Digital photo processing opens up huge possibilities—everyone is free to edit photos to match their taste and their mood of the day. But this freedom can sometimes tie you up by leaving you with so many variants that you can’t even choose among them. Or at least, I know it happens to me—all the time.

The internet is full of various guides for producing “perfect” pictures. Zonerama Magazine isn’t the only place where you’ll read about things like the right way to compose, what lenses are good for what kinds of photos, and how to edit a photo using a histogram curve.

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.