Ability to produce spotless, great-looking photo effect is something that every Photoshopper strives to achieve. We all know Photoshop is designed to help us make photo/image look great, however, because Photoshop itself is such as large-scale, complicated software, sometimes it’s difficult for beginners or even intermediate users to find the function and option they need to make such effect. That’s why many tutorials have been created to help overcoming this difficulty.

In this post, I will show you my collection of 11 Fascinating and Educational Tutorials Teaching You How to Produce Better Photo Effects. Those are tutorial that I came across months or even years ago, and until now they still reside in my firefox bookmarks. It’s a small collection, however I’m sure  you will find pretty much everything you need to make great looking photos, based on the techniques outlined in each tutorial.

Hope you enjoy them and learn lots :)

For your viewing convenience, I broke down the tutorials into three difficulty levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advance.

Here goes the list, enjoy!

Beginner Level

Basic Photo Editing Tutorial

For this tutorial I will be showing you how I personally edit my photos. These are just the basics such as removing blemishes and smoothing the skin as well as making other general adjustment.

- source: thetragictruth-of-me.deviantart.com

Finding and Identifying the Light Source

Use Photoshop to create and add a dramatic ray of light to your photos. It’s easy, accurate, and fun! This tutorial shows you how to find and identify the light source for your photo. Fairly easy, have a try!

- source: photoshoptutorials.ws

Photoshop Tutorials: Turn A Photo Into A Collage Of Polaroids

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to take a single photograph and turn it into a collage of polaroids, with each polaroid containing a small section of the overall image. You can use this effect with lots of different types of images, whether it’s a photo of one person or several people. It’s great for photos of family or friends, vacation photos, or even as a creative effect for wedding photography.

- source: photoshopessentials.com

Transform Photo into Watercolor Painting

This tutorial shows a quick and easy method to transform photo into watercolour Painting by using just a few steps. The great thing about this tutorial is that you can use it pretty much any photo of your choice. Have a try!

- source: 10steps.sg

Intermediate Level

Faking HDR in Adobe Photoshop

This HDR Photoshop tutorial shows quite easy way to fake HDR photos in Photoshop. You don’t need to shoot into RAW or take multiple photos – one JPEG file is enough.

- source: nill.cz

Lighting a Giant Elephant

If you’re like me, every now and then you find yourself needing to insert a subject image into a background where the lighting between the two doesn’t quite match. Your subject image may be flatly lit, while your background contains crisp shadows and highlights — and if you don’t correct the problem you run the risk of getting a load of critical comments.

- source: worth1000.com

Fiery Photoshop Space Explosion Tutorial

Illustrating scenes from the final frontier can make for some beautiful work. In this tutorial — the longest we’ve ever published — I’ll walk you through creating a spectacular space scene featuring two planets colliding. Strap yourselves in, Photoshoppers!

- Source: psd.tutsplus.com

Seamless compositing

Learn how to fake unbelievable fantasy images, like this giant warrior lizard, using some clever Photoshop trickery.

- source: digitalartsonline.co.uk

Advance Level

Create dynamic distortion effects

In the following steps, I’ll let you in on one of the most effective and easily mastered techniques that I use to make striking, dynamic distortions of subjects – in this case I’ve used a model, although the technique can be adapted to any objects that you wish to feature in your work, such as cars or trees.

- source: computerarts.co.uk

Matte Painting

This tutorial is actually a “making of” where I explain how I proceeded to achieve this matte painting. I use a Wacom Intuos² A4 board, if you don’t have any graphic board this is going to be hard but not impossible. At each step of the matte painting, useless to remind you to create a new layer so that the work will be easier and mistakes avoided!

- source: 3dtotal.com

Create a Powerful Mental Wave Explosion Effect

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a crazy explosion, like a mix of Magneto’s ability with Peter Petrelli’s power. We will use images and filters to produce this wave explosion effect. Even though it may look like a difficult tutorial, it’s really not that hard.

And just by the way, this is the most amazing, comprehensive, absolutely beyond awesome tutorial I have ever seen so far on the interent.You’ve got to try this out.

- source: psd.tutsplus.com

Ok that’s it for this 11 Fascinating and Educational Tutorials Teaching You how to Produce Better Photo Effects post here on psdvault.com. Hope you enjoy this collection and found those tutorial interesting and useful.

Till next time, have a good night!

Have you ever come across an amazing looking photo that has vibrant colour and huge depth, and you wondered how on earth could this image be created in the first place? If you have, you probably bumped into one of those HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.

In this post, I have included 30 Mind-blowing HDR Images + 10 Articles that I found useful on How to Generate Them. Hopefully those wonderful works would inspire you, and the articles can get you started on HDR image processing.

I would love to hear from you about the experience you have for this respective, simply drop me a comment below and we can all learn together!

Here is a bit of definition I found on Wikipedia about HDR:

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

Here is the list of 30 Mind-blowing HDR Images from deviantArt.com (you can click on the image to view them on deviantArt.com and access the author’s homepage from there)

Got inspired and want to know more about HDR? here are some articles about HDR that I found useful:

How to Create Professional HDR Images

Photoshop CS2 has a little-known (it seems) built-in HDR assembler that, while lacking the “make my photo look like a bucket of saturated paints gone awry” tone-mapping features of Photomatix, is capable of creating extremely realistic or extremely surreal HDR images.

Simple Guide To HDR

HDR images are generated by taking multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposure settings and combining them digitally on a computer. Generally, the more pictures that are taken at different exposure settings the better the resulting HDR image will be.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography in Photoshop CS2

High dynamic range (HDR) images enable photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than a given camera could capture in a single photo.  This opens up a whole new set of lighting possibilities which one might have previously avoided—for purely technical reasons.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorial – HDR – High Dynamic Range

Contrary to popular opinion – what you see is not what you always get. You may be able to see the detail in those dark shadows and bright highlights when the sun is shining – but can your CCD or CMOS sensor? Contrast in a scene is often a photographer’s worst enemy. Contrast is a sneak thief that steals away the detail in the highlights or shadows (sometimes both).

HDR Photos and Photoshop

In the real world, the dynamic range far exceeds what our eyes are capable of seeing and what our monitors and printers are capable of displaying. With high dynamic range (HDR) images, you can create images that can store a larger dynamic range.

The Definitive Guide to Realistic High Dynamic Range Images

This tutorial will attempt to demonstrate how to make a realistic HDR, one that is virtually indistinguishable from a single exposure. The biggest goal is producing a tutorial that can stand as a standard by which anyone can learn to create a balanced HDR. Ultimately, the processing choices are yours.

Merge to HDR in Photoshop CS2

Everything has limits, and the technical evolution of photography during the past 150 years has largely been about overcoming the craft’s limitations. Dynamic range though is one of the limitations that hasn’t yielded much over the years to technology’s inexorable advances.

Photoshop HDR

This is an article about Photoshop HDR imaging. The following HDR workflow is explained in detail:

Merging photos to an HDR image
Processing the HDR image
Tone Mapping

Photoshop CS2 High Dynamic Range

Photoshop CS2, offers an intriguing new function for creating 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. It offers the ability to combine multiple individual images with different exposures into a single 32-bit floating-point image with expanded dynamic range.

Learn how to create awesome HDRs

In this post, you’ll learn the steps you need to take to create cool HDR images. Find out how to select a great scene, and how to properly take the images.

That’s it for this “30 Mind-blowing HDR Images + 10 Useful Articles on How to Generate Them” post on psdvault.com. I hope you find this post both inspirational and useful for your learning towards HDR image processing. I would love to hear from you about the experience you have for this respective, simply drop me a comment below and we can all learn together!