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.

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.

We’d all like to think of backgrounds as simply not an issue—when we think of them at all. But in reality, backgrounds can have a lot of clutter, especially in urban photography. Meanwhile, there are several ways to look at this issue.

When you’re photographing outdoors—and especially in the city—you can often end up with chaotic colors in your pictures. And someday you might end up for example photographing an athlete for a sponsor… and their uniform shows other sponsors’ logos. What’s the solution?

Basically the only thing you need for a photo is light. But unfortunately when you’re out shooting you’ll run into a lot of types of lighting, each with its own color. When there’s more than one source in the same scene, they can cause some real problems.

Just about all of us shoot when we’re on the road. But the pictures that experienced photographers post on the Internet look a little different. Their exceptional shot locations definitely help, but their final looks actually owe a lot overall to computer edits. And meanwhile, these are rarely complicated tricks. In this article, you’ll find several common workflows that you too can use on your photos.

Hair just doesn’t get the attention it deserves in photography. And meanwhile, great-looking hair takes a photo to the next level. So sit down, read on, and learn to give hair a healthy shine with (and without) a photo editor.

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.

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.

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.