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This is how Photoshop’s “Divide” blend mode works and how to use it to remove colour casts

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Photoshop has a whole bunch of different blend modes but knowing what they all do… Well, even many of the most advanced Photoshop users don’t know what they all do. That not knowing could be holding you back, though. And this video is a perfect example as to why.

I’ve been using Photoshop since about Version 3.0 (yes, I’m that old), but I don’t recall ever once using the “Divide” blending mode. After watching this video from Unmesh at PiXimperfect, though, I wish I’d started looking into it years ago. Unmesh starts by showing how it works in a practical sense, and then explains the underlying maths behind it to help you understand how it does what it does.

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For an in-home photography challenge that can keep you busy for hours, try Egg 2.0

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Photographing eggs is something Joe Edelman’s become quite well known for, and something he often recommends. 10 years ago, he made a video specifically about the topic and how it helped him to “see the light”. It’s a lesson he often suggests to people who are struggling to understand how light works, and it’s brilliant in its simplicity.

Well, now, Joe has turned that decade-old 4-minute video into a 43-minute experiment for his “Stuck at home photography challenge” series to help stave off the boredom while we’re all stuck at home and isolating ourselves from the outside world.

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Learn how to read your camera’s histogram… through music?

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I thought this was quite a weird and odd video at first. It wasn’t until I was a little while in that I finally realised what he was getting at. But if you’ve been struggling to understand the histogram but you have an ear for music then this video from Tim Shields is a pretty good analogy to help you figure it out.

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Watch these techniques to shoot smooth handheld footage on your iPhone without a gimbal

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Smartphone gimbals are pretty commonplace today. There are countless models from companies like Zhiyun, Moza, Feiyu, and a million other brands. It feels like we’ve had them forever, although they’ve only really been around for about four years. And sometimes, even today, we need to figure out a way to live without them.

You’re not always going to have it with you when you see something cool and want to whip out your phone to grab a sequence. Or perhaps, as filmmaker Brandon Li mentions in this video, carrying a gimbal defeats the whole purpose of using your phone. Putting his money where his mouth is, this 10-minute video shows us how we can get gimbal-like shots without a gimbal.

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Here’s how to create super fast video renders in DaVinci Resolve

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No matter what video editing application you use, one of the biggest pains is the speed at which your final video renders out. Even with a pretty powerful system, they can take a while, especially if you’re using high res footage with lots of effects. It turns out that Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve has a way to speed them up massively.

I recently switched to DaVinci Resolve, and so I’ve been following a few YouTubers pretty closely. One such YouTuber is Jamie Fenn, who puts out Resolve videos a couple of times a week. In this particular video, he shows us how we can optimise our settings to get some extremely fast renders in Resolve.

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How to change the colour of anything in Photoshop using Gradient Maps

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Most of us have used Gradient Maps in Photoshop at some point. Most commonly to aid in black and white conversions. They offer a lot of control and power for black and white conversions and lets us get some nice contrast and done that there regular Black & White adjustment layer doesn’t.

But did you know that you can use it to change the colour of just about anything you want in Photoshop? Taking a break from the more philosophical videos he’s been posting lately, Sean Tucker has released a tutorial on how he uses Gradient Maps to recolour elements of photographs – and it’s let me see the tool in a whole new light.

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Learn how to shoot better architectural photography from an actual architect

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Architectural photography is possibly one of the most challenging types of photography there is. We see buildings every day of our lives, and most of them have been seen from just about every angle already. Seeing and photographing them in a new or interesting way isn’t easy.

This video from 30×40 Design Workshop was actually posted to YouTube a couple of years ago, but it’s not one I’d seen before and it offers some great advice for those wishing to pursue architecture photography.

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This beginners guide gives you 20 tips for getting started in Capture One 20

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As photographers start to explore alternatives to Adobe’s suite of applications, Capture One is a piece of software that’s often recommended as an alternative to Lightroom. While it may be arguably superior in certain aspects, and very similar in others, the workflow is a little different to Lightroom. So, it can take a while for new users to get used to it.

In this video, Michael Comeau at On Portraits walks us through his 20 top tips for beginners to Capture One to help newcomers get to grips with the software quickly and speed up their overall workflow.

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How to edit in Lightroom using the “Dark Mode” technique for more contrast and drama

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When it comes to processing our images, there are all kinds of weird and crazy techniques out there. This is an interesting Lightroom one from Pye Jirsa over at SLR Lounge, which he calls “Dark Mode”. It allows you to quickly and easily draw a distinction between the lit areas you want to highlight, and the shadowy areas, without sending them to pure black.

It’s an approach I’d not seen before. It essentially involves bringing the exposure way down, the blacks way up to bring back the shadow detail and then controlling your contrast with the highlights. Some thought needs to be put into the shooting technique for this to work, but it looks to be quite effective if this is the final look you’re going for.

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This free “Ultimate” travel and landscape photography tutorial is three hours long

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Travel and landscape photography has always been popular, but since everybody now has a camera in their pocket and many are also choosing to take things further with a DSLR or mirrorless camera, it’s really taken off. Finding information on travel or landscape photography isn’t exactly difficult, but Taylor Jackson has combined all his knowledge into this three-hour “Ultimate” travel and landscape tutorial video.

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