Articles by: Charles McNally

Photoshop Tutorial: Faking Darkroom Film Edges

So far in my photoshop tutorials, we’ve covered quite a bit on how to fake the look of an old toy camera, with the Holga, LOMO/X-Pro, and Light Leaks tutorials.  These are fun to do, but if you really want to go all the way and to make people think you’re shooting film, this is the last (and really most important) step. Digital cameras trim the edges of your shot (as do a good amount of enlargers) so that you don’t actually see any edges – the image goes all the way to the... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Photoshop Tutorial: Light Leaks, pt. 2

One of the coolest things about older cameras and toy cameras (such as holgas, dianas, lubitels and other gems) is that they have an element of unpredictability to them. If you haven’t shot on a camera before, you have no idea if there are going to be holes (usually around the edge of the film) where your film is accidentally exposed to light when it shouldn’t be, causing little colored blurs or white streaks. I showed you how to get white-blur light leaks in the last photoshop tutorial,... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Photoshop Tutorial: Light Leaks, pt. 1

One of the coolest things about older cameras and toy cameras (such as holgas, dianas, lubitels and other gems) is that they have an element of unpredictability to them. If you haven’t shot on a certain camera before, you have no idea if there are going to be holes (usually around the edge of the film) where your film is accidentally exposed to light when it shouldn’t be, causing little colored blurs or white streaks. Now that I’ve shown you how to fake a holga photograph and how... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Photoshop Tutorial: Getting that great X-PRO LOMO look

Let me explain the title real quick, in case any readers aren’t in the know yet. LOMO is a russian optics company that makes cameras. They use the word Lomography to mean a wide-angle, shoot-from-the-hip, distorted colors, plastic lenses, expired film kind of photo asthetic. Another thing a lot of Lomographers like to do is x-pro, or cross processing. This is the act of developing one kind of film in the chemicals meant to develop another kind of fim. For a lot of photographers, this means... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Software Review: Vertus Fluid Mask 3

I was a little hesitant when I signed up for this review. A masking program? I’ve seen quite a few masking programs that were hard to work with, with steep learning curves, bad tools, poor quality and more. I went in to it with pretty low expectations, to be honest, so I was blown away when I encountered the level of quality in Fluid Mask. Most of the time I create cutouts using photoshop layer masks and spend a lot of time zoomed in up close. It’s seemed to work pretty well — I thought... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Photoshop Tutorial: Tilt-shift Miniature Faking

Hello fellow photo editors! Today we’re going to learn how to make everything in your picture look like it’s teeny-tiny by simulating the extremely short focal plane that macro photography creates. It’s fake tilt-shift photography. Tilt-shift is actually kind of a misnomer for this, however, as tilt-shift lenses don’t quite get this same kind of effect. Thanks wikipedia! This is just a fun, quirky edit and works great for outdoor sporting events, parking lots, city-scapes... [Continue reading this tutorial]

Next Page »