Nov 20

The Best Adobe Suite Alternatives For Creative Pros

For years, the Adobe Creative Cloud has been the default toolkit for most professional creatives. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro are so dominant that their names have become verbs. But the landscape is shifting. The mandatory subscription model, feature bloat, and the rise of specialized, AI-native tools have pushed many seasoned professionals to look for alternatives. This isn’t about finding a free or “good enough” replacement. This is about finding the right tools for the... read more ›
Nov 20

The Best Photoshop Alternatives For Creative Pros

The conversation around Photoshop is changing. For years, the question was simple: “What’s a cheaper alternative to Photoshop?” That question is now obsolete. The real question, the one that professional creatives should be asking, is: “What does my new creative stack look like?” Adobe Photoshop isn’t dead, not by a long shot. But its role as the undisputed center of the creative universe is over. Trying to find a single tool to replace it is... read more ›
Nov 19

Is Adobe Photoshop still worth it in 2026? That depends…

The conversation around AI and creative work is deafening. It’s a mix of doomsday predictions and utopian fantasies, with most of it missing the point entirely. The real shift isn't about replacement; it's about a fundamental change in our role as creative professionals. Nowhere is this more apparent than inside Adobe Photoshop. For decades, it’s been the undisputed hub of our digital craft, a tool for meticulous, hands-on manipulation. But that's changing. Photoshop is evolving... read more ›
Nov 19
Aug 05

Everything You Weren’t Taught About Taking Photos: How to Make an Image While Making Tough Decisions on Set (Amidst the Drama of it All)

chase jarvis naked juice
Background Story. This image was a part of a global campaign — print, OOH and digital - for Naked Juice in 2011. This image was one image in a series of 6 ads where the goal was to achieve what we were calling "the Naked Lens" — a superwarm, hard backlit look, complete with lens flare and jeweled tones throughout the image. While it might be an overused look these days — lens flares hadn't... read more ›
Jun 10

Photographs Have Been Lying To You All Along — The Sordid History of Image Manipulation

With Adobe Photoshop looking ahead to its 25th anniversary, a handful of clever advertising pranks, and the recent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art on the history of photo manipulation [deets below], I thought we'd wax nostalgic for a hot minute on how far photography has come -- and hasn't come -- from those pre-school days of cutting, coloring and pasting. For those of us who love to wrench around in Photoshop on a... read more ›
May 13

Size Matters: How to Build a HUGE Panoramic Photo, From Capture to Final Image [272 Gigapixel !!]

Earlier in the week I shared my gear list for the hike up Kilimanjaro with Summit on the Summit. While on the mountain I snapped off a slew of panoramas and sent them to my buddy Mark, who does digital retouching with his company PARADOX VISUAL. I wanted him to build a BIIIIIG panorama that could be auctioned off for Summit on the Summit. And when I'm talking big, I'm talking 4 feet tall and... read more ›
Apr 29

So You Want to Be a Commercial Photographer? Here’s How… [Joey L on creativeLIVE]

joey L on creativeLIVE
Update: It's official now, I'm dropping in as a guest on JoeyL's show TODAY at 10:45 Seattle Time (1:45 NYC; 18:45 London). Join us - ask questions. I just was sent over the topics he's going to grill me on and I haven't given an interview this in-depth about commercial photography in more than a year. Tune in HERE to watch... -- Occasionally I hand pick certain people that I'd like to see... read more ›
Apr 09

4 Great Ways to Get the Look of Film in Your Digital Darkroom

A lot of us still shoot film for love and for fun. I'm often dragging around my Polaroid 600, my Hassie 500cm, some Lomo stuff (or these other film cameras)... but it's next to impossible to have clients get fired up to shoot film in a professionals setting. They wanna see their picture NOW. Well, if you've ever been in a pickle over how to get... read more ›
Mar 07

Photoshop Action Hack ‘Un-Airbrushes’ Women’s Bodies

Dove has been running "Real Beauty" ads for more than a decade. Their agency Ogilvy in Toronto cam up with a pretty dope hack/secret weapon to raise awareness with photo re-touchers, art directions and designers to reconsider the messaging that they and their clients are promoting by thinning, coloring and generally adding or subtracting to women's bodies for benefit of advertising to the masses. By disguising a desirable Photoshop action in popular blogs Dove has... read more ›