Photoshop is an marvelous instrument for graphic design, but there is certainly a lot to learn for photographers, and there’s always more to rule for those who are already experienced. If you’re currently working as a photographer and editor and looking to modify your skills, you probably find that time is a major restriction to improve your knowledge. If so, you will need to develop a plan to enhance your skills step-by-step in the time that you have. If you are an aspiring editor, you may have no idea where to start in order to achieve the level of success of some of the Photoshop masters that we see online or on YouTube. In this, article we’ll look at the steps you can take to increasingly build your skills using tools that are already available.

1. Follow Tutorials

   There are number of websites or blogs or youtube videos that focus on supplying superior quality tutorials for photographers. There are a increasing amount of other websites and blogs that regularly publish Photoshop tutorials. All of these places are precious resources for enhancing your skills, whether you want to develop particular skills or just looking to modify in general. In order to take benefit of the tutorial sites that are accessible, subscribe to a a couple of sites that you like the most so you don not miss out on new ones (you can also bookmark other tutorial sites in case you want to find them afterwards). With the number of content available in market, you will never be able to work through each tutorial, and you are unlikely to have an involvement in all of them anyway. Try to select one or two per week to try on your own. For most of us, learning is a easy step when we are actually doing things ourselves, so working while reading the tutorials is necessary rather than browsing through them.

2. Experiment

   The perfect way to learn something new is to experience it for yourself. While tutorials are helpful, you should also take out some time to just experiment on your own to see what magic you can create. You can try to apply things you have learned through tutorials, or just experiment with things you are not well-known with. Photoshop has so many various functions, features and settings that you will really need to become well-known in order to understand their potential. Experimenting will open up your creativity and help you to get more handy with Photoshop. To put the lessons you learn from others into practice by your own, you will need to do some experimentation and adaptation. There may be some tutorials that teach you precisely what you want to do, but more likely they will teach you a skill or technique that can be used, but you’ll need to set it to fit with your project or image.When experimenting, find something that suits best for you in terms of learning new tricks.
   
   

3. Start with basics

   There’s so much to learn with Photoshop and so many outlook that it is important to get a hold of the basics before attempting to move on the advanced. Like anything else, the basics of your Photoshop knowledge is will help you in future. If you are beginner, rather than trying to follow with advanced tutorials, take some time to get your perfect hands on the basics before anything else. Start with tutorials on all of the basics of Photoshop, like the interface, the tools, shortcuts and more. Having a proper knowledge of these items will make it much easier when you want to work on advance part later. After that start to cover topics as typography, web components and photo manipulation and then you can move to advanced tutorials.
   
   

4. Participate in groups and get reviews

   After you have learned some tutorials and you have done some experiment by your own, it is helpful to get feedback and review from other designers as well to improve of the parts which are still not perfect. There are groups of graphic designers on social media all over the place that can be excellent for feedback and review. There are hundreds of groups for designers that are not connected with a particular blog or websitewhere you can get honest reviews for your experiment. Groups are great spot to share your work with other designers or photographers who are also enhancing their own ability. You can get active by giving honest feedback to other people on their work, and you will get more result on your own work indirectly. If you are interested in a place where you can share your experiment to continue the learning activity, try some Flickr groups.
   
   

5. Find an pro to follow

   Regardless of what field you are into, following and learning from a professional can be highly helpful, and Photoshop is no different. If you want to become a good editor, find someone that you look up to and pay close attention to their work. Fortunately, being in this field that is related to technology, it is easy to find experts online and see their work, read their blogs, and interviews.These interviews provides information about their lives and their careers that can help you in your own work and career. If you already admire someone, subscribe to their blog, search for them on social media, keep an eye on their daily uploads. If you do not have any expert you admire, concentrate on work that you like in groups, see what stands out to you, or find a particular tutorial writer that has a mode which you acknowledge. In some cases you may be able to get in touch with the particular person through their site or through profiles on social media and having a conversation with them will help you more to learn.

