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Follow these five steps to turbo-charge your Photoshop skills

The thing I love and hate about Photoshop is that it has countless editing tools and options. Like most photographers, I find it extremely helpful. At most times, I found learning how to use it really fun and rewarding. But being self-taught, learning Photoshop was sometimes pretty frustrating.

If you’re both enjoying and struggling  to use Photoshop, Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE shares five great tips. They’ll help you to accelerate your Photoshop learning and significantly boost your editing skills. This will lead to not only better images, but also editing faster and with more confidence.

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Retouchers rejoice with new cursor border adjustment feature for Photoshop

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Starting with the latest photoshop, you will get the feature you always wanted but never knew it. The latest Photoshop allows you to change the outline of your brush tip.

I know it sounds picky and irrelevant, but look how critical it can be when working with high-resolution or retina monitors. This screen grab by Oleksii V. Hirlin shows just how much easier your life will be when you track your Photoshop brash. Finding your brush can be an incredibly frustrating task for some operations like Dodge & Burn.

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The best photo upscaling AI in 2022. Compared.

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It’s time for another software battle! So far, we’ve compared AI photo sharpening and AI photo noise reduction. Next up, is AI photo upscaling, and we’re putting Adobe Photoshop, Topaz Gigapixel AI, Skylum Luminar Neo Upscale AI, and ON1 Resize AI 2023 up against each other. Upscaling images is important for print purposes, and it even slips in with pro-stock shooters who need to create images at specific resolutions. Having AI helps us by upscaling whilst preserving details and filling in the blanks sounds great, but which software does it best?

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Use this Photoshop trick to make sure you have a subject in your shot

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Adobe Photoshop introduced the Subject Select feature in a 2018 update, but it’s more useful to us as photographers than we may have first thought. The ability to select a subject on command is a great feature that can help us with our creative vision, too.

The subject of a photograph is the most important feature. The subject guides our composition, exposure, lighting, and all other creative decisions. Our subject is the main focus of our scene, both figuratively and literally. It should be the sharpest point across the scene as well as being the obvious main feature our viewers are compelled to look at. We can use a simple trick in Adobe Photoshop to check whether our image has a subject. Here’s what to do:

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New Photoshop update will restore an old photo in a single click

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The latest update of Adobe Photoshop includes the ability to restore an old photo in just one click, thanks to the software’s groundbreaking addition to their Neural Filters. Called ‘Photo Restoration’, the new filter uses AI to assess what needs to be fixed and uses tools such as content-aware fill to automatically ‘heal’ the image.

The Neural Filters have been around since 2020, and include things like generating a shallow depth of field effect in portrait images, making a landscape image look as though it was shot in winter, and colourising black and white photographs. So not only can you now restore an old photo but you could also colourise it too.

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Adobe to make Photoshop web-based free… With a catch

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Adobe has announced a new web-based version of Photoshop that will be entirely free for everyone to use. Yes, you read that right – instead of paying for a Creative Cloud subscription, you’ll be able to access the program freely on the web. But there’s of course, a little catch that might make you buy the program later after all.

The free version is already being tested, but Adobe describes the service as “freemium.” In other words, you’ll be able to use the program on your browser, but some features will be available for paying subscribers only.

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Has Photoshop gone too far with the one-click season change?

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Photoshop has had some AI-powered filters for a while now. Adobe announced a couple of new ones recently, some incredibly useful and the others… well, maybe not so much. The latter include Landscape Mixer, a tool that lets you combine your landscape photo with another in a single click. Has Adobe gone too far with this? Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE demonstrates the tool in his latest video, so let’s see how it performs and is it any good at all.

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How to use Photoshop’s Channel Mixer to colour grade your images

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There are a lot of ways to colour tone and grade your photos in Photoshop and although I primarily use Curves to colour tone my shots, a powerful tool that I’m starting to use more and more is the somewhat under-utilised Channel Mixer.

Every couple of weeks I Live Stream via my Facebook Page and there I colour tone images submitted by my community. During the streams we often discuss techniques and lighting for a couple of hours and it’s a great place to get some free feedback and critique on your shots. Those that have watched me live in the past will have seen me use the Channel Mixer a lot, but for those that have missed the streams, I thought I’d do a super quick intro to the extremely powerful ‘Channel Mixer’ Photoshop adjustment layer, to show you some popular looks that take seconds to add to your shot.

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How to create Tiny Planets in Photoshop with a regular DSLR or mirrorless camera

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Creating tiny planets has become really popular ever since consumer 360° cameras started becoming a thing about five or six years ago. So popular that there’s even native support in apps for cameras like those from Insta360 to create them. But what if you want to do something a bit higher resolution, or with higher dynamic range and a bit more control than a 360° camera can offer?

Well, in this tutorial from Paul Trani at the Adobe Photoshop YouTube channel, you’ll learn how to create them within Photoshop using just a standard panoramic image shot with nothing but your regular DSLR or mirrorless camera.

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