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Turn Any Photo Into a Painting in Photoshop Using This Weird AI Trick
Video Tutorials

Turn Any Photo Into a Painting in Photoshop Using This Weird AI Trick

Client work slows down in summer. That’s when I do my best experimenting, usually with a cold brew at my corner table at the coffee shop, headphones on, burning through tutorials I’ve been bookmarking for months. I’ve tried a lot of AI techniques in Photoshop that promised “artistic effects” and delivered something that looked like a stock photo got into a fight with a Instagram filter. So when I stumbled on this one from Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN, I almost scrolled past it.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)

I work almost exclusively from coffee shops. Not because I’m trying to look interesting, but because something about ambient noise and a flat white keeps me locked in. The problem is that screen real estate in a coffee shop is whatever your laptop gives you, and on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the default Photoshop workspace is basically a panel explosion with a tiny canvas somewhere in the middle. For the first two years of freelancing, I just… lived with it.

Point Color in Photoshop's Camera Raw Is the Color Tool I Wish I'd Found Years Ago
Video Tutorials

Point Color in Photoshop's Camera Raw Is the Color Tool I Wish I'd Found Years Ago

Client work has a way of exposing every gap in your toolkit. I spent an embarrassing chunk of my early freelance career doing color adjustments the hard way — HSL sliders, selective color adjustment layers, hand-painted masks — all to target a single stubborn orange in a landscape or a specific blue in a sky. It worked, sort of. But it was slow, fiddly, and every time the client wanted a tweak, I was rebuilding the whole thing.

How to Shoot and Composite a Clean Product Shot Using a Black Background in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

How to Shoot and Composite a Clean Product Shot Using a Black Background in Photoshop

Product shots are one of those things that separate the designers who can charge real money from the ones still quoting $50 for a full brand package. I know because I spent an embarrassingly long time in the second camp, faking studio-quality results with flat, lifeless images that screamed “photographed on a kitchen table.” When a client hands you a physical product and says “make it look good,” you need a repeatable system, not a prayer.

Photoshop's Landscape Mixer Neural Filter Is Wildly Good (With One Catch You Need to Know)
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's Landscape Mixer Neural Filter Is Wildly Good (With One Catch You Need to Know)

There’s a specific kind of panic that hits when a client says “can you make this look like it was shot in winter?” and you’ve got exactly one image of a sun-scorched desert to work with. I’ve been there. My old solution involved approximately fourteen stock photo licenses, a lot of blending modes I only half understood, and one very long night at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee. So when I caught this Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN, I nearly knocked my cold brew onto my laptop.

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes

I spent the better part of a Tuesday afternoon last month looking for the Properties panel. Not because it was hidden. Not because I’d closed it. It was open the whole time, just buried under three other panels on my secondary monitor in a configuration I’d apparently set up sometime in 2021 and never touched since. Meanwhile, the client on the other end of a Slack thread was waiting for a mockup revision that should have taken seven minutes.

Stop Eyeballing It: How to Actually Use Photoshop's Transform Tool Like You Mean It
Video Tutorials

Stop Eyeballing It: How to Actually Use Photoshop's Transform Tool Like You Mean It

There’s a certain kind of Photoshop shame that hits when you’re dragging layers around by eye, nudging things pixel by pixel, hoping they “look about right.” I lived in that shame for longer than I’d like to admit. Back when I was slapping together graphics for friends (before anyone was paying me to do it), I thought the move tool and vibes were basically the whole toolkit. Spoiler: they are not.

Photoshop at 35: What Happens When You Actually Use Version 1.0 in 2025
Video Tutorials

Photoshop at 35: What Happens When You Actually Use Version 1.0 in 2025

I started making graphics in MS Paint. Terrible, pixelated, deeply embarrassing stuff - word art on birthday cards, memes with white borders because I didn’t know how to crop. So when I finally got my hands on Photoshop, it felt like going from a tricycle to a sports car. I still feel that way, honestly. But it’s easy to forget just how far the software has actually traveled when you’re living inside the current version every day.

Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed

I’ll be honest with you. My relationship with Camera Raw masking has always been “good enough.” Select sky, paint in the foreground with a gradient, argue with a brush tool for fifteen minutes over some tree branches, call it done. It works. It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done between my third and fourth coffee of the morning. Then I watched this Matt Kloskowski tutorial on the April 2025 Photoshop update and realized I’d been doing the equivalent of cutting a steak with a butter knife.

Why Your Photo Composites Look Fake (And the Luminosity Trick That Fixes It)
Photo Manipulation

Why Your Photo Composites Look Fake (And the Luminosity Trick That Fixes It)

I once spent three days on a composite. Three full days, multiple oat milk lattes, two different coffee shops, and one very dramatic Spotify playlist. I was proud of it. I sent it to a designer friend for feedback and he replied with a voice memo, which is never a good sign. Turns out he’d recreated something cleaner in about 20 minutes using a luminosity-based matching workflow I had never once considered.

Tattoo Be Gone: A Three-Step Photoshop Removal Workflow That Actually Holds Up
Video Tutorials

Tattoo Be Gone: A Three-Step Photoshop Removal Workflow That Actually Holds Up

I do a fair amount of portrait retouching for clients — headshots, lifestyle stuff, the occasional album cover for a band that takes itself way too seriously. And every so often someone slides into my inbox asking if I can “just remove” a tattoo from a photo. Sometimes it’s for a corporate headshot. Sometimes it’s for a family portrait where grandma is going to lose her mind if she sees it.

How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)

There’s a specific kind of photo that shows up in everyone’s catalog and causes a small amount of existential dread: the backlit candid. You know the one. The light is beautiful, the moment is real, and the subject looks like they’re being interviewed in a witness protection program. I have folders full of these from outdoor events, and for a long time my solution was to either slap a Lightroom preset on them and hope for the best, or just quietly move them to trash.