Shooting waterfalls is a must to-do, especially with those folks who shoot nature and landscape. Shooting a waterfall is fun and very rewarding especially if you recognize the way to get the best waterfall images. The whole idea of shooting a waterfall is to point out its is flow and motion, sometimes bigger waterfalls are visualised in wide angles to offer a thought about its vastness and size. A waterfall also will be suffering from its flow of water and particularly during monsoons where all water bodies are full and flowing. It becomes an excellent opportunity for photographers to capture images of the waterfalls. Waterfall images are often made very interesting with a mixture using lens, composition and tools sort of a ND filter or a polariser. In this article we’ll discuss some tips to form your waterfall images even better and guide you to a number of the gorgeous waterfalls in India where you can go and shoot amazing images.

To begin with capturing waterfall images, you’ll need a camera that has full manual control over the settings, be it a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. Although it’s not really necessary to possess high end gear to capture good images and your crop sensor camera is quite enough.

Using an ND filter.

ND or Neutral density filters control the mount of sunshine hitting your sensor. This becomes very helpful in situations where you’ve got to regulate the quantity of sunshine. You can do an equivalent changes with the settings of the camera also but an ND filter offers you more freedom when you would like a bigger aperture within the middle of the day. There are a couple of disadvantages with ND filters, especially while shooting landscape and therefore the time of the day has harsh and hard sunlight. In such cases there’ll be areas with high intensity light forming hotspots then the shadow areas. In such a case, using an ND filter will get lesser details in the shadow region. To solve this, you ought to consider shooting at dawn or dusk depending on the intensity and direction of the sun.

Pay attention to details just like the environment, the direction of sunshine and the the elements that you simply want in your frame. It’s important to compose your shot before you press the shutter. Employing a wide angle lens will allow you to bring more area into your frame.

Choose your exposure correctly.

If you’re fixing fully manual, it’s suggested that you to take it easy on the settings. One thing you will surely require while shooting a waterfall its the sense of motion and flow. This needs opening the shutter for a extended time for that the exposure can capture the flow of the water with the environment perfectly steady. Sometimes there is going to be a considerate amount of wind and this may cause the trees and a couple of elements in your frame to move and cause blur. This can be overcome by shooting multiple exposure and a couple of where the exposure is balanced for a faster shutter speed so that the elements can be captured steady. Later the pictures are often stacked in post-processing and a wonderfully blended image are often achieved.

Use a polariser to eliminate the unwanted reflections in the image. When shooting waterfalls, you’ll encounter variety of places where there will be tons of reflections. Reflections do look good in some situations but most of it might be unnecessary. So you’ll need to adjust the filter to get the utmost effect of removal of reflection.

Take a look at the histogram.

The histogram shows the quantity of highlights and shadows within the image and always keep the values from blowing up. An excessive amount of highlights or too dark shadows aren’t desirable as there’s tons of details which will be lost within the shadows and highlights. You have to shoot in RAW file format to permit you to fix anything that has gone wrong. But always make sure to have a glance at the pictures and fix anything directly inside the camera instead of depending upon post processing.

Use a tripod

Use a tripod to keep the camera steady, select the smallest ISO and set the aperture narrow. See the desired shutter speed if achieved or use an ND filter to get even slower speeds. The thought is to get the water in motion which can look milky after completing the exposure.

Most places and countries have some or the other waterfalls flowing. These waterfalls tend to be bigger and more beautiful during the monsoons and make incredible subjects for landscape photography. In India, there are quite a couple of waterfalls and if you would like to travel and capture some waterfalls, Google about the amazing places in India where you’ll get the simplest waterfall images.

Handheld shots for long exposures

Your arms aren’t as stable as a tripod. They shake a little, and so for handheld shots, you cannot set your shutter speed to a very low value. Telephoto lenses can significantly magnify distant subjects, but every millimeter of hand motion can mean as much as a meter-wide jump for the objects in the frame. The general rule of thumb is that you can use a shutter speed of up to [1/focal length] seconds. So with a wide, 24mm lens, you can use up to 1/30 seconds approximately, while a telephoto lens with a 400mm focal length will need a much shorter time: 1/400 second. If there’s not sufficient light for the shot, then you need to increase the ISO, decrease aperture value or use the stabiliser if your camera or lens which comes with stabilisation. When none of these options works, then you can shoot using a tripod or lay your camera on a flat surface. If there’s nothing usable around, then you can support with your hands against your body. That gives you more steadiness, and so you can use somewhat longer times. By leaning against a tree, you can improve things even more.

