Articles by: Charles McNally
Photoshop Tutorial: How to Fake a Holga Photograph
May 20, 2009 by Charles McNally
If you don’t already know, the Holga camera is a $15 plastic toy camera, made in China and celebrated by many photographers for it’s blur, vignette, light leaks and low-quality aesthetic. I’ll assume that you don’t want to go through all the hassle of using film, developing it, dealing with negatives and printing and storing and all the rest, so I’ll show you the best way I know how to fake a Holga image using Photoshop. [Continue reading this tutorial] Read More →
Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 3 of 3)
May 14, 2009 by Charles McNally
Welcome to the last of the portrait retouching tutorial series. The previous two cover blemish removal and blurring/sharpening. This tutorial will focus on using curves to ensure your image looks nice and bright and color correct. If you’ve been following the previous tutorials, your portrait subject already looks great. It still may look a little dull however, and more than likely has a very subtle color tint, so we have to make sure the color flatters the subject’s skin and is accurate. I’m... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 2 of 3)
May 8, 2009 by Charles McNally
Hello, and welcome back to our three-part photo retouching tutorial. If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check out part one, in which we cover blemish removal and eye/teeth whitening. For this part of the tutorial, we’re going to learn how to both blur and sharpen your subject to create pleasing results. I know that blurring and sharpening the image seems somewhat contradictory, but we’re going to use layer masks to paint these effects onto the image only where we think... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Photoshop Tutorial: Plain Pic to Glamour Girl, Retouching Techniques. (part 1 of 3)
May 1, 2009 by Charles McNally
Greetings, pixel pushers! Today I’m going to teach you how to subtly transform a good picture into an excellent picture in just a few easy steps. By the end, you will be able to turn your pictures into beautiful portraits for business, friends, family members, even touch up your own myspace pics… This will come in handy when using your own photography on a website, or using your friends for product demonstration photos. This process is very similar to what magazines do to make sure skin... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Photoshop Tutorial: Partial Color With Layer Masks
April 7, 2009 by Charles McNally
I’m going to show you how to make a black & white image with selective color, using a very powerful tool in Photoshop called Layer Masks, and painting on these layer masks using the Brush Tool. We’re also going to make the color really pop, and we could even change the color entirely. To start, I find it a lot easier to use an image which lends itself well to the effect. I look for one bright, solid color, fairly isolated from other bright colors. For this reason, I chose this image... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Photoshop Tutorial: The Black & White Adjustment Layer
March 30, 2009 by Charles McNally
For those of us fortunate enough to have one of the latest two versions of Photoshop (CS3 or CS4), there is a new, more powerful and fun way to create black and white images and get a lot of control over color brightness. This is my favorite way to convert color images to black & white — I use it pretty much exclusively because it takes all the guesswork out of moving the sliders around and makes it easy to adjust complex colors. Ready? Load up your image and let’s go! [Note: If you own... [Continue reading this tutorial]
