Many people think that tools for sharpening a photo on a computer are only useful when a botched shot has left the photo blurry. And they’re certainly useful then. But there are also other, more important cases where sharpening should be used. In fact, you should use it on practically every picture. Wondering why? Then read on.

Your basic light for photography—available to you free of charge—is natural light. But when you’re using that light, you usually don’t have many ways to fully control it, and so you’ll often have to adapt your exposure and your scene to the light. You’ll learn to perceive light and take advantage of its characteristics with some practice…

The eyes are the core of a portrait, and they’re an important means of expression in photography. So let’s take a look at how to make them stand out. We’ll retouch them using a brighten-and-darken technique. And we’ll do the same to let the lips and teeth stand out. The goal: to make our subject really, really shine.

One very simple and effective way to emphasize your subject is to find a high-contrast background. You can contrast your subject against the background not only visually, but also in terms of its meaning. These contrasts are especially strong when a picture contains two elements that seem dissimilar, but join together to form a surprising composition with a powerful message.

When you’re taking digital photos and their colors are globally shifted due to a bad white balance setting in the camera, the fix is a matter of moments in Zoner Photo Studio. You just set a neutral color using the white-balancing eyedropper. But what if you want to fix the colors in a scanned photo? One where the tooth of time has gnawed at the colors? Then you need some more demanding edits. So let’s take a look at how to fix this kind of picture, where time has left its mark on the colors.

An eye for light and perfectly handled work with natural and artificial light sources are the key prerequisite for a good photo. The right lighting lifts a photo up out of the dull gray average, while a badly lighted picture, no matter how beautiful its subject, will never impress.

Sometimes you need to highlight your subject to make sure they’re attention-getting and that it’s immediately clear what’s important in the photo. In today’s article, we’ll show you how you can make a photo’s subject shine using local brightening and darkening. After all, photographs are about light. And today’s edit will be about light too.

When a photo tells a story and uses several objects to tell it, that can be a lot for your audience to digest. To make sure they know how to read the photo, position the different parts of its composition so that the photo forms a single, balanced whole. The photo shouldn’t feel like one side or the other is too “heavy.” Let’s take a look at today’s article at how to use composition to get a correctly balanced picture.

Lots of interesting news in the photo space over the last few weeks so it’s time once again for our photopourri blog approach to bring you up to speed on a few items we think you may have missed.

Feeling a little photographically uninspired? Then start up a photo project. With these projects, you can build a variety of photographic skills and have fun doing it. You can also try out things you haven’t found the nerve for before or get your creative juices flowing when you’re feeling uninspired.