This year’s new version of the all-in-one photo software Zoner Photo Studio awaits you under a new name: X. You’ll soon discover why this year’s new features will be an extreme success in your home. But first, let’s peel off the program’s individual layers.

The market today is flooded with ever-better zoom lenses built to cover practically every imaginable range. And yet there are still photographers who make do without any zoom at all. Is it really possible to stick to just one fixed lens and completely forget about all the other focal lengths?

Lens flare in photos, including artificial lens flare, is fairly popular… though not with everyone. A lens flare can add life to a photo, giving it a story or energy. But it can also ruin a photo. Here we’ll be showing you how to add lens flare to a photo—as well as where you definitely want to avoid it.

Color adjustments are right up there alongside tone-curve adjustments as the most common edits you’ll make to your digital photos. No matter whether that’s a global repair to a photo that was tinted by a bad white-balance setting, or complicated creative edits using selections.

Maybe you’ve been there—standing somewhere with a breathtaking nature scene in front of you. You pressed the trigger a few times, but for all the world you couldn’t get a picture that really showed the beauty you had before you. What was the problem?

Perfect sharpness in a photo isn’t always something you want. Blurring can come in handy both when fixing mistakes in your photos and as a tool for creative expression.

Metropolises are more than just streets lined with glass and steel skyscrapers—they’re also living organisms full of endless motion and commotion. Almost never-ending streams of cars flow through the streets—the urban arteries—and human figures rush by on the sidewalks. Motion is the city’s essence. And you can express it in your pictures using a fairly simple technique—blurring the picture.

Street photography is dynamic and full of surprises, once-in-a-lifetime moments, stories, and faces, as well as unexpected enchanting corners. It throws the cover off of day-to-day life and details that we normally overlook. And meanwhile you can do it practically anywhere. You just pick up a camera and head out into the street.

Our digital age makes everything a whole lot easier than it used to be. Every typo can be corrected, and every photo can be retouched, darkened, brightened, or otherwise fine-tuned to perfection. Well… usually. Levels, meanwhile, are an important, yet often forgotten tool that can rescue more photos than you’d think.

By mastering work with artificial light sources, and especially flashes, you break free of several exposure limitations that hold you back when you’re taking pictures in natural light. Using flashes also gives you much sharper pictures, because the flash is so short that it eliminates motion blur.