Want to learn how to crate and use actions in Adobe Photoshop?  Maybe you’ve heard about it, or tried it in the past, only to find yourself getting stuck or held up at a certain point?  This tutorial is for you.  It will walk you through the basics of how to record an action and then how to use it in your post processing workflow.  Tutorial by the one and only Bob Mizerek.

Cross processing is a technique where you either have the same image, shot on a tripod, captured with multiple exposures. Or, cross-processing can also be done by creating mutltiple exposure levels in post, using an original RAW file.  Here, Bob Mizerek gives us a peek inside his personal workflow to see how he took a landscape photo of a forest from dull to spectacular by cross-processing the image.

This Photoshop tutorial via IceFlowStudios is a brief and simple to follow method to make the iris and pupils of the eyes of your model really POP in Photoshop.  We all know we can sometimes use the dodge tool to selectively brighten or highlight the whites of the eyes, but this tutorial focused on the actual iris and pupil.  Using the dodge and burn tools, the tutorial instructor here shows how you can make them really jump out, when you either have catchlights that are uninteresting, or dull; or when the iris is just looking a little bit muddy.

This is a really good Photoshop tutorial video on advanced dodge and burn techniques for portraiture.  These are the types of things that are good to know for that one special image you’re working on.  It’s not the quickest or easiest stuff in the world.  This stuff takes time, but the time is definitely well spent.  Most stock photographers like myself can’t afford to invest this much time into just one image or piece of stock art, for the sake of workflow and return on investment.  These dodging and burning methods are definitely something I might do for a client, or for a very special marketing or advertising campaign where one portrait is the main focus or feature image.  Editorial or fashion photographers and retouchers might employ this much retouching in their workflow, especially for headshots, magazine covers or article spreads.  Here the artist/author, Sean Armenta, also shares how to work with curves, curve adjustment layers, and layer masking.

Tutorial shared from the Red Dot Blog.

Here Bob “The Miz” takes a simple landscape image and shows how to turns it from dull to interesting in photoshop in just around 4 minutes.  By adding highlights to some of the tree limbs and tweaking the levels, as well as adjusting the way the sky looks, the image really comes to life (as compared to the original). The techniques covered in this tutorial video include layer masking, saturation, curves adjustment layers, and blown out sky replacement.