Many people consider layers to be something complicated that an ordinary person can’t even understand. But they’re really something very simple that will help you and make your work easier on even the simplest jobs. Let’s go make layers a part of your work too!

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.

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.

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.