Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Basic Photo Editing Tips for Photoshop (Part 2)

Greetings from sunny (and hot!) California! Beth here with a basic tutorial for photo editing. I will be using Photoshop CS4 so you may need to adapt some of the instructions to fit whichever version you are using.

Back in 2003, my hubby and I bought our FIRST digital camera with a whopping 4 megapixels. We were quite impressed with our purchase but as you can see, not all of our pictures turned out well-exposed and some had quite a bit of digital noise in them. I've recently found some ways to help salvage some of those photos.

First off, I use the clean-up action I talked about in this previous post. Just press play and adjust the levels as you see fit as the action prompts you to do.


Then, I adjust my dark, light, and midtone levels in photoshop. Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels.


Then you will see this window come up. The far left toggle adjusts the dark. There's plenty of darkness in my picture so I did not change this level. The far right toggle adjusts the light colors. I adjusted it to make my husband's white shirt more true to its shade and achieve improved overall white balance. The last step is to adjust the midtones, once you've established your point of reference for the darks and lights. Adjusting the midtones seems to make all the difference in the world, as you can tell here.

Next, I readied my red-eye fixer tool.


Just take the "t" shaped cursor and click on the red-eyes and you can see how it works here. Then I saved my image.


There is still some digital noise here from being under-exposed. There are various digital noise-reducing software programs available. I downloaded and installed the Noiseware Community Edition Standalone 2.6 because it was free and it works great!

Once you open the photo within the software, you will see a default setting for editing photos. For my photo, I decreased the noise suppression luminance to 55%, increased the noise suppression color to 90%, then clicked the "Go" button. And voila! Much better photo!


It's still not a perfect picture but the improvement is tremendous. (Click on image below to see greater detail.) It's not very common for parents to be behind the camera so you have to hold on to every one you've got. :-)

I hope this tutorial helps someone save a picture or two. Thanks for reading!

3 comments:

  1. While you have improved the photo I think you should consider doing some hue adjustment and sharpening.

    http://www.rightreading.com/blog_images/photoshop1.jpg

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  2. Hi

    Thanks for this post! I am sure by using this tips picture become more sharper and beautiful.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very nice post. I wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed browsing your blog posts.Today,people wanted always instant without the hassle of doing the work, you are sharing great information about easy photo editing or basic photo editing tips. Thanks for sharing...

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