25 Great Digital Photography Techniques, Tutorials and Effects

The collection of cool digital photography tutorials is endless, you can even find 10 completley different methods to achieve the same effect. Which is the best? It really depends on the photographer and there level of expertise. In this post we have listed our own personal favorites photography techniques in 68design with tips tutorials to help you recreate the effect. You will find tecniques for the currently in vogue HDR, Tilt-Shifting and Lomography to the less common and diverse Sabatier and Escher effects. Which ever effect you use, your images are going to look cool and unique.

Infrared Photography

Infrared Photography »
What is the Infrared Spectrum? Well, take a good look around you and you’ll see and endless diversity of hues in all the colors of the rainbow: The grass is green, the sky is blue, the roses are red and the future is bright. Now imagine that on top of all the colors you can see, there are other ranges that are normally invisible to us, colors that for us don’t exist but they’re out there and for some animals they are a part of everyday life. This is the Infra-Red (IR) spectrum and in this article you will learn how to photograph it effectively.

High Speed Photography

High Speed Photography »
High Speed Photography is used in physics, health research, sports and more. This article describes how to capture super fast movements using ordinary camera gear and a little home made electronics.

Lomo Photography

Tilt Shifting Photography

Tilt Shifting Photography »
This Photoshop tutorial will teach you about simulating the tilt-shift lens effect that is used mostly in photography. The goal of this technique is to achieve a really unique feel to the image as everything is miniatured or modeled. A method that tricks the eye in a good way since the image is very pleasant to the eye and give the photo a real kick to the upper level photography.

HDR Photography

HDR Photography »
This is a detailed guide about taking photos for an HDR image. Practice has shown that successful and smooth HDR photography takes careful planning and sets certain requirements for the gear. Some might feel that HDR photography is complicated and time consuming. However, if you have the right camera, the hardest part is setting up a tripod and the rest is simple and fast.

Cinematic Portrait Effect

Cinematic Portrait Effect »
In this photography and Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to add drama or a cinematic quality to a regular, humdrum and boring portrait using a little bit of fake HDR. That way if you work on a project that requires a stunning shot without the stunning photography, you’ll be able to post-produce something phenomenal.

Coloring a Black and White Image

Coloring a Black and White Image »
Adding color to a black and white photography allows you to highlight previously unnoticed features, emphasize details and bringing a bland image to life.

Diorama Illusion Effect

Diorama Illusion Effect »
Have you ever built a diorama? It’s a depiction of a scene in miniature. Or perhaps you remember owning a dollhouse or train set as a kid. You lay on the floor, inches away from tiny versions of full-size objects. In the background, your brain was busy writing the software that makes this illusion effective. This fun and cool photo treatment can be performed by almost anyone.

Exposure Blending Tutorial

Exposure Blending Tutorial »
This tutorial will walk you through the basics of creating the same look of the HDR (High Dynamic Range) version of the mailbox in the photo to the left . All you need is camera and photo editing software that supports layer masking (you can follow the steps in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and The GIMP, among others).

Little Planets Using Your Panoramas

Little Planets Using Your Panoramas »
Wee Planets, Tiny Planets or the Polar Panorama effect, whatever name you prefer, is the technique of taking a 360° panorama image and using Photoshop (or any other decent image editor) and creating a circular or round image that wrap the panorama around to make it appear like a tiny/wee planet.

Turn Daylight into Night

Turn Daylight into Night »
This tutorial will show you how to take a low quality, lifeless and dull shot and turn it into a vivid night shot, with street lamp lightening. You will see how you can take the most terrible, blurred and lifeless pixelated shot and turn into a professional photo with unique effects.

Cross Processing

Cross Processing »
Cross-processing is developing color print or slide film in the wrong chemicals — for example, color negative film in slide chemicals (”C-41 as E-6″) or slide film by the color negative process (”E-6 as C-41″). Not surprisingly, this causes wild color and contrast shifts and requires lots of trial and error.
With many possible permutations of film stock and processing technique, there is no single, identifiable, cross-processed appearance. The most common combination is C-41 as E-6, in which slide chemistry is used to process color negative film, and it’s a quick job to imitate it in Photoshop.

Gritty Effect

Gritty Effect »
In this tutorial you’ll be shown how to add a dramatic, gritty, bronzed effect to your images using Photoshop.

Movie-Like Effect

Movie-Like Effect »
You will learn how to give any image a glossy movie-like effect using photoshop, you will learn how to effectively use colour mood adjustments, the depth of field effect and a simple, yet impressive film effect.

Vintage Effect

Dynamic Lighting Effect »

Colouring A Black And White Photo

Colouring A Black And White Photo »
You can hand colour a black and white photograph in Photoshop in a number of ways. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add colour by making selections and using adjustment layers. THIS EFFECT DOES NOT LOOK NATURAL! It will not look like a colour photograph, but is great for a retro look and can be good fun on old pictures.

Escher’s Droste Effect

Escher’s Droste Effect »
The “Droste effect” derives from a Dutch chocolate maker that used an image of its box on the box recursively at smaller and smaller scales. With this tutorial you can recreate this effect with relative ease, using After Effects and Photoshop CS4.

Sabatier Effect

Sabatier Effect »
True solarization (sometimes referred to as classic or reversal solarization) is the reversal of a portion of photographic image resulting from prolonged exposure to an extremely bright light. This article describes in detail the process of solarizeing prints, and how to control the variables to effectively achieve the effect.

Manipulated Smoke Effect

Manipulated Smoke Effect »
Learn to apply the Warp Tool effectively and a few other tricks to make smoke look like a skull. This technique has a variety of outcomes and works well with water, clouds and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Macro Photography Tips

Macro Photography Tips »
Much has been written on the topic of Macro photography for those photographers fortunate enough to own a DSLR with macro lenses – but what about if you own a compact point and shoot camera? Can you get great macro shots too? Of course you can…to a point. In this article, the author gives you great tips and tecniques on how to Macro photograph using a point and shoot camera.

Photographing Car Light Trails

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Photographing Car Light Trails »
The key to photographing car light trails is choosing a good composition and capturing plenty of trails. The great news is that they can be very easy to shoot, and you can produce some amazing images with even the most basic of equipment.

Photograph Water Drops

Photograph Water Drops »
Water droplet photography is very easy to get started with, and you can get as complex as you want. There are three tricks to making beautiful, time-scultped water pictures with a single small flash: Light placement, timing and flash duration.

Two Tone Silhouette Effect

Sunset Light to Light Portraits Effect

Sunset Light to Light Portraits Effect »
Sunset is arguably the most beautiful time of day for portrait light. But you don’t want to simply take your subject outside and start shooting. Take a few moments to identify “how” to use your light and your portraits will be dreamy. In this article the author gives you three method so that you can use the light by setting your subject in relationship to the setting sun.

Indie Movie Effect

Indie Movie Effect »
In this Photoshop tutorial you will be shown how to take an ordinary photo, and make it look like it’s a still from a movie.

Painting with Light

Painting with Light »
Painting with light is a fascinating photography technique where you illuminate areas of a long exposure shot with a light source to create some stunning effects. There are two main types – the first is where you shine a torch on large areas of a scene to illuminate them individually, and the second is where you use a small bulb to create interesting streaks of light.

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