When a fish looks up from under the water, it is generally thought that they would see an ultra-wide angle hemispherical image. This is caused by the refraction of light through the water and is known as the Snell’s Window effect. That’s why any ultra-wide camera lens is known... Read more

Introduced in Photoshop CS5, the Content Aware Fill tool is a handy way to remove objects from an image without resorting to fiddling around with the clone stamp tool. With Content Aware Fill, Adobe Photoshop will try its very best to fill any selected area with a best guess at... Read more

Back in the olden days of photography, when you needed a dark room and trays of exotic chemicals to develop a photograph, rudimentary photo alteration was still going on. The Victorian equivalent of Photoshop was double exposures, aperture techniques, burning and dodging. To burn and dodge was to cover... Read more

Using gradients of colour in Photoshop often produces very pleasing, professional results, mainly because producing nice smooth transitions between the colours is something a digital platform does very well. The Gradient Fill Tool in Photoshop, located on the left hand sidebar, sharing the same button as the Paintbucket Fill... Read more

In recent versions of Adobe Photoshop, more geometrical effects have been added to the default filters library. One of the eager newcomers is the Extrude filter. This takes any selection, image or layer and pushes it outwards using a series of cubes or pyramids. It’s one of those new... Read more

Many users only ever use the circular brush tool in Photoshop and miss out on one of the most satisfying ways of freehand digital drawing and a quick, simple way to create interesting effects. Click on the brush tool on the left hand toolbar, it’s the eighth one down,... Read more

With the mega pixel count on cameras getting higher and higher, and the display resolutions on monitors and televisions increasing to suit, the image sizes we now work with are significantly higher than they ever used to be. This can bring with it a few navigation issues when you... Read more

Sometimes you don’t want to spend hours creating the perfect image, you don’t want to carefully fix every small mistake and make the most convincing photo collage the world has ever seen, sometimes you just want to stick someone’s head on someone else for humorous effect. Here’s a quick... Read more

All images, like onions, have many layers, in a photo these layers are flattened, but they are still there, the sky, the foreground, the subject, all fall into different planes and the mind splits them up. If you are trying to give the impression of layers in an image,... Read more

All graphics packages come with pre-set filters that new users like to play with when they first get the package, but then never use again. Let’s face it, if everyone used the default filters, with all images subjected to the same process, it would turn the internet into a... Read more

Arthur C Clarke’s third law of prediction states – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” and if you’ve ever used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, you’ll know exactly what Arthur was talking about. Using a very simple technique of allowing you to sample areas of an... Read more

The film Easy Rider deliberately allowed natural light into the camera lens, the recent Star Trek movies added in CGI lens flare, some people hated it, some love it, it divided opinion and now so can you with Photoshop’s built in Lens Flare filter. For a long time, allowing... Read more

With the possible exception Peter Pan, everyone and everything has a shadow, as long as light is hitting it. Internal shadows appear where the surface contours towards and away from the light source. External shadows appear behind wherever the light source is. Multiple light sources cause multiple shadows and... Read more

Photoshop is capable of amazing things, you can literally create anything, or change anything into anything, but let’s be honest, all a lot of people really want to do 90% of the time is to put someone else’s face into a photo. Here’s a very simple way to do... Read more