Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Photoshop
A little while ago I was going through some photos and I came across a cool shot I had taken in New York of a dog in front of a large window. Unfortunately it was ruined by the reflection of yours truly. Normally removing something like this would be quite time consuming, so I thought, why not try Generative Fill. Not only did it work, but it worked perfectly at removing the reflections and keeping the other detail. So I made a video to show you the process…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Adobe’s “generative fill” for photoshop. The feature, which uses Adobe’s firefly AI engine to add AI-generated imagery to your photos or artwork directly in photoshop. Now that it is no longer test software, I wanted to share my experience, and address a couple of big issues with generative fill.
Just a quick PSA - if you’re in the market for a new Adobe subscription, they’re currently offering 20% off the All Apps plan (this is the one I use) in select European, Middle East and Asian countries. Read on for more details.
Ever since the most recent update (at the time of writing) to Photoshop included the new “super resolution” feature in Camera Raw there has been a lot of discussion, and an equal amount of misinformation about this feature. In case you missed it, “Super Resolution” is Adobe’s new method of upscaling a file using artificial intelligence to give a superior result to previous methods. There have been some wild claims about this online, including some claims that it doubles the resolution of your camera, and that you no longer need to buy a high megapixel system, as this is just as good. In this article, we will take a look at “Super Resolution”, discuss its actual usage case, and talk about some tips on how to use it.
One of the tools recently added to Photoshop was a new AI-based sky replacement feature. Similar to the headline feature in Luminar, it allows you to replace a sky without complex masking. While sky replacement has gotten something of a bad name recently, it can actually be useful for quickly fixing an otherwise problematic image. In this case, I use it to replace an overexposed sky with a similar one and salvage a photo with a minimal amount of work.
A recent technology demonstration from Adobe showed off a new feature coming to Camera RAW and Lightroom: Colour Grading. The applications will get a three-way colour corrector similar to video editing applications, and a feature that has been present for some time in Capture One.
I almost missed this from the announcements yesterday, but Camera RAW in Photoshop has gotten a big makeover. It now behaves and looks a lot more like Lightroom. Some of the old frustrating behaviours are gone and it now supports high resolution displays properly.
Luminar’s best-known party trick is its AI Sky Replacement, whether you love it or hate it, but it occasionally doesn’t work properly. I was recently playing around with an image from my archive, and I came across such a situation. Here’s the method I used to get around the problem.
In this video, I use Photoshop to add some foreground interest to a Landscape image and correct an unbalanced composition. Part of my “Live Editing” session series normally for Patreon Members, I’m making this episode available to everyone on YouTube.
In this video I give you a sneak peak at what it’s like to use Luminar 4 to enhance a cityscape image. Using a photo of the New York City skyline, I show you what it’s like using the new AI Sky replacement filter, and a quick look at the new interface.
If you are using Luminar flex as a plug-in for Lightroom, then there are lots of different ways to activate it. However, personally I use a bit of a roundabout method, by sending the image to Photoshop first. In this post I’ll explain why, and what the steps are that you should use if you want to work this way too.
If you ever need to open a RAW file in Photoshop using Camera RAW I recently saw a demo featuring a feature that is sort of hidden, but is really useful. This is possibly a little bit technical, but the tip basically allows you to open a RAW file as a smart object without explicitly choosing the option to open as a smart object.
One of the key new features of Lightroom 7.3 and the corresponding Photoshop release, was the addition of creative profiles. If you’re not familiar with these, they are sort of a cross between presets and LUTS, and can be applied to both RAW and JPEG images (and of course tiff, and psd etc). You may be wondering how to create these new profiles. Well, it’s actually pretty easy, but you need to use photoshop. What follows is a basic guide. I will do a more in-depth version in a future post which goes into the more technical details.
Ever since adobe updated Lightroom earlier this moth and changed the way presets are stored, there has been a lot of confusion around the new system, and I myself have been caught out by this too. In fact, I was so confused by the changes, I mistook one aspect of the new format completely wrong, and ended up putting out some incorrect information. Luckily a reader set me straight, and so here is the semi definitive guide to the new preset format.
I was playing around with some photos in Photoshop earlier today, and I was also using Luminar as a plug-in, when I stumbled across something cool, almost by accident. It’s one of those things, that seems kind of obvious on hindsight, but I had never thought of trying this before. You can use Luminar non-destructively within Photoshop if you use it on a smart layer.
I wanted to share a quick video tip with you about removing people from a shot in Photoshop. This isn’t a video about how to use the clone tool or anything like that. In fact I only use the clone tool for a short part of it. I actually use two images to remove the people, and combine them using one of Photoshop’s lesser known but really useful tools. First, let me back up a bit and explain the circumstances surrounding the shot.
I’ve talked about MacPhun’s Luminar here before. Specifically I discussed it in the context of the software being a new RAW converter, and I talked about the possibilities it offers. However, there’s another way to use the application, which also works really well, and that’s as a plug-in. You can use it as a plug-in for either Photoshop or Lightroom, and it offers a lot of functionality. Recently I was using it on an actual project, and so I thought that I’d discuss what I did and how I used the software.
I have been having a devil of a problem with Photoshop and Camera Raw for quite some time now. Basically, when opening an image, or pretty much anything that triggered the Camera Raw engine, it would take ages to load the window. I’m not talking about a minor inconvenience of a few seconds either, I’m talking about minutes. On occasion it could take up to 10 minutes to launch the Camera Raw window, which in turn would grind Photoshop to a halt. I searched online for a solution but couldn’t find one. Then, the other day, like a bolt of lightning, a possible solution occurred to me, and it seems to have solved the problem.
