On the Photoshop work area, the “artboard” – the area around your image – is by default 50% gray in all views except Full Screen mode. The artboard is the part of the Photoshop image window that appears when you make the viewing window larger than the image itself or that surrounds your image if you use any screen mode other than Standard. If you don’t like 50% grey as your background colour, and let’s...

This is an easy yet elegant technique for finishing your images for display online or even in a PDF and should be useful for web designers and photographers. Using Photoshop, you can create the effect of a matte and frame around your image. 1. Open up the photograph that you want to frame. (This is a photograph I took in South Kerry in February. Yes February!) Set your Foreground and Background colors to black and white respectively by...

The Clone Stamp tool (quick photoshop cloning tip here) is one of the most often used tools when it comes to retouching in Photoshop. But two other tools which are often overlooked by people new to the sport are the Healing Brush and the Patch tools. In this post, I’m going to show you how to use these tools to remove some wrinkles from an elderly lady’s face. To ensure that we get a realistic result we’ll firstly duplicate the...

You can clone an image, or part of an image onto a separate image in Photoshop using the Clone Tool. Here’s how to do it; 1. Make sure that you have two images open – the one you want to clone from and the one you want to clone to. 2. Select the Clone Tool (S) and Alt + Click (windows) or Option + Click (mac) on the first image to select a sample point. 3. Switch over to image you want to clone onto and start...

I wrote this article for PhotographyBB magazine. Check it out for lots of great articles on photography, Lightroom and Photoshop. The toy model look has become a very popular photo effect in recent times. It tends to work best on photographs taken from a height such as a shot from a window or a bridge. The high viewing angle helps to give the impression that you’re looking down on a toy model. 1. Open up your picture in Photoshop. This is...

In this tutorial, we’ll look at a technique you can use to gather together a number of your shots with a common theme and present them in a nice grid format. The idea is to do some close cropping on the images so they are all the same shape. 1. The first thing you need to do is to sort through your photographs and choose nine images that you want to use in your poster. It doesn’t matter if the pictures are in Portrait or Landscape...