Surely you’ve run into this before: you’re in a place that you want to show off through some great photos, but the weather is against you. There’s a dull gray sky with no room for creativity. You have a subject that’s interesting, but the rest is boring. In most cases you can make use of tone mapping, gradient filters and the like, but there are also cases where there’s no adjustment that can make the sky look good, and yet something does have to be done with it. There is one last resort—replacing the sky.

Presets make photo editing go faster. Because they can apply several of your frequently used operations at once. Presets keep you from having to set the same sliders to the same values again and again; it all just takes one click. The built-in presets aren’t a good fit for you? No problem. Zoner Photo Studio offers an easy way to create your own. It will save you work, and you’ll get to keep your own original editing style. 

Gradient Filter functions are generally used for darkening or coloring the top of a photo—usually the sky. They basically replace a physical gradient filter that you’d place over your camera’s lens. But the Gradient Filter in ZPS X is also highly customizable and offers lots of creative opportunities.

Noise is common in photos. To some extent it can serve as a creative tool, but most of the time it’s a nuisance. It usually appears when you shoot in bad lighting conditions while using a high ISO. But you can remove it using computer editing. Let’s take a look at how to do that.

Most cameras and mobile phones have the ability to shoot video in addition to taking photos. Some moments are better captured as moving images. One take may not tell the whole story. For this reason, it’s better to make a video montage that can easily be created in Zoner Photo Studio X. New and improved functions make editing your video a piece of cake.

Minimalism is one way you can change up a classic couples photography session. Close-ups are often able to capture emotion more than a classic portrait. If you’re searching for inspiration for your next couples shoot, give these tips a try. #minimalists #love

Improving composition and removing distractions from a picture’s edges. Or taking your first step towards prints. Cropping can amount to all of this. Besides improving composition, you can also use cropping to give a photo a precise ratio of sides. And that can be essential when you’re printing.

Generally when photographing a landscape, you’ll try to capture faithful, saturated colors. But sometimes a different approach is in order: going black and white. Black-and-white landscapes have an immense magic to this day. But there are some golden rules for how to do this edit. And to get the best picture possible, it pays to follow them.

Physical polarizing filters have been a useful tool for us photographers for many years now. They help us eliminate reflections and make skies look more natural. But if you don’t have one at home—or if you’ve forgotten it at home—that’s OK. You can also add the same effect on a computer.

The human eye is fascinating, not only because of its uniqueness, but also because it’s a very important aspect of what photographers focus on. The first rule of thumb when shooting a portrait is that the eyes must be sharp. But what if we skip the portrait entirely and go straight to shooting a close-up of the eye itself. This article explores the many options for doing just that.