Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Jul 22 2010 in Articles, Tutorials by admin |

See how you can quickly fix your photos to wow your friends.
Author: Adam Kozłowski
Source: PhotoMafia.pl

Step 1.

Choose a few dull photos

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 2.

The first photo has a bright upper part and a dark lower part. Professional photographers use a graduated filter that is darker on the top to transmit less light. This way you can decrease contrast between the bright sky and dark, shadowy landscape. In order to fix that problem in Photoshop we will use a tool called an Adjustment Layer to brighten the bottom part and simulate the use of a graduated filter. Adjustment layers are useful because they do not change the original picture, so you can modify them without worrying. Choose Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Exposure. A panel will pop up with three values. Adjust the Exposure slider so that the bottom part of the photo will look bright enough (here I used +1.5).

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 3.

The photo will now look too bright in the upper part. In order to fix it, we need to make the adjustment layer gradually fade towards the top of the image. Select the white rectangle of the mask in the Layers panel.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Then select the Gradient Tool from the toolbox. At the top of the application window you will see new options. Choose a black-to-white gradient from the drop-down menu.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Starting from the top edge of the photo, click and hold the mouse button and move the cursor to the bottom of the photo. Release the button and you should see a gradient in the Exposure adjustment layer in the Layers panel. The photo looks much better already, but there are still some adjustments to make.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 4.

The colours in the photo are not as you remember them, right? You remember rich greens in the valley, deep blue sky and golden field in the foreground. Let’s enrich the colours now by creating a new Adjustment Layer. This time choose Layers -> New Adjustment Layer -> Vibrance. Let’s try to adjust the Vibrance slider to the right even as far as +50. This will make the colours pop!

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 5.

Finally, as this photo was probably taken by a compact camera with a very small lens which is prone to get dirty during travel, there is not enough sharpness and so-called “punch” in the image. We need to go back to the Background layer in the Layers panel, which is our original photo and then in the top menu select Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask. The Unsharp Mask tool (commonly abbreviated in discussion forums as USM) is usually used to sharpen up fine details in the image. But here we will use it in a different way.

In the pop-up window decrease the Amount slider to about 50% and the Radius slider to a value that is really big – depending on the size of your original photo this may be from 30 to 100 pixels. Here for this original 2 megapixel image, i used a value of 50 pixels, but that is a matter of your personal preference.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

The effect can be best seen if you click Preview tickbox in the Unsharp Mask pop-up window on and off and on again. You will be able to see what photographers call “punch” in your own photo.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 6.

The second photo suffers from what photographers call “underexposure”. This usually happens when the camera sets the exposure time that is too short, usually because it is being fooled by a bright object in the scene. This might be snow, sand on the beach or clouds, like in this photo.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

To alleviate this problem, we should again use an adjustment layer with Exposure correction. However, we will use a new option in the pop-up box of the Exposure Adjustment Layer. There are three icons of an eye-dropper in this window. One is for setting the black point (the place in the image which we know should be black), another for setting the gray point (when we have some colour cast in the image, but we have an object that we know should be gray) and finally the white point, which is what we will use.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

We know that the clouds were bright white, therefore we must pick the brightest spot in the image with the white point eye-dropper tool. Depending on which point of the cloud you pick, the brighter the photo will become. Here i settled for a value of +0.75. You can also use the Unsharp Mask tool from the previous photo to add contrast to this one.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Step 7.

For the last photo we can take a look at its Histogram panel. The Histogram counts pixels in the image with a specific brightness. The left side of the histogram belongs to dark pixels, the right side to bright ones. If you have a severely underexposed or overexposed photo, you will see a very sharp peak on the left or right side of the histogram, respectively. Here, however, we see that the values of the histogram are concentrated in the middle. This usually means that the photo lacks contrast.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Therefore we must make the bright tones brighter and the dark tones darker. For this, again, we will use the Adjustment Layer tool. Select Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Brightness/Contrast from the top menu. Move the contrast slider to the rightmost point (+100). This will make the Histogram look a bit more stretched.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

However, the photo still looks a bit dark.

Dull photos from your summer holidays? No problem!

Let’s add another adjustment layer – the one we already know – for controlling Exposure. You can introduce small changes to the exposure slider and also to the Gamma slider. The Gamma slider can brighten up or darken the midtowns in the image, while leaving the white and black point where it was.