Storing your images on a safe and sturdy external hard drive is one of the easiest and cheapest options available to photographers, however this shouldn’t be considered as the only option open to you. In recent years there has been a steady growth of online photo storage sites that specifically hold your images securely and privately. Consequently a growing number of photographers, particular professionals, are using these sites as their all important fail-safe; if the computer crashes and the external hard drives are stolen, then at least you can pull your images back from your hassle-free, digital safety box.

What is more, by backing up work into a “cloud”, photographers are ensuring the availability and accessibility of their work wherever they are in the world. Furthermore this method extends the opportunity for the user to exploit the facility as a …

Although I am a purist by heart, I cannot forget my early days with a digital camera and a copy of Photoshop. The filters got me … right where I live!

Nowadays, I try to create compelling images right at the moment of exposure and not at the post editing stage. But then a piece of software appears and spoils me rotten.

Snap Art 2 is a Photoshop plug-in that appears in the Filters menu and twists and twiddles with an image to produce something which is far, far from being a photograph.

Nevertheles, these transformed pictures do have their uses: they can be useful in making birthday cards, a poster or to jazz up a school assignment.

They do have their place.

I found in use, Snap Art 2 is surprisingly powerful in its range variations that …

A Guest Post by Nick Rains

Once you have added more and more images to your Lightroom catalogue it becomes less easy to find a particular image from the many thousands you have imported. Fortunately, being a digital asset manager Lightroom includes some powerful tools for searching.

You could start with the Library > Find menu item which works pretty well but is limited to searching from metadata fields in all your images. It’s powerful enough to include options for ‘contains’, ‘does not contain’, ‘ends with’, ‘starts with’ etc, plus you can put in multiple search terms like a country and a date to search (Contains All) for all images from a certain country on a particular date. It’s quick and easy but not very versatile.

For more power there is the Filter Bar itself ( ‘\’ key in the …

Do you open photos direct into Photoshop or do you use Adobe Bridge? If you don’t use Bridge, there are some good reasons for changing your habits.

You may not realize it but some of how Camera Raw behaves depends on whether you open an image from Bridge or from Photoshop. Here’s how:

Freeze Photoshop or not?

Open a Raw image in Photoshop and it opens, of course, in Camera Raw. But look at the screen – Photoshop is open but the window is frozen. You can’t minimize it and you can’t work in Photoshop at the same time as work in ACR.

Close the image and now do the same thing from Bridge – right click a Raw file and choose Open in Camera Raw. See the …

If you’ve ever wondered what the small icons in the Layer palette do, you might be surprised at how useful they can be. Here’s what the Lock Transparent Pixels icon does and how you can use it.

There are times when you are working with content on layers in Photoshop that the layers can do things that you don’t expect them to do. For example, in this image, I have extracted the background to a layer of its own by selecting it and then choose Layer > New > Layer via Copy.

I now want to blur this layer so if I select it and apply a Gaussian blur filter to it, you will see that the Gaussian blur filter pushes the background over the edges of the …