Photo Editing Software and Applications

Today, I would like to showcase a few Photoshop tutorials that would speed up your workflow. All these tricks are related to images only, as designers not really want to spend extra time in playing with images. These quick tutorials would help them in speeding up their task, without compromising on the quality.

While creating a layer style, the changes are made to all the layer, but If you wish to make changes to a certain part of the image, here is the way to turn your layer styles into layers:

In a recent update to their image search, Yahoo have introduced a filter to allow you to only display images covered by the Creative Commons license, which you are allowed to reuse (sometimes with conditions, please check). Firstly, this filter only appears to be active on http://images.search.yahoo.com, and is not yet active on http://uk.images.search.yahoo.com/ 

Adobe has disclosed that there has been a breach in their servers, and hackers had access to encrypted data for as many as 2.9 million customers. Adobe is stressing that the data is encrypted and that they "do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit car numbers."

In this article, we round up some of our favorite tutorials that include skulls, monsters, zombies, haunted houses, and witches for your Halloween projects.

When the Adobe Camera RAW plugin was released back in February of 2003, it instantly became a must-have tool for photographers. Since then, the plugin has been frequently updated to support more cameras and more features. Adobe Camera RAW is available as part of Photoshop CC and is built upon the same powerful raw processing technology as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In this tutorial, part of a comprehensive series on Adobe Camera RAW, we will explain what Camera RAW is and how you can use it to make non-destructive edits to your photos.

It may already be too late. Houzz appears to be using the images posted by professional photographers to illustrate editorial stories they create for the front of the site.

One photographer was contacted by a staff writer to find out who built what was depicted in the images with no mention of licensing the images for this reuse.

It’s not unusual for social media sites to have onerous terms when it comes to posting your images on their site. Generally this is because they have to host the images on servers which may be located anywhere in the world and repost the images at will for other people to see. To solve this they take all your rights… We’re all suspicious of what might come next but so far that’s been the extent of what they do. Houzz has taken the first step in reuse that should be of great concern for professional photographers. Paying writers to create editorial content with images uploaded to the site competes directly with existing editorial outlets that pay for a similar use. So not only are they ripping off photographers they’re stealing readers from outlets with their free content. And as Houzz works towards a profitable business model they will start selling advertising against their freely obtained content… and their evil plan will be complete.

Adobe Photoshop ships with some pretty cool photographic layer styles, don't you know? All you have to do to access one single click cool effects for your images is to display Window > Styles panel and to load styles. Click on Styles panel menu and choose: Image Effects and Photographic Effects. When pop-up dialog appears click on Append what means add/load styles to currently loaded.

Adobe’s photo-editor software gets its annual refresh with tweaks and new features, but its biggest change is the move to a subscription model. Adobe has tweaked and added more features to Photoshop Creative Cloud (Photoshop CC), making an already good image-editing application even better.

However, what Photoshop CC adds is a number of new tools, most notably a Camera Shake Reduction filter (accessible from Filter\Sharpen\Shake Reduction in the menus). This filter actually reduces motion blur caused by camera shake and actually produces a much sharper photo from a shot that is normally unusable.

In use, it actually works okay and there are a number of sliders that allow you to increase or decrease the effect. There are limits to how much shake can be reduced in a photo but if you’ve ever had shots that have been ruined by slight camera shake, this may actually be able to save it. Again something that will interest photographers is that Photoshop CC also features an improved upscaling feature if you want to enlarge your photographs beyond its original size. It does seem to do a good job, although again, don’t expect it to add details back into an image where there was none to begin with.

In case you decided to switch from Adobe Photoshop to Adobe InDesign, you may feel a bit intimidated like I did. It’s a new piece of software, and that usually implies some (usually steep) learning curve. Guess what? You got it all wrong. It was easy, painless, and for the most part I was able to transition seamlessly.

First thing’s first, why do you feel the need to switch over to InDesign in the first place? In most cases, you’ve been handed a project by a client that is in the .indd file format. Or, maybe you’re latest project is a multi-page publication.

InDesign allows you to define a layout and then gives writers the ability to change up the content on the fly without destroying your well-designed layout. Sure, you can try to design a 12-page publication in Photoshop, but you can be sure of one thing — the editors are going to come in at the last minute and want a bunch of new content added or cut out. This can completely change your layout and which text flows from one page to the next.

InDesign is going to be your best bet if you want to have quick control of the global document without having to mess with multiple documents in Photoshop.

This tutorial will teach you how to create a design featuring a colorful explosion contrasting with grayscale elements. This design heavily relies on the creative use of brushes, patterns and Photoshop tools/effects.

Though this tutorial was created in Photoshop CS5, you should have no problems achieving the same effect in any CS version.