and a fast shutter speed. When you attempt anything new there’s a learning curve involved, and this project is no different. Once you’ve set up, focusing is the first tricky element. By setting the lens to manual focus, you might need to adopt a slight trial-and-error approach and take plenty of test shots as you tweak the…

One way of creating stylish fine art images is by using clever lighting techniques to make interesting shapes with shadows. ‘Ring heart’ shadow pictures are some of the most commonly bought stock photos and a staple of greeting cards, and in this project we’ll show you how to recreate the classic ring heart shadow effect by placing a ring between the pages of an open book The effect is achieved by positioning a single light source behind the ring so it casts a shadow on the pages, with the curves of the open book distorting the shadow so that it becomes heart-shaped rather than oval. The exact shape of the shadow will vary depending on several factors, including the power and positioning of the light and the position of the…

We photographers love a reflection, don’t we? Whether it’s a mirror-like lake, a perfect puddle or a fleeting moment caught in a window, reflections are ripe material for dynamic shots. In this project, we’re using them in an unusual way, by creating an endless landscape of mirror-like pools. And all we need is a single circular mirror. Of course, we also need to harness a few essential Photoshop compositing skills. But, as with the best composites, the real work takes place in-camera. We’ll take several shots of our scene and subject, making sure the conditions and lighting stay consistent, before piecing them all together to come up with our final surreal montage. To add an extra aura of mystery, we’ll add a little mist and drop in a few distant…

Using candles is an effective way to capture nicely lit portraits, with the warm light creating an evocative atmosphere. But you need to follow a few key techniques for the best results. First off, we’re using a wooden floor to act as a reflective surface for the candlelight. Avoid drafty locations as otherwise the flames will flicker – like a candle in the wind! Shooting at night with the lights off is best, but shooting during daytime with the curtains closed should be dark enough. We draped black material behind our model; this area doesn’t need to be totally dark as we’re exposing for candlelight, which renders the backdrop and surroundings black. More candles throws more light onto your subject; we found around 20 tea lights worked well, placed in…

Focus stacking is a handy technique used to extend the depth of field in your images. This technique is commonly used in extreme close-up photography as depth of field is so limited. Depth of field is determined by three factors: focal length, distance to subject and aperture. Macro lenses tend to have long telephoto focal lengths – like the Sigma 105mm lens we’re using – and you have to get in close to your subject to achieve full-size magnification, both of which leave you with a very shallow plane of focus. This is why narrower apertures are typically used in macro photography to ensure the subject is sharp, while blowing out the background into soft focus. But often this isn’t enough to render the entire subject in sharp focus. The…

Most lenses are built at great effort to correct barrel distortion, so that straight lines in a scene will be captured straight in the image. Fisheye lenses, however, forego this rectilinear approach and instead cram as many degrees of view as possible into the frame. The result is extreme distortion, with curvature that gets more pronounced the further things are from the centre of the frame. The widest fisheyes can capture an amazing 180 degrees of view, but these are the kind that produce a circular image surrounded by black. Alternatively there are those that are less wide but produce a more practical rectangular image, like the 8-15mm lens used here. On a crop sensor DSLR, it offers a whopping 180 degrees angle of view across the diagonals of the…

When it’s miserable outside and you’re in need of photographic inspiration, look no further than your kitchen cupboards. You’ll be surprised at how creative you can be with a few household items, and for this project we’re going to produce colourful, abstract images using only tinfoil and some food colouring. It’s a simple setup – all you need is a table and some natural light from a nearby window to create your own table-top studio, and a macro lens as you’ll need to focus close to the foil. The effect is achieved by placing some glasses of coloured water next to or on a sheet of foil and photographing the reflections – the resulting shapes and textures create images with a lovely painterly feel. You’ll need to have patience and…

Photographing miniature models and toys has captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of photographers worldwide. There’s something charming about capturing a toy model in a real-life situation with your camera. In this project we’re going to show you how to shoot a toy Land Rover in a likely situation, off-roading in a woods. It sounds simple enough, and you only need a standard zoom/kit lens to focus close enough for this shot, but there are a few key points you need to remember when capturing your miniature scene that we will explore in this tutorial. You’ll need to get down really low for a convincing shot, so take a beanbag or rolled up jumper to support your camera. As you’ll be spending a lot of time lying on the…

Plunging the landscape that lies before you into deep shadow may seem counter-intuitive at first. But shooting in silhouette can be a brilliant, creative style of photography. The main purpose of shooting a silhouette is to expose for the sky when you want to capture a stunning sunset. In such situations, the dynamic range of your camera’s sensor simply isn’t capable of capturing both the detail in the dark landscape and colours of the far brighter sky, so you’re faced with a choice of exposing for one or the other. A bright white, bleached-out sky is rarely the favoured option. But that’s not to say the landscape in your silhouette shot does not matter. A flat field will not work very well, no matter how colourful the sky. Instead, look…

The Photomerge Compose command available in Elements 13 provides a guided walkthrough that explains each stage of the photo-merging process. To begin with, we use Quick Selection to isolate the object we want to extract from its original background. Once the selection is done, the command places the object on another layer, allowing you to position it exactly where you’d like. It also offers a feature to Auto Match the tones, but don’t bother using it. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t do a very good job of matching tones, it also pixelates your cut-out image and severely lowers the quality. Luckily, colour matching is easily done once Photomerge Compose is complete, and other tools, such as Levels, offer greater control anyhow. Once the images are combined, it can…

