Beauty is what you buy

One of the foremost photography challenges is learning how to properly evaluate the light in a scene and arrive at a perfectly balanced exposure. If you find this a struggle, the tutorial below from pro Gil Kreslavsky explains everything you need to know in the next 11 minutes.

Gil is an experienced Israeli photographer and educator who specializes in travel, street and documentary imagery, with a popular YouTube that shares his experiences, gear preferences, practical insights, and real-world tips. He introduces the video like this: “You’ll learn how to understand light the way your camera does, master dynamic range, and avoid guessing about your settings.”

By the time the lesson concludes you’ll approach exposure with confidence, master dynamic range, and know how to control bright highlights and deep shadows. With this knowledge in hand, the creative decisions you make will strengthen every image you shoot in challenging situations.

Gil’s advice is based on the fact that our eyes and the camera see light in very different ways. His analogy is to imagine that you’re standing indoors, looking out through a window. “The human eye can easily observe what’s happening indoors and out, but a camera can only accurately deal with one of these very different light intensities.”

Thus, if you meter for the dim room, everything beyond the window will be blown out and devoid of detail. Conversely, the indoor scene will be dark and unreadable if you expose for what’s outside. This is because “our sensitive eyes can discern approximately 24 stops of light tonality, while modern cameras are limited to capturing a range of 13-15 stops.”

What all this means in the field is that there may be a big chunk of dynamic range that a camera simply cannot record. Now that you understand these theoretical considerations, the practical techniques that follow make perfect sense, and they’re very easy to implement if you follow Gil’s straightforward advice.

Gil explains the compromises required to balance light in various scenarios and conditions for an ideal range of tones. Sometimes appropriate camera settings will get the job done, while other times the solution is limiting dynamic range or changing your vantage point and framing a scene differently.

In short, you can eliminate guesswork and consistently nail exposure by employing Gil’s tips and techniques. Be sure to explore his instructional YouTube channel once the video concludes.

We also recommend watching an earlier tutorial we featured with another accomplished outdoor shooter who provides a quick-and-easy beginners guide for harnessing the power of backlighting to capture nature, wildlife, and landscape photographs that demand everyone’s attention.

Whenever Photoshop gets an update it’s easy to concentrate on headline-grabbing features while overlooking other new and important capabilities that aren’t considered as “revolutionary” but important nonetheless. Today’s eye-opening tutorial from Adobe expert Julieanne Kost reveals 10 recent upgrades that are deserving of note.

Kost is a highly respected photographer, educator, and an expert at all things Adobe whose popular YouTube channel has 55K subscribers who appreciate her how-to videos that have received over 4M views. There’s a very good chance that the tutorial below will change your post-processing workflow forever more.

Be prepared to take a few notes because Kost covers a lot of ground in nine minutes as she runs through her list of oft-ignored features that includes everything from tricks with Photoshop’s Gradient tool, fonts and type, Generative Fill, the Adjustment Brush, and more.

She begins with Photoshop’s familiar Select Subject and Remove Background capabilities and demonstrates how much they’ve evolved when image processing is set to Cloud. As she says, “With the improved processing expect to see improvements to subject detection, masking of fine details, edge selection, and the selection of holes within an object.”

Next on the list is a unique way to create gradients by choosing the Stripes option found in the Method dropdown menu. This approach is super helpful when your goal is to achieve interesting effects with abrupt transitions between colors.

Tip #3 has to do with the fact that more that 1,500 new fonts have been added to Adobe’s Type library, “including many of the most popular fonts of all time from monotype, such as Helvetica, Gotham, and Avenir. Another noteworthy upgrade is that Photoshop’s Frame tool now supports custom shapes. There are a variety of presets, but you can also use the Shape panel’s fly-out menu to load additional legacy shapes or even create custom shapes of your own.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of everything you’ll learn about the new Photoshop enhancements you may have missed, along with helpful advice for putting them to work. Once you’re done be sure to visit Kost’s instructional YouTube channel where you’ll find many more transformative methods for making the most of Adobe’s image-editing software.

And don’t feel ignored if you’re a Lightroom user because we recently featured a tutorial from another post-processing export who demonstrates his seven favorite hidden Lightroom tools that you should start using today whether you’re a beginner or more experienced photographer.