If you haven’t heard yet, Lightroom 2 is great! Ok, ok you might have heard me mention it a few times but learning is about repetition. 

So here I was post processing my Greece photos in Lightroom playing around with the main basic adjustment sliders when I thought to myself… hey! this kinda looks like an HDR photo. So I tweaked and tweaked until I got a pretty cool HDR look that looked cool. Then I thought that you guys might like to know how to do it too.  So here I am.

Now, before I go on, and before the true Continue Reading »

I truly hope that all of you are enjoying this festive season and that you’re taking lots and lots of pictures!

Before sharing with you the top 5 most popular  tutorials on YPS,  I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support. 2009 was YPS’s first full year live on the Web. It’s still a baby at only 21 months. I’m filled with gratitude knowing that my posts are helping many passionate photographers from around the world.  Your comments and support keep giving me the motivation to keep sharing my knowledge and photography Continue Reading »

Back in Adobe Lightroom 2 today and I’ll be showing you a cool way to add a virtual photo frame to your images without ever leaving Lightroom.

Of course, you don’t have the versatility and complete control of doing it in Photoshop (which I’ll cover in another tutorial) but you can still have great black or white frames. This is Continue Reading »

One of the great things about Lightroom 2 is the ability to create presets and share them with the world.

If you’re not familiar with presets, it’s basically a saved series of photo adjustments that you can then apply to any image. Kind of like actions in Photoshop.

In this post, I thought I would share with you the many places where you can get a ton of  free Lightroom presets to play with. But before Continue Reading »

This was a fun Photoshop tutorial! A reader asked me if I could do a tutorial on making a photo look washed out and old like in the 70s and I thought that was a great idea!

I’ve done this style a few times in the past but it had been a while. It came back to me very quickly though.

This video tutorial is a 3 step process to Continue Reading »

Here I was just doing my daily Web surfing when I came across a Youtube video by Michael James. In this video, he compares various ways of creating HDR images. The one that caught my attention was Lightroom plugin Enfuse. The reason it caught my attention was the fact that I could create an HDR image directly in Lightroom without ever leaving Lightroom! I’m all about workflow efficiency and this option sounded great. If you missed my Photoshop tutorial on HDR, you can also check it out.

The best news of all is that Continue Reading »

Are you a Lightroom 2 Addict like me? Do you find yourself going less and less in Photoshop? If you answered YES then you’ll appreciate this Lightroom video tutorial.

Quite a few of you have written in to ask me about specific Lightroom keyboard shortcuts so I thought I would put together my shortcut keys and show them to you in one simple video.  Once you start using them more and more, you’ll see how drastically your workflow Continue Reading »

In this Photoshop video tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to make a sunbeam, or sun rays, passing through a window. No Lightroom today my fellow YPSers. Can’t do that there… just yet.

The technique consists of creating your lightbeam with the polygonal lasso tool, bluring it, making it transluscent and then fading it. It’s an easy 4-step process that will make your photo look heavenly. Continue Reading »

Time for another Lightroom video tutorial! I’ll be showing you how I post processed a landscape photo to make it look like it was taken decades ago… with a little modern twist.

All of  the post processing was done in Lightroom except for the last effect. The grain was added in Photoshop.

The photo I chose to use is a landscape shot of Continue Reading »

Here’s a DIY option to use your speed light with your studio softboxes.

I was looking at various ways to hook up my SB-800 to my softboxes and found a few options like the Westcott Slipper but found it overpriced considering you could get an Ezybox for less. Being determined to find a way, I continued my hunt. And last week I got lucky and found this Youtube video by Stephen Poff from someone on Twitter who RT it. In his video, he shows how he used a Justin clamp with his speed light and studio softbox. My jaw dropped to the floor! It’s so simple!

Being a big Strobist fan myself, I find myself Continue Reading »