How-To Geek

When you’re shooting portraits, the soft background look keeps distracting backgrounds from ruining a shot. If you’ve not shot correctly, here’s a quick, simple tip to pop out your foreground and keep the most important parts the most visible.

Encryption tools exist to protect your privacy… and also to make you feel like you’re an awesome spy. Today we’ll use a portable USB drive to hold all of your passwords encrypted in a virtual disk hidden inside a file.

Printers have been using line tones to create rich looking images long before there was any digital art. Today we’ll be using Photoshop tricks (with no filters) to turn an ordinary photograph into old-timey line tone style piece of art.

Creating animations from scratch in Photoshop might seem daunting, but in fact, they’re very simple. Fire up Photoshop and grab some of your files. It’s time to annoy the pants off of your friends with lots of animated GIFs!

One of the characters you might have seen around How-To Geek is our very own “Keyboard Ninja.” Today, we honor him in t-shirt form, and you can pick the first design you’d like to see printed for the HTG store.

For those of you of the artistic persuasion, you might be using Photoshop or GIMP to color your scanned drawings. Fortunately, putting the line art in a transparent layer is very easy with this slick technique.

If you think Photoshop is the most powerful tool in a photographer’s toolbox, think again. Whether you’re using freeware, Adobe Camera Raw, or Lightroom, Raw developing tools are the best way to turn good pictures into great ones.

You might laugh at the high retail prices for “premium” cables at big box retail stores. But is it possible that a higher quality cable can give you a better digital signal? The nuance of the answer may surprise you.

Creating a background image for your webpage (or desktop background) isn’t challenging at all. In fact, even a newbie Photoshop user can bash one out in about ten seconds. Here’s the simplest of simple methods with surprising, great results.

If you’ve followed along, you’ve bought hosting and installed WordPress software for a swanky new webpage. Today we’ll explain the less obvious perks of WordPress and how you can get a bit more mileage out of your new web software.

Last week we talked about how to buy and start a simple website using WordPress. Today, we’ll start customizing our WordPress site and get you off on the right foot to having a great quality, feature rich website.

You’ve probably put up plenty of pages and accounts on various services and blogs. But today, learn how to become a real website owner and put together an awesome feature-rich website of your own with little to no experience.

Maybe you’ve always wanted more of yourself. Or maybe you’ve always thought you could be your own best friend! Regardless of your reasons, here’s how to duplicate yourself with some clever photograph tricks and either Photoshop or GIMP.

Somewhere in your home, there’s a box of old analog photographs you probably want digital copies of. Unless you know how to use your scanner correctly, the image quality can turn out poor. Here’s how to get the best results.

Ever taken a picture that has a focus that’s just a little bit too soft? Today’s graphics idea was requested by a reader that wanted to do something about those blurry images. Keep reading to see our solution!

You may have heard photographers talk about “Chromatic Aberration” like it’s a disease. Today, we’ll give a explanation of what this term means, and share an advanced technique for removing it from photos, should the need arise.

Even if you don’t have much drawing talent, it’s surprisingly easy to create a photorealistic caricature from a photograph with good resolution and a few minutes in Photoshop. Grab an image and get ready to become a caricature artist!

You’ve seen it in magazines, photo websites, advertisements, and loads of other places—that romantic, almost saccharine look applied to an image to soften skin texture and create “glowing” portraits. Here’s how to get that supermodel glow in under a minute.

As with most things, when you dissect a popular term like “resolution” to an acedemic (or geeky) level, you find that it’s not as simple as you might have been lead to believe. Today we’re going to see just how far the concept of “resolution” goes, briefly talk about the implications of the term, and a little bit about what higher resolution means in graphics, printing, and photography.

While falling under the “just for fun” category, faking a tattoo in Photoshop or GIMP is an exercise that can teach you quite a lot about the program. Here’s how we made a convincing image from a few minutes work.

When you learned photography the hard way, it’s hard not to see the new generation as simpletons spoiled by the advance of tech. Today, we’re learning about the history of photography, and how hard it really was.

At How-To Geek, we’ve written extensively about how it’s impossible to “enhance” images and reclaim detail that is lost or isn’t there to begin with. Are we changing our tune? Nope, there’s nothing magical about these tips, except for the improved results you’ll get when you improve your own low resolution images. Keep reading and give it a shot!

It’s never too late to let that special someone know how you feel about them with these elementary school-style geek valentines. Send them off on Valentine’s day as E-cards, or print them out and share them, and make somebody smile.

JPG distortion, tiling, and artifacts can ruin an otherwise great image. While no technique can truly restore and image, here’s a How-to Geek tip on how to remove and repair JPG distortion and artifacts in a few easy steps.

It may not be a fountain of youth, but Photoshop is the secret of beauty experts everywhere. Here’s some tips on  how to reduce wrinkles and make the people in your pictures look younger in virtually no time at all.