You applied a preset, tweaked a few sliders, and suddenly your subject looks like they spent a week in a tanning bed. If your skin tones look unnatural after editing, you are not alone. This is one of the most common frustrations photographers share on Reddit, in Facebook groups, and across photography forums. Here is … Read more
We have all been there. You come home from a shoot, load your photos onto the computer, and every single one has a sickly yellow or cold blue tint. The white balance was wrong on your camera, and now you are staring at JPEG files wondering if those shots are ruined. The short answer is … Read more
Fluorescent lights give your photos a green tint because the mercury vapor inside the tubes emits light with strong spikes in the green wavelengths (around 545 nanometers), rather than the full, even spectrum of daylight. Your camera sensor records this green-heavy light faithfully, but your brain automatically compensates for it, so you never notice the … Read more
Color temperature is a way to describe the color of light emitted by a light source, measured in degrees Kelvin (K). It defines the warmth or coolness of light and directly influences the overall tone of every photograph you take. If you have ever wondered why your indoor photos look orange while your outdoor shots … Read more
You take a beautiful winter landscape shot, and the snow looks like it belongs on an alien planet. That stubborn blue tint ruins otherwise great photos, and it is one of the most common frustrations photographers face in cold-weather and shade shooting. If you want to learn how to fix a blue color cast in … Read more
Indoor photos look orange or yellow because artificial light sources like tungsten bulbs emit warm-colored light at around 2700K to 3200K on the Kelvin scale, and your camera’s auto white balance is not compensating for this color temperature. When the white balance setting does not match the actual light source, the camera records that warm … Read more
You just spent good money on a dedicated camera. You take a photo, look at the back screen, and feel underwhelmed. Then you pull out your phone, snap the same shot, and it looks crisp, vibrant, and sharp. What is going on here? If you have ever wondered why does everything look sharp on my … Read more
Use an aperture between f/11 and f/16 to keep a whole landscape sharp from foreground to background. This range gives you the best balance of deep depth of field and maximum lens sharpness for most landscape photography situations. Go wider than f/5.6 and your foreground starts to blur. Go narrower than f/18 and diffraction softens … Read more
Your background blurs more with a telephoto lens because of two forces working together: the telephoto compression effect magnifies a narrower slice of the scene, and the shallow depth of field at that magnification spreads the blur across a larger area of the image sensor. The result is that out-of-focus background elements appear bigger, softer, … Read more
You lined everyone up perfectly, pressed the shutter, and felt great about the shot. Then you opened the photo on your computer and realized the front row is tack-sharp but the back row looks like a watercolor painting. If you are wondering why your group photos have some people out of focus, you are dealing … Read more