This surreal effect may look complex, but you can copy it quite easily with any portrait, using the graphics or backgrounds that come with Photoshop Elements. We’re using a simple Brass Leaves graphic, but there are lots of other options. We’ve built up the intricate foliage effect by duplicating the leaves graphic and reshaping it in different ways. We then duplicated the cut-out face and ‘clipped’ it to each layer to apply the pattern, before applying a Drop Shadow layer style and changing the colours. Here’s how it works… THE MISSION Create a surreal portrait by blending graphic effects Time needed 30 minutes Skill level Intermediate Kit needed Photoshop Elements LAYERING EFFECTS IN PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS Use clipping masks and layer styles to apply textures, colours and realistic shadows 01 CUT…

Transforming your subjects with a dispersion effect is a great way to produce an eye-catching portrait. It’s fairly simple to do with a few easy Photoshop techniques. We’ll show you how to use custom brushes, layers and masks to create a fun splatter effect. The key to great results is using a good variety of brush tips and knowing how to get the best out of them. For this tutorial we’ve supplied a set of brushes, which we’ll reveal how to load into Photoshop Elements. By delving into the Brush Settings, we’ll show you how to resize your chosen brush tip, and adjust the angle and roundness to create a variety of brush splattering effects. This technique works best on portraits with clean, simple backgrounds – we’ve used a portrait…

It’s that time of year when the night sky is regularly lit up with amazing firework displays – whether it be on Guy Fawkes Day, Diwali or New Year’s Eve. As such, it’s a great opportunity to head out with your camera and capture the colourful displays. But if you need a quick fix or if you’d like to add fireworks to an old photo, there is another way to light up the night sky. Using simple Photoshop Elements layer skills, we can blend photos of fireworks with any scene we choose. This is a fun technique to try if you’d like to create an atmosphere of celebration, or if you fancy bolstering a lacklustre display with extra explosions, or just want to learn fundamental Photoshop skills such as layer…

The term ‘bokeh’ refers to the circular spots that appear in out-of-focus areas of an image. Usually creating bokeh in-camera means investing in a fast lens, shooting at a wide aperture and catching out-of-focus highlights in the background. But with a few simple skills we can replicate the effect in Photoshop. The key to success here is the amazing Photoshop brush engine. Not only can you create your own brush tips from any shape you like, you can also change the way the brush applies colour by randomizing it. If this all sounds a little complicated, then don’t worry, it’s simply a case of opening the Brush panel and experimenting with the settings. The key sliders for our bokeh effect here are Scattering and Jitters. Combine them with the right…

Of all the ways to create High Dynamic Range images, Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR Pro’ command has always lagged behind the best. Like all HDR tools, it lets you combine a set of exposures into a single image that expands the dynamic range beyond what your camera is capable of. But it suffers badly in comparison to dedicated third-party offerings, such as Photomatix Pro, and almost all of the HDR presets it offers are, to put it bluntly, rather horrible. It’s not completely without merit, as it does let you create 32-bit HDR files, but if you’re serious about HDR, then it’s worth exploring other ways. Thankfully, Adobe has recently added a new, and rather excellent, feature to Photoshop CC’s Camera Raw plug-in (and Lightroom) that merges a set of…

There’s much fun to be had in Photoshop by merging two seemingly disconnected images into an offbeat montage. The technique also calls upon many of the most fundamental tools and features in Photoshop, such as layers, masks and blending modes, so it’s a great way to learn core skills. Here we’ll combine a light bulb and a snowy tree into a seamless scene. One way to do this would be to cut out the tree, but this would take a while. Instead we can get almost instant results with the Multiply blending mode. This multiplies the darkness value of the blended layer with those below, so because the tree is a dark object against a very light backdrop, the lighter areas are effectively eliminated with a single click. Unfortunately it’s…

If you’ve ever wished you could paint like a pro, but lack the talent for fine brushwork, then here’s an opportunity to create beautiful painterly art. Starting with a photo, all we have to do is apply a few filter effects then brush over with the Pattern Stamp tool to give it the look of paint on a canvas. The Pattern Stamp tool might seem like an odd choice, but the thing is, patterns aren’t necessarily restricted to recurring lines, shapes or textures. In Photoshop, you can turn images into patterns. So once our image is prepared, all we have to do is define it as a pattern, then we can use the Pattern Stamp tool to redraw it in brush-based form. It’s as if we can load the colours…

Back in the days of film a double exposure could be created by exposing the same frame of film twice, without winding it on. The result would be an abstract mixture of two images. It was an unpredictable and rather charming effect, and in the days before Photoshop, one of the very few ways in which photographers could blend two images into one. The popularity of the effect remains to this day, especially TV and film (notably in Adele’s trippy Send My Love music video and the excellent opening credits to the TV series True Detective). In fact, in an era of digital perfection, the old-school charm of double exposures seems to grow stronger and stronger. These days, we can use Photoshop to create almost the exact same result as…