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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:

Five innovative ways to isolate the subject in your photos

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I have no idea where I first heard this, but it’s extremely true: “the main difference between painting and photography is that the painters need to work hard to put things into their images, whereas photographers have to work hard to take things out of their images.” Painters start with a blank canvas, and every single thing that ends up in the final piece of art is a result of careful craftsmanship, years of hard-earned skill, and raw intention. The photographer’s canvas, on the other hand, is all of the world’s visual chaos, and he or she must deploy an equivalent amount of craftsmanship, skill, and intention to weed out all the fluff.

This video shows how focal length and zooming affect subject-background relationship in your photos

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I believe you already know that “zooming with your feet” and changing the focal length can affect the relationship between your subject and the background. In this short video, you can see the effect of both coming close to the subject and changing the focal length, and how it affects the final look of your image.

Should you create photos without dominant subjects?

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One of the first things we learned about composition is that our photos need to have a dominant subject. Photographer Ben Horne explores the topic I find very interesting – should we step away from the “rule” and create photos that are quite the opposite, without dominant subjects?

I like to think that rules should be broken sometimes, and I find this video interesting because Ben tells us what we can achieve by breaking this rule. While it may not always be the solution, it can often produce an interesting photo that will keep the viewer engaged even without the obvious subject.

How to fake the 2 stops magic bullet in Photoshop.

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Hey guys! Today I’m going to be showing you a cool tip for how to manipulate a natural light image within photoshop to be able to drag some of that control back between the subject and background separation that get’s stripped away when shooting with a strobe. Obviously you can find a better lit location but sometimes you find something great that doesn’t have the separation you wished for.

Here’s a great article on how to achieve the “real” effect with a strobe.

Lighting direction as a tool: Popping vs blending your subject within a scene

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As someone who shoots on location a lot I’m often given a choice on what I like to call “popping” or “blending” a subject into a scene, in short this really as as simple as using your main light source to either complement the direction of a natural / embedded light source in a scene (a candle, window, lights etc) or contrasting it completely so that the subject “pops” out and suspends the belief that they are illuminated within the scene naturally.

Here’s what I mean:

1000 Beautifully Photographed Poses From Supermodel Coco Rocha

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As much as we’d like for our clients to just naturally know how to pose for a photograph, we have to be realistic; it’s never going to happen. Part of the portrait photographers job, in fact, is to be able to tell their subjects how to pose and present themselves in front of the camera and, just like our subjects, we’re not always the best at posing, either. Fortunately, supermodel Coco Rocha (aka “The Queen of Pose” ) has teamed up with iconic photographer, Steven Sebring, to publish the super useful book Study Of Pose.

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