Save time with Actions in Photoshop

We all like sharing our pictures on social media platforms like Facebook, but optimising your pictures for upload can be slow and painful, writes Jon Adams. Follow this easy Photoshop tip, however, and you'll cut out the dull, repetitive task involved in making your imags ready for upload. In this video, Jon shows you how to create an Action that will perform all the image optimisation chores and save your file to a new folder in ... wait for it ... one click!

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Flashphobia – and how to cure it!

Unless we’re very studio-oriented and using it on a daily basis, flash is a bit of an enigma for most photographers, writes Jon Adams. It’s a mysterious entity we might be happy to use for a burst of extra illumination if it’s on ‘auto’ mode and the flash is ‘talking’ to the camera, but we like to stay out of that conversation and just accept the results. We can always delete the pics if we don’t like them, and the idea of getting involved in those inverse-square-law calculations to determine the required exposure is far too much like being back at school. And photography is supposed to be fun, isn’t it? Not some practical application of Newton’s laws we didn’t quite grasp half a century back in ‘O’ level physics!

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Using extension tubes

When it comes to gadgets and gizmos, one of the things that makes a huge difference - but is often overlooked - is the humble extension tube, writes Jon Adams. If you’re not familiar with these contraptions, they are hollow tubes with a lens mount on one end and a camera mount on the other, and they fit between the camera body and the lens to increase the distance between the optics and the sensor.

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How ‘real’ is your photography?

Unless you’ve been under a rock (or bobbing about in the Arctic) for the last week, you probably noticed that a controversial debate has been reignited in the photo community about the relationship between photography and reality, writes Jon Adams.

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Adding subjects to new scenes

A little while back, we looked at how simple composite images can be created in Photoshop by adding a new foreground to an image, writes Jon Adams. In this video, we take things a step further by cutting out a specific subject from one shot and adding it to an entirely different scene. With so many automated selection tools now available in Photoshop and Lightroom, you may think that a hands-on manual approach is a thing of the past. But because those automated tools don't always works successfully, the manual route with the Pen Tool is sometimes the best option, so it's essential to know how to use it...

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