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3 Tips for Fixing Photos

Posted on June 15th, 2007
Written by admin and filed into the Photo Manips, Miscellaneous, Effects category.


Photography is becoming easier with technology, but sometimes pictures just don’t turn out right. There are 3 easy steps you can follow to get picture looking better.

Three Tips:

Removing Washed Out Color
Exposure
Levels
For this tutorial all you need is Photoshop, and pictures or stock photos.

STEP 1 (Washed out color)

A lot of the problems photos have come from being washed out. Basically the colors in the photo aren’t vibrant enough. There are many ways to fix color problems in photos. Below is a quick and simple way.

Right click the photo layer in the layer table > Duplicate layer

Go to Layer mode > Set blend mode to “Overlay” or “Multiply”. (Each layer type gets slightly different results. They are both good for different situations; however I have found if you use them together they don’t work as well.

Go to Layer opacity > Set it to 50% (The opacity will obviously vary from picture to picture.)

STEP 2 (Exposure)

Open your photo up and choose Image> Adjustments> Shadow/Highlight

Mess around with the sliders until the image looks better.

STEP 3 (Levels)

Go to Image > Adjustments > Auto levels or use the shortcut and press Shift + Ctrl + L

The image will look a lot better with just this one step alone. If the image still doesn’t look quite right, do it manually by following the steps below.

To manually adjust levels Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels

It can take some adjusting, but sliding images can look a lot better.

3 Steps can greatly improve images, and make your photos better. There are many advance techniques to do these things better, but for the quick fix the three steps above are perfect.

The image above is not a great looking photograph. However, it is hundreds times better than the before picture. You can get an idea of what these tricks can do for photos that aren’t messed up that much.

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