One of the more popular tutorials that has been written and shared in the dPS forums was the following one from one of our members – LeeR on ‘Levels’. While written last year it continues to be popular with readers so I thought I’d reshare it here on the blog.

One of the questions I see most frequently on DPS is “How can I give my images that professional ‘pop?’” The truth is, pros have a whole bag of tricks for setting themselves apart from the pack and, like your auto mechanic, they use different techniques for different situations. However, there are some things that are common to most images, like getting the exposure and focus right, cropping and sharpening. I hear about these things all the time in this forum, but rarely hear about one of my favorite …

One task I perform regularly in Photoshop and Lightroom is to assemble multiple images on a single page for printing. I love displaying my photos, for example, as triptychs –which are three side by side images.

I’ve posted before on the process in Lightroom here and here and today I’ll show you how to do this in Gimp using a set of templates that you can find free for downloading on the web.

I downloaded my templates from http://www.gingerpixel.com/review/storyboard-templates. There are eight templates in all zipped into a single downloadable PSD file.

Update: Since we published this post, the GingerPixel.com site is down so the storyboard templates are no longer available. To assist you, we have created a custom set of templates for both Gimp and for Photoshop. You can find these …

Are you looking to improve your post production of images?

Our friends at Topaz Labs are offering dPS readers a special $100 discount off their Plug-In Bundle this weekend only. The offer ends at 11.59pm this Sunday night (23 October).

The bundle includes 10 great tools for amateur and pro photographers wanting to accomplish the most common post production tasks. They’re easy to use and most of them are compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, Paintshop Pro and more. Many of our readers are fans of these tools.

The tools in the bundle are:

• Topaz Adjust – makes your photos POP with exposure, detail and color
• Topaz Remask – extract a subject from its background
• Topaz DeNoise – eliminate noise with this great noise reduction tool
• Topaz Detail – Sharpen and manipulate detail with ease
• Topaz InFocus – recover

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I’ve been talking to a few people lately about deleting catalog backup files. If you backup and optimize your catalog every time you close Lightroom then, over time, you will end up with a lot of excess catalog backups.

Each of these backups will consume disk space so the question becomes – what is in these backups? What use are they? And can they be deleted safely?

Backup your catalog

When you set Lightroom to make a backup of the catalog what it does is to make a backup of just the catalog and not your images, or your previews, or the sidecar xmp files for your raw files, or your presets. While having a catalog backup is undoubtedly a useful thing, it is incomplete so you will need to have a system backup system in place to backup what Lightroom does …

Photoshop has a huge range of shortcut keys for speeding up your day. Here are my ten best shortcut keys that I suggest you add to your Photoshop toolkit:

1. Find the sizing handles

When you paste a layer or selection into a Photoshop image – if it is larger than the current image it can be difficult to find the sizing handles.

To find them, press Ctrl + T, then Ctrl + 0 (zero) or on the Mac – Command + T, Command + 0. This selects Transform and sizes the image inside the window so you can see the sizing handles.

2. Flatten layers but keep them too

Sometimes you need, for example, to flatten the layers in an image to sharpen the result but you don’t want to get rid of …