Make Your Photos Look Better Using Photoshop

Photoshop is famous (infamous?) for being able to make photos look better than real life. It's no wonder—its suite of tools can do everything from add a little something extra, to totally reworking an image. We'll show you a few ways you can take your digital snapshots or scans to a new level with a few little techniques that have a big payoff.

Steps

Cropping and Healing

  1. Open a photo. When opened in Photoshop, it will appear as a layer named Background. The first thing to do before applying any finishing touches is to crop the photo, and remove anything that intrudes on the image. For this tutorial, we'll begin with this image:
    • You can download the full-sized version here.
  2. Select the Crop tool (C). Much of the time, our snapshots are taken without a lot of thought to composition. Either we're just capturing a moment, or are taking a lot of shots in hopes of finding "the one." Cropping can help you focus a picture on the subject and add a lot of strength to the image.
  3. This image is being cropped using the rule of thirds. The general idea is that a picture is divided into thirds, horizontally and vertically. Important elements of the image should be on or near the lines.
    • You can see the peaks of the mountains are roughly aligned to the vertical lines, while the sky and trees are defined by the horizontal lines. It is felt that this makes a more interesting image than having everything centered.
    • Press Enter to crop the image.
  4. Select the Spot Healing Brush tool (J). Use this to clean up bits of the image that weren't cropped out, but are distracting. For our test image, we'll be trimming the trees at bottom left, bottom right, and upper right.
  5. Your image is now prepared for the next step: making it outstanding!

Cleaning Up and Adjusting

  1. Duplicate the background layer. Either right-click on the background layer, then choose Duplicate Layer from the menu, or drag the background layer to the New Layer icon and Photoshop will create a duplicate layer automatically.
  2. Set the Blending mode to Soft Light. This may make the image too dark, but it is only an intermediate step. Once the blend mode has been set, select Control-I (Command-I) to invert the image, or choose Adjustments from the Image menu, then select Invert.
  3. Use the High Pass filter. From the Filters menu, select Other... > High Pass... Make sure the Preview checkbox is enabled, then adjust the Radius slider to taste. Notice your image will change, with a nice, soft effect. The radius really depends on the resolution of your image. If it's very high resolution, you will use a larger radius than if it's a low-resolution image. Let your taste be your guide.
    • While we're using it with a landscape, this effect is also very nice with portraits.
  4. Create a Levels adjustment layer. With the Background copy layer selected, click on the Levels icon in the Adjustments window.
    • Clicking the Auto button will automatically balance the levels between the brightest part of the image, and the darkest. You can use the sliders to fine-tune your image, or use one of the custom presets at the top of the Properties window.
  5. Create a Curves adjustment layer. Click back to the Adjustments tab, and click the Curves icon (to the right, next to the Levels icon). This will let you fine-tune the contrast of the image.
    • Click about 1/4 of the way up the line and pull it down just a little bit. Click again about 3/4 of the way up the line and pull up just a little. This should form a kind of "S" shape, and your image should be much more dramatic.
  6. Change the Curves adjustment layer's blending mode to Luminosity. This will prevent the contrast from affecting the color information of the image.
  7. Merge Layers. From the Layers window menu, select Merge Visible, or press Control-Alt-Shift-E (Shift-Option-Command-E on a Mac) to create a new layer that merges all the information into one layer.
  8. Select the Dodge tool (O). The Doge and Burn tools are ideal for bringing out highlights and shadows in an image. At the top of the Photoshop window, set the controls as follows: for the Dodge tool, set the Exposure to 5%, and the Range to Highlights.
    • Set your brush to a fairly small size (depending on the resolution of your image), and use the Dodge tool to boost the highlights. It's great for bring out details in an image, without over-brightening things
    • The Burn tool will darken things, and is well-used on shadows to give images greater depth.
  9. Compare the images. On top is the before image, followed by the edited version.



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