How To Make Photographs Look Better in photoshop

[sxyloverboy 0]

Well here a tutorial on how to make your photographs looks a bit better than the image directly from the camera. These are only guidlines and not rules. Also the numbers in this tutorial are not the numbers that make the picutre you made look the best.

 

Here is the image i will use to make it look a bit better.

 

1. So the first thing what i always do is edit the levels a bit.

Layer --> New Adjusment Layer --> Levels...

You can leave the name to Levels 1 or name it however you want.

This is the histogram. In mine you can see how the black only starts going about one cm from the left of the histogram. in most cases we can pull it

 

As you can see the image has gotten a bit darker. But the colors arnt really as dull anymore. To Compensate that i will pull the right arrow thing a bit to the left. This will make it a bit brighter again.

Now as you can see the colors of the field look a lot brighter and not so dull anymore. But the sky as gone totaly white. Im going to use a mask now to only apply the effect on the field and not on the sky.

You can still see some of the white sky but im to lazy to make a perfect mask now. but somehow the image still looks a a bit strane because the sky dosent really fit in well with the field. so now im going to duplicate my levels one layer. Right click on Levels one and then press on Duplicate Layer. Now your going to have a very funny looking picture for a second becuase the sky will still have no effect and the field the double effect.

 

So now double klick on the round black and white circle on the Levels 1 copy layer( if that how you let the name be ) and pull the black arrow back to the total left and the white arrow back to the total left. And then press OK. Now press on your layer mask and Invert it. Image --> Adjustmensts --> Invert... or ctrl+I.

 

Now double click on the black and white circle again and you'll see that your histogramm has changed. i can now pull mine all the way from the left to about the middle of the histogram because thats where it starts.

Now im just going to be perfecting the masks abit and were done with the levels.

This is what it looks like now. still now perfect but yeah. And now that i'm this far in the tutorial ive realized its enough for the time being and ill make a part 2 if people like this. So if you have any questions or want to see what i would do to you images

feel free to pm me or post it here.

 

Ive uploaded the .psd file as an attachment but im not sure its there. well if you want it just ask me.

[leiaah 0]

Wow! finally a tutorial I can use. I hope there'll be more of this next time 'cuz when i try to fix pictures I usually just autolevel and autocolor everything in Photoshop and most of the time nothing good gets done heh. I have a question, how do you brighten up a dark picture? I have a picture that I've scanned and it was taken using no flash, is there a way to brighten it up but still make the colors look vivid and not dull?

[sxyloverboy 0]

I have a question, how do you brighten up a dark picture?  I have a picture that I've scanned and it was taken using no flash, is there a way to brighten it up but still make the colors look vivid and not dull? 

179271[/snapback]

There are ofcourse many ways to edit pictures digitaly to make up for the things you did lets say not to your likeing while doing the shot though in some cases of over or under exposition there isnt really a way to make it better.

 

Here are some things i might try:

Scan it a few more times and play around with the scanner settings. sometimes it just scans to dark.

If you photograph with film and scan in your printed out pictures i would suggest getting a film scanner or this tray where you can put film inside and scan it with a normal scanner. These ususaly look better that scannig from print.

 

As for doing it in photoshop. I would make a new Brightness/ Contrast layer. Now i would make the brightness a bit higher, but now the image will look a bit to flat so we go up with the contrast a bit too. then go up with the brightness a bit again and with the contrast a bit too. Do this as much till you get the best results you can achive.

 

The only problems now is that the areas that were lighter than the rest in the original might look a bit to light.

 

hope this helpd.

[Johnny 1]

The basics of Levels. Nice job.I'm amused by the "Knock out Osama" popup I got when I visited imageshack to see the final picture...*giggle*

[nelimitat 0]

Man it's very interesting. And very easy to do this task. I have some video tutorials about photoshop but I've been too lazy to watch them.

[Saint_Michael 3]

not bad maybe when i take pictures i can do this.