35 Premium Photoshop Tutorials: How to do Photo Manipulation

Photography Tips  •  Photoshop Tutorials

Learning all the ways you can edit your photos and images is like someone that finally learns the proper drawing techniques. Before, the person was making interesting doodles, now he/she’s creating works of art. The talent was there but it was not fully utilized until full knowledge of the possibilities was gained. And it’s the same thing with digital art and photo editing. This popular set of professional level tutorials aims to teach photographers all the possibilities of photo manipulation and enhancement. Found here: 35 Premium Photoshop Tutorials

By using advanced color grading techniques and a bit of photomanipulation, the instructor turns a snapshot of rural life into a breathtaking award-winning image. In this tutorial, he will show you step by step how he was able to achieve such a transformation. The knowledge you’ll gain after completing this tutorial will allow you to transform your own photos into magical works of art.

• How to Make Your Portraits Look Out of This World

In this tutorial, we will start with an unretouched portrait of a girl, a photo anyone can take at home with their camera and transform it into some sort of fantasy character. We will go through every step I took to get the final result, from working on the skin, color grading, lighting and finishing with the background.

With the techniques you’ll master after completing this Photoshop tutorial, you will be able to create many different looks for your portraits, whether you just want a subtle enhancement or you really want to push it and transform your portrait into something that is out of this world

• Transforming Real People into Caricatures

They cover a lot of things in this massive tutorial. You will learn step by step how you can create any cartoon character you imagine using photomanipulation, retouching and color grading techniques. With only Photoshop and stock photos (or your own) you can create a unique caricature that can be a logo, a mascot for a product, a character in an ad, etc.. You can of course use the same techniques explained in this tutorial, in a more subtle way, to spice up your portraits or images.

This tutorial has a massive 89 steps detailing the entire process to achieve the image above and don’t worry, all their tutorials can be done by anyone who has basic knowledge of Photoshop.

• How to Bring Out Colors & Details in Your Photos

In this tutorial they use advanced color grading techniques to create a tone mapping effect without the use of any plugins or 3rd party software, only using Photoshop and what comes with it. Starting out with a photo taken with the aid of an off-the-camera flash and turn it into some sort of “reality show” poster ad. Taking a photo while using an additional fill-light or reflectors helps retain a lot of details in the shadows and highlights which make it easier in post-production to really push the color grading.

This tutorial will be helpful to anyone who wants to give their photos a professional look with richer colors and higher contrasts.

• How to Create Fantasy Environments with Photomanipulation

If you are a professional photographer, photomanipulation is a skill that will allow you to take and develop images beyond the norm for your clients if the situation ever calls for it. This in-depth tutorial involves steps to photomanipulation and color grading to make sure everything fits into the scene.

• High Impact Magazine Style Photo Editing

This tutorial goes through advanced color grading techniques to transform a photo that desperately needs more punch into an high impact image that could be used in a magazine ad for example. By using different techniques to exaggerate to contrasts and accentuate the colors, we can give our photo a sort of “painted” look that is very popular right now with commercial photographers. If you want to take your photography to another level, this tutorial will show show step by step how to edit your photos like the pros. And if you are a graphic designer, the knowledge you will learn in this tutorial will further help you to create eye-popping art.

• How to Transform Portraits with Color Grading

In this tutorial, we will push the limits of color grading without degrading the image. We will add colors to a very grayish, nearly black and white photo and then we will bring back the details from the shadows resulting in a drastically changed and more pleasing look.

• How to Make Facial Features Pop with Retouching

This one will show you different retouching techniques and tricks that will help you transform regular people into eye-popping characters. In this Photoshop tutorial, we will enhance the facial features of the man and the woman giving them a funny cartoonish look perfect for our artwork. We will then work on colors and add a background that will mesh well with our characters. In this case, I choose a background that would give the impression that those two were in an insane asylum.

• How to Make the Most Out of RAW Photos

This tutorial will show you how you can get the most out of a RAW photo especially when your subject or the sky couldn’t be properly exposed. When you take photos in nature and you don’t have with you a reflector, especially when the sun is going down and you want to capture it along with your subject, you’ll run into some problems. Either the sky will be blown out or your subject will be too dark. You can however with Photoshop correct that problem, bring out hidden details in the shadows and highlights as well as colors you didn’t think were there. If you want to make your photos “pop” more, this is the tutorial for you.

• How to do Glamour Magazine Style Photo Makeovers

In this tutorial we will digitally transform a model into a Supermodel using advanced retouching techniques. By learning these techniques you can also perform more subtle photo makeovers when the situation calls for it.

• How to Add Depth to Facial Features and Portraits

Make your subjects “pop” by increasing the details and realism of your photos. This Photoshop tutorial will focus on just that, starting with a generic photo of an old man and then using different techniques we will transform the photo into something much more eye-catching.

• How to Improve the Look of Wedding Photos

Tutorial going through the steps to color correct and color grade photos. This is the perfect tutorial to learn the basics of photo editing and get you started.

• Photomanipulation to Convert People into Characters in Photoshop

What you can do with photomanipulation is only limited by your imagination. No need for any 3D softwares to create what you have in mind, all you need is Photoshop. In this tutorial, I will show you step-by-step how I turned an old man into an alien creature. The techniques can be applied to much more than just aliens, you can create your own photomanipulations and transform any image you want that you can use for any purpose you want.

• Digital Painting: How to Paint with a Mouse

Take retouching to the next level by mastering digital painting. In this tutorial, we will create everything from scratch, the eyeball, the iris, the eyes, the face, the nose, the mouth, the hair and the shoulder/neck.

Digital painting can really be difficult, it usually requires a digital tablet and if you are not a great painter to begin with, you are looking at a steep learning curve. In this tutorial, I show you techniques any beginnners in digital painting can recreate and that, with his/her mouse.

• How to Create More Impactful Portraits

This tutorial will cover how to improve the look and details of someone face/skin and really give your photos or the people in your photomanipulations a very cool and impactful look. Starting with a generic picture of a business man, we will layer by layer improve the details, contrasts and colors until we get something that will really get people’s attention.

• How to Retouch Your Portraits Like the Pros

This tutorial uses a different technique from the one mentioned earlier. Retouching is something photographers always end up doing when taking portraits but one particular popular look, one that we often see in magazines or ads for beauty products is the flawless “airbrushed” look. Well, there’s no airbrushing going on in this Photoshop tutorial but what we will do here is take the unedited photo of a model with minimal make up and we will “glam it up”, get rid of all imperfection and finally create the type of photo we can often see in beauty product ads and fashion magazines.

All source images for the tutorials are supplied to you so you’ll be able to do exactly what is shown in the tutorials.

Found here: 35 Premium Professional Photoshop Tutorials