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How to combine images at different shutter speeds

You’ve probably heard about exposure blending , in which light and dark exposures of a scene are blended together, usually to balance land and sky. But how about shutter blending? For this, rather than blending brightness, we’ll instead blend different-length exposures – one fast, one slow – to create a single image displaying both a split-second moment and a longer stretch of time. In our first shot, the motion of the cyclist has been captured with a single off-camera flash. This required a fast shutter speed, so we used the camera’s maximum sync speed of 1/250 second – fast enough to capture the motion of the cyclist, but too quick to record much detail in the background. For our second shot, we used a longer exposure of 15 seconds to capture more background detail and blur the motion of a passing gritter truck. (The interesting dashes of light are caused by the truck’s flashing beacons.) A tripod is essential when using shutter blending– both for the long exposure, and to
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Enhance your night shots with this really simple photo editing tutorial

One way to capture a dramatic-looking night shot is to pop the camera on a tripod and use a slow shutter speed to turn passing cars into colourful streaks of light. These vibrant light trails add contrasting colours and tones to a cold dull background, as well as evoking a great sense of movement in your still image. In this tutorial’s end result, the light trails also help enhance the composition by linking the car on the left with the blurry figures on the right. Capturing light trails in-camera is a hit-and-miss affair. You have to experiment with different shutter speeds to get the streaks to register and also to make them look long enough. You also have to deal with variables such as changing lighting conditions and car speeds. Thanks to Photoshop Elements, though, you can whip up some digital light trails by modifying brush tips to produce a streaky texture. Here we’ll demonstrate how to transform the 2D streaks and give them a sense of depth and direction. We’ll show you
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How to blur water in Photoshop Elements: get the slow shutter look (free start file)

In this quick Photoshop Elements tutorial we show you how to blur water using  simple Photoshop effects  to recreate the classic slow shutter look. Shoot moving water using a slow shutter speed and you risk over-exposing the shot and losing detail, especially in strong daylight. You could use a neutral density (ND) filter to reduce the amount of light entering the lens. Alternatively, you can capture a healthy exposure using a relatively fast shutter speed (we used 1/60sec for our start image) and then add more blur to the water in Photoshop. Here’s how… How to blur water in Photoshop Elements 01 Select the water Download our start image, water_before.jpg from  http://goo.gl/gZnrn . Go to Window>Layers and drag the Background layer onto the Create a New Layer icon. Grab the Magic Wand tool, set Tolerance to 30 and untick Contiguous. Click to select the whitest water. Hold down Shift and click to add other sections of falling water. 02 Add a layer mask Click on the Ba
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Panograph photography: how to make on-trend, ‘low-tech’ panoramas

A panograph is like a low-tech panorama, but as we show in our latest Photoshop Elements tutorial, its characteristic fragmented, home-made look can produce some fascinating pictures. What is a Panograph? Regular panoramas are good for photographing scenes which are too wide to capture with a single shot. With  today’s photo editing software  it’s possible to assemble the individual frames so that the joins are invisible. But in a ‘panograph’, there’s no attempt to hide the joins. Indeed, the fact that the picture is made up of individual photos is celebrated. It sounds like a technically inferior way to take panoramas, but panographs turn the scene into a kind of impressionistic mosaic, with fragments of life passing before the lens in a series of changing moments. Buildings don’t quite join up, pedestrians are chopped in half or appear in more than one frame, and there’s so much more to occupy your eyes as you unravel the fractured details in the scene. Panographs are eas
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4 Photoshop Elements tricks to make an average landscape stunning

Want to add impact to your otherwise average landscape image? Thanks to a few simple Photoshop Elements tricks  you don’t have to keep wasting photos . In this Photoshop Elements tutorial we explain 4 ways you can use Curves and the Gradient tool to make your landscapes stand out. Your digital camera can produce landscape shots with wonderful colours and contrast. But even if you get all your camera settings spot-on, you’ll sometimes find that images lack punch, especially if the contrast is strong and the camera overexposes shadows or underexposes highlights as a result. Take our landscape image for example: it looks flat and dull, and certainly doesn’t do the dramatic subject justice. Fortunately, there are lots of ways in which you can boost colour and contrast in Elements. One of the most effective tools for doing this is Adjust Colour Curves, which enables you to improve contrast by lightening or darkening particular parts of the tonal range. You can, for example, lighte
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20 free Photoshop actions for black and white landscapes

Download our free Photoshop actions for black and white landscapes and give your landscape photography a monochrome makeover! Photoshop Actions might not be the most glamorous aspect of creative post-processing, but integrate them into your digital workflow and you’ll save bags of time  by applying your favourite special effects in seconds. As we’ve explained before , an Action is essentially a recording of a Photoshop process (you can only record Actions in CS or Photoshop CC, by the way; newer versions of Elements enable you to play Actions, but the options are limited). The result works a treat, but it’s time-consuming if you want to apply it to lots of images. Record it as an Action, however, and it can be applied to other shots with a single click. And as if this wasn’t clever enough, you can apply an Action to an entire batch of images. You can even share your Actions online, or download Actions created by others… such as the ones we’re offering you today! Free Photos
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Adobe Lightroom 5 tutorial: the best new tools to enhance and retouch with ease

Our Adobe Lightroom 5 tutorial explains how to use the new tools in the Develop Module to enhance, retouch and correct distortion. With its two new tools, plus a huge improvement to existing ones, Adobe Lightroom 5 continues to deliver the kind of features and workflow options that photographers will find invaluable. In this Adobe Lightoom 5 tutorial we’ll focus on the changes to the Develop Module. The Radial Filter will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the Graduated Filter or Adjustment Brush in that it enables you to define and tweak an area with settings like Exposure, Clarity and Saturation. And just like the older tool, it enables you to blend the tonal change. But rather than a straightforward linear blend, you can make circular blends that can be positioned wherever you please. Upright, the second new tool, detects horizontal and vertical skew and fixes it at the click of a button. It’s an effective tool for distortion correction, particularly on wide-angle shots
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