Digital Photography Tips

Cleaning up small and large skin blemishes in Photoshop is an incredibly easy process. It’s actually quite fun to do as well because you have complete control over how much you clean up the skin in the photograph. Unlike retouching the entire area of skin, cleaning up blemishes requires no Photoshop filters or layer masks. There is a great tool in Photoshop called the “spot healing brush” and it looks like this.

All you need to do is select this tool and use the “alt” key to select a sample of good skin. Ensure your brush size is set to just larger than the size of the blemishes. You can change your brush size by clicking on the drop down button in the upper left side of the screen.

Once you are ready to get rid of the small and large blemishes in the skin, simply start clicking away. The spot healing brush is great because unlike the stamp tool is blends in both the texture and color in a seamless fashion leaving virtually no sign of the blemishes in the first place.

Look at the image at the top of this blog post to see both the before and after pictures of the skin with blemishes and then without blemishes.

How to edit colors in photoshop. coming soon.

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If you’re relatively new to photography you have undoubtedly had difficulties properly framing a photograph. This is not something that only happens to amateur photographers, it is a problem that all photographers face no matter of their experience levels. However, some elements of photographic framing become second nature to you after a while. Meaning as time goes on, framing your pictures properly becomes more and more easy.

The biggest mistake that first time photographers make is that they pay too much attention to the main subject of interest with little or no regard for the objects surrounding the primary object of focus. Photographers forget that photography is about story telling. It’s a visual language that should communicate ideas to people. This means, that like painters, photographers need to put great thought into composition and framing. However, unlike painters, photographers don’t have an endless amount of time to make decisions. As the direction and intensity of light changes, as people move, and expression change, so will your photograph. You need to think quickly and frame your photograph even quicker.

The two best tips to give amateur photographers is to firstly, pay special attention to all of the elements which make it into the 4 walls of your photograph and pay extra attention to the area around the 4 walls of your photograph. “Amputating” parts of objects with one of the walls of your photograph is a dead give away that you were not paying attention. Either an object makes it into your photograph or your reposition yourself to get rid of the object. Secondly, you need to find a way to place emphasis on your main object. However, this is much more complex than it sounds. Too many people just place their main object dead center and click. However, your main object doesn’t have to be center, or the biggest element in the photograph. You can use lines, shapes, colors, or contrast to draw attention to your main area of interest (All of these concepts are discussed more in our online photography school), but for now just practice using the rule of thirds and proper object organization to help better your photography framing.

Proper photography framing is not easy task. You can spend a lifetime experimenting with different framing techniques. Just enjoy yourself and have fun along the way.