SOOC is short for Straight Out Of Camera

When you download the images from your camera they are like a digital negative that can be perfected in the Digital Darkroom.

Most of the time a bit of contrast and curves adjustment is all you need for the colours to pop and foryour image to really stand out from the crowd.

Download my photoshop actions and try adding some pop to your colours today.

I have been using Adobe Photoshop since 1996 when I bought a copy of Mac Addict which had a 30 day trial of Adobe Photoshop 4. I knew that I had one month to use the program and each day I devoted an hour to using it, sometimes doing the tutorials in Mac Addict and other magazines around at the time. I had so much fun that I have been addicted to Photoshop ever since. In this section of my site I included some basic tutorials with screen captures and files that you can download and experiment with.

Photoshop tutorials
	Adobe Photoshop actions to increase productivity. Click a button for easy photo editing.
	Adobe Camera RAW presets
	Adobe Lightroom presets
	Adjusting colour and contrast using auto levels, auto contrast and curves
	Converting from colour to sepia or black and white using photoshop
	Create your own magazine covers
	Curves, hue/saturation and contrast makes photos come alive
	Fringing - removing the halo or fringing cast in low light photos.
	Hand colouring a photo in Photoshop CS3
	High Key
	Incense smoke art
	Merging a photo and new background
	Merging photographic elements
	Out of Bounds (OOB)
	Photographing animals in cages
	Photographing incense smoke
	Porcelain effect with portraits
	Reversed lens macro technique
	Shadows and Highlights
	The Digital Darkroom
	Water effect photos

If you use some of my actions or techniques please email or flickrmail me and I will feature them on my site.

Tutorial : Out of Bounds - taking your photo out of bounds

Earlier I photographed the gerbera I purchased yesterday against the black armchair. I merged a photo of the chocolate heart (red) into the centre of the gerbera daisy and added a black background. Now I'm going to use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to create a frame and erase part of the frame to show parts of the photo appear to be 'out of bound'.

 You have two or more images that you'd like to combine. How do you do it? In this tutorial I will share one way to achieve this task.

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Open the portrait that you wish to merge.