Professional image editing revealed. The fast and systematic way to make your images look good.
Sometimes we do not get the result we expected in our images. Your exposure was wrong or the light makes a color cast. And of course you are free to edit your images to represent your vision and not reality. In this tutorial I will show you how to make images better using Photoshop. The dialog box you will use to make the basic settings is called Curves. You can come very far with this tool but sometimes we have to use some other tools for selective corrections and finally most images get better with a little sharpening.
Here is the list we will follow:
- Edit Highlights using Curves and Selection as mask.
- Enter black / Enter white using Curves
- Tone using Curves
- Contrast using Curves
- Colorcast using Curves
- Color-correction using Hue/Saturation, Selective Color, Replace Color, Path, Layer Mask.
- Restoration using History brush.
- Sharpen using Unsharp Mask.
This is the order you should follow editing most images. When you look at a image and something strikes you as the major flaw, it is tempting to race ahead and fix that first. But wait! Using this method many things will get right in the process.
Presenting the images.
This is the images we want to edit:
- In the image of the little girl there is no contrast.
- The image of child standing on its head in the snow have a heavy blue cast.
- In the image of the fruit and glasses, I will show how you can boost the light mid-tones and enhance highlights.
- The image of the tree with flowers is to dark. We would want the flowers to stand out more.
You can download the HighRes images for free, to use in practicing the tutorials on this site.
