Ever take a nice outdoor photo or landscape and wonder, “Gee what happened to that nice blue sky there was on that day?”  Well, a lot of time depending on the direction of the light and your exposure, the sky will become blown out.  You might lose a lot of cloud detail, and a lot of the deep blue color you remembered from that day.  Check out this quick and easy Photoshop technique using simple selections and an addition sky images, for “digital Photoshoptic surgery”.

Blown out skies ruin a lot of good photos – don’t worry, they’re very easy to fix in Photoshop in under 5 minutes.

The dodge tool set to “highlights” is mind blowingly helpful when it comes to shooting white seamless, or objects over white.  It’s always better to get it right in the camera or in the studio, but sometimes that doesn’t always happen. Here is an older Photoshop tutorial I thought I’d resurrect from the dead today.  It shows you how you can quickly and easily clean up your photos shot over white or light gray by using the dodge tool in Adobe Photoshop. This allows you to avoid having to tweak levels, make an actual selection or use masking.

I came across a great Photoshop video tutorial today demonstrating how to properly use the liquify filter to enhance images of people.  This guy does a great job of showing a little about what each tool does, and how simple it is to use it.  I’ve stuck to the basics up until now, but this tut has helped me learn a lot.  You really can do anything to people with this tool…make their butt larger or smaller, their boobs, their arms and legs, eyes, face, twist their head, even.  Yes you can become a digital plastic surgeon!  Now, obviously we don’t all have this much time to invest into perfecting every single image.  In stock, buyers want what’s real as well, not just perfection.  Keep that in mind, but have fun playing with this sweet tool.

Video by imaging expert and award-winning author Deke McClelland

Below are a few other videos demonstrating how far you can go with the liquify filter.