Ways to Correct the Most Common Flaws in Digital Photos

As you are probably eager to start experimenting with your pictures in a photo editing application, this article is aimed to help you with a few ideas to get started. It refers to Adobe Photoshop in particular, but other image editing software works the same. Without becoming to technical or going into all the specific functions you can experiment on your own, it aims to provide you with easy ways to do some changes to your photo.

Red eye removal
In many photos made with flash, people have red eyes. In photoshop, you can easily remove them with the Brush tool. You first zoom in, then drag to a precise area with the Hand tool. Select a proper brush size to work on the pupils area. Use color mode at low opacity in order ti keep the details in the image but colorize the areas you choose. Then zoom out to see how it turned out like and make the final touches if necessary. Choosing a feather brush instead of a solid one will make the picture look more natural. Another method to remove red eyes is using Ellipse Selection. Select the pupil areas and add a feather in order to make the selection edge less sharp. Then use the red eye removal button.

Correcting flashlight effects
The flash can sometimes make a person's face look to white and it would help to make it darker. The first method to improve it is from the Adjustments and Variations option. Select Highlights, then click Darker on the scale 3-4 times and OK. A slightly better way to do this is to select the pale areas with the Polygon Lasso or another selection tool that works in the same way. After that, use a feather to soften edges of the selected area (the size should be around 6). On the selected area, use the Brighten function and decrease brightness until you are satisfied.

Cropping and zooming
You might want to remove some background from the photo. Before cropping, you could zoom in to get an idea about how the picture will look like. You can crop and resize the photo at the same time, keeping the resolution constant. Be careful not to enlarge the photo too much as it will look pixelated. Don't go lower than 150dpi with your resolution or you won't be able to get good prints. Now your picture looks much better, with highlights adjusted, red eyes removed and cropping to bring forward the subject.

Careful brighting
Take, for instance, a photo of a cherry tree. You might want to brighten the cherry blossom to highlight details, but not the background sky, which is already bright enough. With the Brighten option you can make the whole picture brighter, which is not good. From the Adjustment and a Variations option in the Image File tab you choose Shadows/Midtones, set the scale between Fine and Course and click Lighter a few times. This will make the cherry blossoms clearer without brightening the rest of the photo.

Another way to do this is using a Levels feature from the Adjustment option and moving the slider in the Midtones range slightly towards Dark. When the shading is lighter, you can also adjust brightness and contrast. Yet another method is to choose the Color Range and sample the sky area, creating a selection of parts of the sky. Then you inverse the selection, choose a feather sized around 3, and adjust brightness and contrast until you are satisfied.

Colorizing water
Imagine a photo of two swans taken on a gloomy day, with the water looking a bit muddy. You can use the Magic Wand (which selects areas by color tone) or Color Range tool. Then adjust the tolerance value - the higher you set it, the wider the area selected. After you're good with the selection, apply a feather sized 3 and in the Adjustment option click Hue/Saturation to achieve a deep blue color. Move the slider until you are happy with the color, then use the brush at low opacity to paint over the area (like in the red eye removal technique).

This is probably enough information to digest and hopefully it gave you some tips for basic image correction. Now you can start experimenting with one photo and see how these tips work.

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.