What Makes a Great Photograph. This is the most important article on this website. More important than the thousands of others, I will attempt to explain the elements that make up a great photograph. These fundamentals are mandatory knowledge to all artists. Photography makes it easy for anyone to create images without needing any artistic ability or training just set AUTO and go. You cant paint unless you study and practice. In studying painting, you are always taught image structure. Anyone can take pictures. Formal courses of photographic study rarely, if ever, cover the basics of image structure. All they teach is technical mumbo jumbo, which is a waste because cameras do all of the technical stuff for us today anyway. Photoshop Bob Ross is a photoshop meme using an image template of the celebrity painter standing in front of a blank canvas. Hammond Manual Download. Taken from a promotional photograph for. Photoshop Top Secret' title='Photoshop Top Secret' />Julieanne Kost. Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials. If you want to add a nice rim light effect to your subject you can do it using Photoshop. Follow these tips to help you out. Master Adobes image editing software with these free Photoshop tutorials for beginners and pros. A highlevel view of what the various blend modes do, then digs deeper into the nuts and bolts of the blend modes by explaining some of the math involved. Even professional photographers are rarely taught about the basics of image structure, which is why so many photographs are so awful. The lack of structure is why so many photographs dont make it. This article is critical because I hope to explain the basic structures that are so crucial to making strong images. Images that get the basics right always get people to go ooooh and ahhhhh, and those without their fundamentals in order are boring. Photoshop Top Secret' title='Photoshop Top Secret' />Armed with this information, hopefully youll start recognizing the elements which make images that make peoples jaws drop, win top honors at photo contests, and are the first images an editor picks when buying images. Once you learn these simple basics, youll be able to take awesome, award winning shots with any camera. Once you can do this, youll no longer need to waste so much money on camera gear or haul so much of it around with you. Youll just take great pictures. The Basics        top. Intro   Specs   Performance   Usage   Recommendations. Every image needs a basic structure. Without an underlying structure, it is just another boring photo. Photoshop makes it possible to edit your photos in countless ways. In this post are 33 tutorials that teach different photo editing techniques and tricks. The ultimate list of photo manipulation tutorials for Photoshop. Following along with some photoshop manipulation tutorials can be a great exercise if. Every image needs strong underlying compositional order so that it grabs the eye from a hundred feet away. If it cant grab the eye from a distance, it will never be an interesting photo, regardless of how many fine details it might have. Details dont matter if theres no story behind it. The reason my image above has won so many awards in so many countries and is picked continually as one of my best images is because of its strong structure. What is this structure It is the broad underlying colors, shapes and contrasts between light and dark upon whose structure all the other far less important details lie. In this image, we have a big red diamond in the middle. It is surrounded by blue gray. The big red rectangle is the obvious, positive space. The blue gray around it is called negative space. Red jumps out at you, especially when put in front of blue. Red does that. I used an ultra wide lens. Ultra wide lenses get darker in the corners, an effect called falloff. This makes the center relatively brighter, adding emphasis. This central emphasis, in addition to being red, is what grabs your eye and pulls you in from a mile away. This is what makes this shot a winner. Nothing else matters much compared to the way the big red diamond grabs you. Only after its caught your eye does anything else matter. This is crucial if this image didnt catch your eye like this, it wouldnt mean much. Against All Flags 1952'>Against All Flags 1952. Once a photo has caught your attention, it needs to have details to keep the eyes interested. This is easy. Every photo has details. The problem is how few photos have any sort of underlying structure to catch your eye in the first place. In this case, the less important details are the yellow peeking out from behind the red, the clouds swooping out from the center, the crud on the concrete at your feet and the reinforcing mesh seen peeking out of the top of the red wall, at least when printed at gallery size. This photo, like all good photos, is about shapes, colors and balances. It has nothing to do with the fact that the actual subject was an abandoned, burnt out bathhouse with no roof. Its nice that I shot this on 4x. Most photographers snap photos, paying attention only to the details, but ignoring the far, far more important fundamentals. Most photographers dont even know that there are fundamentals These fundamentals are the largest, obvious elements of light and dark, colors and shapes. You have to get this underlying structure right, otherwise the photograph has no basis on which to stand. If I had made this shot in black and white, there would be little to no contrast between the red wall and the blue. The blue is often lighter than the red in this photo, so even using a red filter in B W would not have gotten me what I needed to catch your eye. In color, the color red takes charge and makes this shot successful. You should be able to defocus your eyes and look at your image from a hundred feet away, and the basic organization of elements within your frame should still be obvious. If your image goes away as a thumbnail sized image, it has no structure. It sucks. If it doesnt jump out at you as a thumbnail, youve made a boring image, regardless of how big or detailed you print it. The shot above still grabs people, even as a thumbnail. As a thumbnail, people want to click it and see whats going on. Its not just another gray square. If it doesnt sing as a thumbnail, no amount of Photoshop, HDR or gigapan stitching will give it any more structure. It will still suck as hard, no matter how much time you waste on your computer. You have to get it right in your camera. The one thing you can do later is to burn and dodge. This means lightening and darkening different parts of the image to emphasize whats important, and deemphasize whats not. Photographs without the basics are boring. An image, be it a photograph, painting, sketch or gigapan, is meaningless unless its basics are right. The reason so many photos are so bad is because there is no underlying structure. Bad photos may be loaded with details, but forget to get the big, broad basics of composition, light and color correct. Sadly, most photographers are blind to the basics, and only by chance when the basics come together do they get a good shot. More sadly, since so few photographers are paying any attention to the basics, even when they do get a good shot, they dont know why it looks good, so they cant reproduce it. When you learn to look for the basics first, and can get the basics of composition down, youll be able to shoot anything, anywhere, with any sort of cell phone camera, and walk away with the images everyone else covets. People who are blind to the basics are the great majority of people who keep throwing more money at more cameras, and never get any better pictures. Its the basic underlying composition that makes or breaks an image. Its not about the subject Heres another secret in photographic art, its never about the subject. Its always about the underlying compositional structure. Subjects that may be there are chosen because they support or create a structure, not the other way around. What a subject does in real life is irrelevant. In a good photo, subjects are chosen to provide the shapes or colors we want to lay down the basic design of an image. What might look like a door is really only used because its a rectangle, or two squares. If we shoot it at an angle, now its a trapezoid, or a truncated triangle. An ocean liner If you use the whole thing in a successful photo, its because its used as a shape that works with whatever else is in the frame. This is why Im known as a toilet photographer.