5 Useful Freebies to Help You Create Better Photographs

Looking for a fast way to start creating stunning photographs? Producing great images, broadly speaking, consists of two stages- taking the best possible shot in-camera, and then utilizing the power of post-processing to take it to a whole different level. We have put together a collection of 5 useful freebies to help you with that.

The freebies include ebooks from Photzy and a couple of Lightroom presets. The ebooks contain useful tips that you can quickly apply in your photography to start producing better photos. And if you’d like to add punch to your photos with a single click, there are some cool Lightroom presets too. Do check them out.

Quick Guide to Composition

Composition plays an important role in creating remarkable photographs. Loosely composed shots will never have the kind of visual impact that a photo with a strong composition will have. This guide by Jason Little will help you understand composition better.

You will learn about the compositional rules like the rule of thirds and the golden spiral that can be found in many of the great classic works of art. Jason will also take you through the other composition guidelines on utilizing geometry, framing, leading lines, symmetry and patterns to produce visually captivating photographs.

Adding Emotion to Your Photographs

When a photograph tells you a story, it engages you on an emotional level. But what does it take to add an emotional element to a photo and create a compelling image? In this guide, Kent DuFault will show you how you can add emotion to a photograph.

There are practical tips on using lighting, composition, experimenting with point of view and color that can help you do some serious story-telling through your photos.

Headshots 101

While it might seem pretty straightforward to create a headshot, a number of factors go into making a great one. This guide will briefly cover everything that you need to know about headshots and how to capture them. Lighting plays a crucial role in shooting headshots and different lighting setups will produce different results.

The guide will teach you some basic lighting setups and the concept of lighting ratios to get you started. There are also sections on equipment, framing, background choice, and skin retouching tips.

Sleeklens Lightroom Presets Starter Pack

This starter pack from Sleeklens contains some really cool Adobe Lightroom presets and brushes that you can use in your workflow to create stunning images. You get a total of 10 brushes and 30 presets. Do download it and speed up your post-production, all with a single click. Requires Lightroom 4 or above, or Adobe CC.

Trey Ratcliff’s Lightroom Presets Starter Pack

Trey Ratcliff, author of the really popular travel photography blog Stuck in Customs, has a great collection of free presets for you. The presets come with a warning though – “If you like mild presets that do just a little thing here or a little thing there, just walk on by. But if you wanna go cray-cray, well buckle up and jump on board!” Now that you know what to expect, don’t forget to give it a try! Requires Lightroom 4 or above.