Photoshop Tutorials

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going learn how to add creative focus to an image using Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, which has been available in Photoshop since Photoshop CS (which means you'll need Photoshop CS, CS2 or CS3 for this tutorial). When most people think of adding a blurring effect to an image in Photoshop, they immediately think of the Gaussian Blur filter, which has been around in Photoshop since the days of the dinosaurs (they used Photoshop BC back then). While Gaussian Blur is still a great filter with plenty of uses, it doesn't offer us much in terms of control over the blurring effect and usually needs to be paired up with a layer mask for it to be of any real use. Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, on the other hand, offers an incredible amount of control over the effect (more than you'll most likely ever need), and when used with an easy-to-create Depth Map, as we'll see in this tutorial, we can specify exactly how much blurring to apply to different areas of the image, giving us complete creative control over which areas are in focus and which are not.

In this tutorial we're going to create some really sharp looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the pen tool and colour blending. The end effect is quite stunning and hopefully you'll pick up some tips you didn't know before.

"In this tutorial, we’ll look at a quick and easy way to use Photoshop to add glamour and soft focus effects to an image. This effect is used a lot on models, but can be applied to other images too for added impact, especially color rich ones. We’ll also make the bunch of techniques into a Photoshop action, meaning that in future it’ll take just one click to apply the effect."

If Photoshop's Photo Filter isn't one of the most widely used features in the program, it certainly deserves to be. Not only is it easy to use, it's the only feature in Photoshop that lets you choose colors simply by selecting color names from a list! It also has several valuable uses, one of which we've already looked at in a previous tutorial - Neutralizing Color Casts With The Photo Filter - and this time, we're going to learn how to use it to tint and enhance colors in an image.

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to easily add a realistic water reflection to any photo. It's a very easy effect to create and you can add it to any photo you like, although it tends to work best with images that don't already contain water in them.
We'll be using a simple filter and a displacement map to create the water ripple effect, and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to give our water a little color.