Enhance your Digital Photos with Photoshop

A Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial we're going to take a digital photograph, straight from the camera, and make a few simple adjustments in Photoshop to make it POP, and give it some life. I see so many digital photos uploaded to Stock Exposures that have just come straight from the camera without any post processing and they have so much potential, but just lack that punch that just a few simple adjustments would make to give them that extra something special.

This is an original photo as it came out of my Nikon D80 DSLR camera. It's just a typical scenic view of the type of "scenery" photos that people commonly take:

OK, so it's a nice enough photo. It's well exposed and there are no dust spots in the sky, which can appear more obviously in clear blue skies. It's a bit bland though and lacks contrast and depth. Let's see what adjustments we can make to enhance it.

First of all we're look at the histogram and check our levels:

The histogram shows us that the photo is well-exposed with no blown highlights or detail lost in the shadows, and there is a good range of color across the whole scale. Looking at the histogram though, to get the best contrast of colors we can see that we need to pull the highlights in a little and also the shadows. Pure black registers as 0 and pure white registers as 255 and the color range in our image falls within those levels as nothing in our image is pure black or pure white.:

By moving the sliders inwardly, we are making the most of the contrast that we have in our image acroos the whole tonal range. Be careful not to go too far though otherwise the parts that are near white will become too white and blow out. Likewise, you will lose detail in the shadws if you move the left slider to far towards the middle. By holding down the "Alt" key on your PC keyboard (Option key on the Mac), you can monitor how far to move the sliders. Just keep moving them until you start to see spots of color appear in the image and then back off a little.

Next we're going to make a curves adjustment to further enhance the brightness and contrast in our image:

Opening the "curves" box for the first time and you see just a straight diagonal line. By introducing a bit of an "S" shape to the line, we can add increase brightness and contrast to our photos to liven them up:

You have to be careful not to overdo it here as the smallest adjustments can make quite a difference. Just keep an eye on your image and experiment with the degree of the curve you're making until you get it to the position that you like.

Alternatively, you can use the Brightness/Contrast adjustment window:

The numbers represent percentages and you can increase the amount of brightness and contrast in your images. Every image is different and there are no set percentages to use, so just experiment until you get the desired look.

Next, a Saturation adjustment:

It can be easy to go over the top with saturation, so like the brightness and contrast, just experiment by increasing the saturation until you reach the desired level.

The final adjustment we're going to make is by using the "Unsharp Mask":

I picked up this little tip from a talented photographer called Dr. Jalapeno at PopPhoto.com and it makes such a difference to your photos. Using the Unsharp Mask, use the settings above and see the difference it makes to your photos!

Now let's put it all together. the original image:

...and after a few adjustments:

So with a bit of experimenting and a few simple adjustments, you can add so much more appeal to your photos and give them that extra punch that really makes them stand out more.