How to enchance an image in photoshop

[Mulefisk]

How to Enhance an Image in Photoshop

To everyone who's been wondering about the mysteries of photoshopping, here's a very simple tutorial, with some neat tricks, to show you how to take your pictures from great to awesome.

To use this tutorial, you need literally no photoshop skills.

Step 1:

Pick the image that you want to edit, and open it in photoshop

For this tutorial, i'm gonna use this pic, a simple suburban image, with no fancy BATs.



Step 2:

Resize the image. You'll want to do this now, because resizing the image after editing can result in a loss of quality.

Image -> Image size..



Change the height to 600 (If you want the image to be 800x600)

Step 3:

Now that the image is the right size, it's time to start editing.
The first thing you want to do is to edit the contrast.

Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast



Change the contrast value to somewhere around 20.

As you can see, something as simple as increasing the contrast has already made the picture much more vivid.

Step 4:

Altering the colors.

For this step, we're going to use the Hue/saturation tool

Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation







As you can see, giving a negative value will give the picture less color, while giving a positive value makes the colors more vibrant.

I'm going to go with -15

Step 5:

Optional tricks.

To make the image that extra little touch, there are 2 different tricks you can take into use.

The first one is using the sharpen filter.

Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen

This will make your image look a little less blurry.

Another neat one is to simply flip the picture.

Edit -> Transform -> Flip Horizontal

I've chosen to use both, leaving my image like this:



Step 6:

Adding a border.

The image is looking just fine at the moment, and putting it up on the web would probably not be a problem.
However, to have it look just a little more professional, we're going to add a border.

First, use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select a box slightly smaller than the image we're using.



Then, press Shift+Ctrl+i to inverse it.

Now fill the inversed box with black using the paint bucket.

Then, expand the box by 1 pixel.

Select -> Modify -> Expand..

Click ok, and fill the new area you jsut crated with white, by selecting white as your color, and clicking once in the middle of the picture with the paint bucket.

Step 7:

Celebrate!

Congrats! You've just edited your first image

Your finished image (If you're using the same one as me) should look like this:



And just to compare, here's the original:



And that's all there is to it. Not the greatest difference, but just enough to make the picture more interesting and presentable.

I hope this has been helpful to all you people out there who always wanted to use photoshop, but were afraid to do so.

Happy editing!

[TheTeaCat]

Nice one Mulefisk, Thanks.

This will surely be of help, especially the nice clear, easy steps


TTC



I'll stick kettle on, put your feet up, cuppa on the way

[HabLeUrG]

nice tutorial

[Travis]

Very useful, this tutorial. I've been dying to learn how to make an image like that. Thanks to you, now I know. 

[Yoder7652]

very useful...I find that I always sharpen, but the flipping horizontal is something I'll have to try!

[kwakelaar]

Thanks for putting this up, a very handy tutorial.

[jeronij]

Thanks for sharing these useful techniques with us 

[ExiLe]

very nice mulefisk, easy yet informative! 
Now all you have to do is make more cool CJs!

take care,