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 »

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 »

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 »

In this new Lightroom 2 video tutorial, I’ll show you how to add a subtle splash of color to a black and with image.  This technique is very similar to  my Lightroom split toning tutorial where you convert an image to B&W then add color to it. The main difference is that split toning affects the whole image and you can only use 2 colors (one for shadows and one for highlights) while using the gradient filter and the adjustment brush gives you more Continue Reading »

We all want to show off our photos as best as possible on the Web and one of the best ways of doing this is with a Lightroom photo gallery. I showed you how to build one not long ago but I want to give you more resources than just the standard templates. Don’t get me wrong, I love the default templates and I use them all the time but you know what they say. Variety is the spice of life. 

After searching far and wide across the www for you, here are some of my favorites. Some are free and some are Continue Reading »

Yes, I know. You’ve been asking for more Lightroom tutorials and I’ve been giving you lots of Photoshop tutorials. I hope I’ve redeemed myself today with the cool technique in Lightroom called split toning.

Simply put, split toning is taking a black and white image and adding a color tint to the highlights and a separate color tint to the shadows. You can get some pretty cool effects using Continue Reading »