A very quick and simple method to add lens flare to any photograph if you want to enhance a light source in the photo.  This works well for adding a little intensity to a concert photograph or giving an eithereal feel like in the photo below.

• create a new layer and fill with black
• use “lens flare” filter (filter>render>lens flare) and add a lens flare.  You have to add the black color (or white or grey) because “lens flare” won’t work on an empty layer.
• next step is to remove all that fill color using a blending mode.  In the case of black, “screen” mode will remove the black from that layer.
• now you can place that flare on top of existing light source within the image (for instance stage lights in a concert, or the sun in a landscape, etc).
• You can resize and relocated the flar by simply moving the layer around.
• If you find yourself seeing “sidebars” caused by the edge of the layer then either erase with a soft brush or use a gradient mask to remove it.

Photoshop of course is an amazing way to do touch up work on portrait photography.  However, all too often the touch up artist takes things too far, either by choice or more often becuase they simply don't know the techniques for doing natural touch up work in Photoshop.  The following article gives you some great touchup techniques for skin, eyes, lips and teeth that result in very realistic natural looking images.  As with anything in Photoshop, there are a hundred variations on these techniques, but to get the basic concept down, just grab a portrait of yourself and follow along with the tutorial steps.

Did you know that you can actually “paint” smoke into your photos and graphic designs with special “smoke” brushes in Photoshop?  Well you can.  So think of all the cool images you have that would look even cooler if there had been smoke pouring out of the house, the car, the building, or your brother’s ears.    Ok, so maybe you don’t want to make fake fires in your photographs, but smoke has other uses as well.  Just because it is called smoke doesn’t mean it cannot be used for any number of other cool effects.  Fog, stylized texture, insanely cool masking options, and more.  Just get creative.

Here is a long list of websites which give away various brush sets based on the “smoke” theme.

Looking to create some “cool” grunge type graphics from your photography?  Well, there’s a lot of ways to do it and a lot of styles to choose from.  So to get your started, here’s a long list of tutorials from various websites which you can use to jump start yourself.  These tutorials all work with Photoshop to give your artwork some textured, aged and uneven look with rusting metal signs, dirty spots, scorched borders, or overall distressed accents.  Have fun.

Just a few quick pointers to help improve your portrait photographs.

• If you use strobes instead of continuous hot lights, you will get larger pupils from your subject.  Nearly always this is considered more attractive and engaging.  (note: if you can’t get the large pupils naturally you can still get them in Photoshop.)
• Try and get a “catch light” in the person’s eyes.  That is the little cresent shape highlight caused by reflections of lights in a person’s eye.  (once again, this can be done in post, but looks better if you can do it on location.)
• Use your subject’s far cheek as a background for the nose.  By this I mean don’t let the outline of a person’s nose extend beyond the cheek.  That draws lots of attention to the nose and exaggerates any imperfections.
• When shooting a full figure.  Shooting from belly button level instead of standing level will make the person look taller.

HDR Hotography is a relatively new way of taking photographs which allows for new frontiers in artistic expression by the photographer and new advances in image capture by your camera.  The basic concept of HDR is the blending of multiple exposures to produce a wider range of visible details in a photograph.  That's the short description.  If your ready to dig into the detailed step by step instructions on creating HDR photos both in your camera and on the computer, then please read on.

So often I find that I’ll have a large string of separate layers which for whatever reason need to be combined.  For instance, maybe you used 12 layers to produce an interesting background, but now you want to add a guasiann blur to that background.  This is an issue because you cannot add “blur” filter to each layer one at a time, that would take forever, destroy your layer pixels and just look bad anyway.  So what do you do?  Most people will then use the turn off all the layers not part of the background and then use the “merge visible” command in the corner drop menu.  This will work, but has some drawbacks.

Send in your Photoshop and Lightroom questions. I’ll post you an answer.

When I’m not shooting photographs or tutoring I still must keep my Photoshop and Lightroom skills sharp.  One of the best ways to do that is to teach others how to make the most of their photos and artwork.  So send in your questions with as much detail as you can muster. I will respond to your question on my blog with full step by step detailed instructions on how to create the effect, look, restoration, etc that you are trying to achieve with your images.