Times Too Long for the Action

You can keep the camera as steady as you want, but if you’re photographing humans or other living beings, their movement in images will be blurry. So, when shooting social events, you keep to a shutter speed of 1/125 second or faster than that. Or at worst at a shutter speed of 1/60 seconds, but in that case, be prepared to risk having blurring in your images. If you want to capture sports, you’ll find that even shorter shutter speeds are required. They can need shutter speeds as fast as 1/400 seconds, depending upon the sport and the photo’s style. Here neither a stabiliser nor a tripod will assist you, so if you’re shooting within a hall with a restricted amount of light, unfortunately, the only answer is a good camera and lens which works well in low light.

Not Using a Tripod

But there are also images that instantly demand a tripod. Special shots like long exposure photos of the milky way or star trail shots or panning of moving cars etc. A tripod can assist you to maintain shutter speeds that are much much longer. But to work with a tripod isn’t as easy as it might seem. We recommend you to research which kind of tripod you may require and about tripod mounts, weights and so on before investing on one.

Leaving the Stabiliser on

While it’s best to leave the stabiliser switched on in low light conditions, there are also cases where it’s best to keep it off. These mainly refer to when capturing photos using a tripod, where a stabiliser will start vibrating your whole body due to the motor. Certain stabilisers only allow you to turn it “on” and “off”, but some also provide a third choice, “on for one axis only”. This fixes the problem of panning etc when the stabiliser is on.

Leaving the Stabiliser off

Photographers many times forget to turn the stabiliser back on after shooting on a tripod. And also, sometimes they might accidentally push its physical switch while manipulating the lens, or while taking the camera out of the bag. That’s why it is best to stay alert and, if the image in the frame is unusually shaky, double-check if the stabiliser is turned on.

Low Depth of Field

Difficulty with low Depth of Field is mainly displayed in two situations. The first is when you are using a DSLR with a prime lens and an f-stop of say f/1.8 which is a great low light choice mostly. It gives you a superb optical detachment of subjects from their background by using bokehs. The trouble comes when photographing more than one subject in one frame who are standing in different focal planes. You need to keep in your mind that for images like these, you have to keep aside the block lenses or increase your aperture value to f/4 or above to keep all the subjects in focus. Otherwise, all it takes is for one subject in the group to take a half-step back or front, and they get out of focus. Another problem shows itself when you are capturing landscapes, and you want to capture both small objects and a far horizon. Sometimes even the highest f-stop isn’t enough, and the only answer is to merge a picture from two images, one focussed closer and the other farther.

Bad Focus

Sometimes the automatic focus in the camera can be faulty too. It is sometimes disturbed by small nearby objects such as bushes behind people or moving objects in the background. Bushes provide lots of high-contrast points that your camera is happy to focus on. So for such a situation, all you need to do is turn off autofocus and focus your subject using the focus ring manually on the lens. Macro shots require high levels of focussing and it is often advisable to use manual focus for the same.

A Defective or Low-quality Lens

Once we get down to minutely examining a photograph on a pixel level, there is a clear difference between an expensive, high-quality lens and a lower-quality one that is supplied with beginner cameras. If you are bothered by blurry lenses, there is only one solution: research about the lenses and spend on a decent one. After the research, you may see there’s also a difference between a good lens and a great lens. If you consistently get bad results when the reviews say you shouldn’t, it’s time to take your lens into the shop for cleaning or other defects.

Bad or Dirty Filters

A good lens is a good beginning, but you can always make it terrible with a filter. There’s no risk with good filters, but look out for low-budget ones as they can pose problems for the lens during focussing which can cause blur and even add overexposed spots on the photographs.

No Computer Sharpening

Knowledgeable photographers always sharpen their images after reducing them down to presentation size. If you just reduce the picture size without sharpening them afterward, your work will probably look unprofessional at best.

You might already be well-known with the above mentioned points, but some might be new for you. No matter what, it is good to be cautious, and, if supreme sharpness is your goal, shoot slow and steady. As soon as something seems fishy, go ahead and look into the problem. Nonetheless, for other problems, you need to understand where they are coming from and try to check if any of the above mentioned things can help you out. Make sure you do not let any dust or other particles fall on the sensor or the lens when changing lenses outdoor. Your reward will be images that are sharp and stand out from the rest.