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 »

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 »

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 »

I love panorama photos. I check them out all the time on Flickr and I’m amazed at the unique beauty they create. There’s just something about a panorama that is grandiose.

So in this Photoshop video tutorial, I’ll show you how to stitch your photos together using Photomerge. You’ll see that it’s actually quite easy once you know how to do it. Photoshop really does almost all the work for you.

The first thing you’ll need to do is take Continue Reading »

I guess some of you still don’t have Lightroom 2 because you asked me if it was possible to do split toning in Photoshop. The answer is YES. If you have CS4, you can actually do split toning just like in Lightroom using ACR. But if you’re like me and still using an older version of Photoshop there’s still a way to do it.

In this Photoshop video tutorial, I’ll show you how to do split toning just like in my Lightroom split toning tutorial. There are a few more steps to get there compared to Lightroom but we still get there. To be honest, split toning in Continue Reading »

We’ re back in Photoshop! This time I’m going to show you how to use the Patch tool.

If you’re not familiar with the patch tool, don’t worry. It’s not commonly used and even those who know it exists, haven’t really played around with it.

In this Photoshop tutorial, I’ll show you how to use Continue Reading »

In this Photoshop video tutorial, I’ll show you 2 ways of creating the Orton Effect. The Orton Effect was created by a photographer called Michael Orton back in prehistoric times the days of film. He would combine a properly focused and exposed image with an out of focus and overexposed image to get a special dreamy effect. A blurry, slightly saturated photo that still looks Continue Reading »

HDR is one, if not THE biggest craze, out there right now when it comes to image post processing. It’s been around for a while but with some pretty cool software like Photomatix making it easy to do, it took off.

I think this is the post processing tutorial that was requested the most since YPS started!  And I finally got around to it. Better late than never, right? Yes, there are a few HDR specific programs out there but Continue Reading »

My most watched video tutorial of all time with over 16000 views has been “Adding a Reflection in Photoshop”. It’s a great tutorial and a technique that I’ve been using for some of my stock shots. What I found interesting is that many of you emailed me asking if it was possible to make the reflection look more real because it just looked too perfect. That made me think a bit Continue Reading »

Today’s Photoshop video tutorial is all about the Refine Edge tool. The Refine Edge tool made its debut in Photoshop CS3 so if you’re using an older version, you won’t have this tool to play with.

If you’re a stock photographer shooting  isolated people or objects, I think that after watching this video, you’ll want to upgrade to CS3 or CS4 if you haven’t already done so. I use this tool all the time when I want to refine Continue Reading »