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Is Photoshop ruining photography or is it actually helping it?

This is a topic that I see posted on social media every single day. It’s usually not a discussion of the actual topic, though. More often than not, it’s bundled up in a comment like “This isn’t photography!” or “Fake! You’ve Photoshopped this!”. Yeah, it’s a pretty one-sided conversation a lot of the time. But photographer and educator Blake Rudis explores the topic quite in-depth in this video.

The criticisms of the use of Photoshop in photography often come from the self-proclaimed “purists” who believe that every image has to look how it looks right out of the camera (which still has digital post-processing applied, btw) and there’s very little that seems to dissuade them from their beliefs. But ultimately, does it really matter what other people think about your use (or lack) of Photoshop?

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Use Linear Light blend mode in Photoshop to enhance your colours the easy way

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Enhancing the colour in photographs, no matter what they may be, is a struggle that most photographers face. Sometimes it’s quite easy. At other times, it’s not. There are a million different methods for enhancing the colour in your images during different parts of your workflow, but this one from Blake Rudis at f64 Academy is rather interesting.

Painting colour onto images isn’t a new technique, but the method Black shows in this video uses Photoshop’s Linear Light blending mode to help enhance and enrich the colours in your image using the photograph’s own already existing colour.

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How to reduce noise in high-ISO photos and still keep them sharp

Sharpening photos you took at high ISO can be a demanding and tricky. To help you get it right, Blake Rudis of f64 Academy shares some tips for sharpening high-ISO images. He’ll show you how to reduce noise in these photos, but still keep them sharp and achieve optimal results.

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Three techniques to create dramatic black & white images

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I’m not the biggest fan of digital black and white conversions. They’re often just far too much work and effort to get the look that I want. There are a million different ways to make black & white conversions. Until you try a bunch of them, though, you usually don’t really know how quite they’re going to turn out. So, if I know I want black & white then I usually just shoot them on film.

But it is possible to make great black & whites digital conversions from colour shots, though. This video from Blake Rudis at f64 Academy talks us through his three-stage process to make his black & white images.

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How to use Radial Gradients in Photoshop to direct your viewers’ eyes

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If you want to draw more attention to the subject in your photo, proper post-processing is certainly one of the ways. Blake Rudis of f64 Academy shows you a pretty useful trick to achieve this in Photoshop. You can use radial gradients to create a kind of a “spotlight” and draw your viewers’ attention exactly where you want it to go. You can use it on all kinds of photos, no matter if your subject is a person or an object. It’s a subtle technique, yet it can make a big difference.

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How to fix blue waterfalls in your landscape photographs

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Even though I’m not really a landscape guy, I love waterfalls. For me, they regularly serve as the backdrop to a portrait session. The big problem with waterfalls, though, is that they can often turn out quite blue. There’s a number of reasons why this can happen. Sometimes it’s white balance issues. Personally, I find that it’s often the bright blue sky reflecting off or refracting through the tiny droplets.

Regardless of the cause, you can fix it. In this very quick tip tutorial video, Blake Rudis of f64 academy shows us two ways to deal with this issue. The first utilises Adobe Camera Raw. Blake demonstrates using it as a filter within Photoshop, but it can also be applied to your raw files. The other method uses Photoshop’s adjustment layers.

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This 3 step raw colour correction tip will fix your white balance woes

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Even if you plan to alter or grade your footage afterwards, having an accurate and consistent starting point makes your life much easier. Getting perfect white balance without a grey card, Expodisc, ColorChecker or fancy colour meter can be tricky, though. But it’s not impossible.

This video from Blake Rudis at f64 Academy walks us through a simple 3 step process to get perfect white balance in Adobe Camera Raw. While a neutral source in your shot can make this process much faster, this technique is still very quick and easy.

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How to reduce noise in your photos with no 3rd party plugins in Lightroom and Camera Raw

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There’s plenty of great applications and plugins out there that will help you reduce noise in your images. Some are standalone apps while others are plugins. But there’s a lot you can do straight from within Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom without all that.

This video from Blake Rudis at F64 Academy talks us through the noise reduction features in ACR. As it uses the same raw engine as Lightroom, the same settings and techniques work the same way there, too. So, if you haven’t really dived into it before, or you’re relying on 3rd party apps, here’s how it all works.

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Making perfect skies with luminosity masks and Blend If sliders

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Masking different layers based on brightness is an often tricky but vital Photoshop skill to have. There’s a bunch of different ways of doing it from the simple to the advanced. Two of the most common methods are by using Luminosity Masks or with Photoshop’s “Blend If” layer options.

While the two might appear to do similar things on a quick glance, there are some pretty distinct differences between the two. Black Rudis from F64 Academy looks into both methods to show us how they work. Each has advantages over the other depending on what you’re trying to achieve. And both will let you do things that the other simply cannot.

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Save yourself some money and learn how to clean your own sensor like a pro

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Learning to clean your camera’s sensor is one of the most valuable skills a photographer can learn. At least when it comes to camera maintenance. It’s a task that many are afraid to learn, worried that they’ll kill their camera. These things are a lot more solid than most give them credit for.

In this video from f64 Academy, Blake Rudis shows you how spot that you even have a dust problem, and then several ways to get rid of it.

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