Make Your Photos Sexier
There are quite a few techniques for image adjustment and enhancement in Photoshop. A lot of them are quite effective. I have found one useful technique that takes minimal effort and is very effective. It’s a quick and dirty technique, so if you like to spend a lot of time adjusting color, hue, saturation, brightness and contrast, then don’t read any more.
Step 1 Get a Good Image
Find a good, high-res photo to start with. Restoring old and poor quality images is not exactly fun, so do yourself a favor and find an image you think is great. What were going to do is take a great image and make it spectacular. I found this picture of an African lion on stock exchange. I would say this is a rather nice photo, but we can make it better.
Side Note: If you have not been to stock exchange, go check it out, it’s an amazing resource for free images.
Step 2 Lab Color
Select Image > Mode > Lab Color. If you have a background layer it will ask you to flatten your image, you can say yes or you can say no, it doesn’t matter. Once you are in Lab Color, click on your New Fill or Adjustment Layer. It looks like a black and white cookie. Once you have selected the Adjustments Layer button, select Curves.
Side Note: 8:05 PM is the time I took the screen capture, but you can do this at any time, it doesn’t have to be exactly at 8:05.
Step 3 Adjusting your Curves
This is where the magic happens folks. Lab Color has a lighten channel, an A Channel and B Channel. You only want to adjust you’re A and B channels. In the drop down menu, select channel A. All you have to do now is make your typical S Curve. You can add points in the curve by clicking on the graph. Your curve something should look like this.
You want to keep them as symmetrical/even as possible. You can see that the image now has deeper colors and tones, but it’s a little too red. Adjust channel B exactly the same way you adjusted channel A. Ahh Ha! You can now see that the image is full of even rich tones and colors. There are actually hidden colors in your image that are now that are being brought to life.
Step 4 Finishing Up
There is definitely a big improvement from where we started. Once you reach this point, I’d say your next step from here depends on what you find most appealing. For me the last adjustment layer I would like to add is a Brightness and Contrast layer, to add a subtle change in contrast. Subtle, but makes a huge difference. Click on your adjustment layer button and select Brightness and Contrast. I increased my brightness by +18 and my contrast by +20. If it’s too bright, you can just turn down the opacity on the adjustment layer. I turned down the opacity on my layer to 80%.
I like Lab Color, but it really limits what I can do as far as adjustments and filters within Photoshop so I am going to convert back to RGB mode. Select Image > Mode > RGB and this time when Photoshop asks you if you want to flatten your image say yes, otherwise it will delete your adjustment layer. Now you have a beautifully adjusted image that took very little effort. Try this with other images to see with what you come up with. I tried this technique with a Gorilla and was surprised how many rich tones I got out of my image.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Great and simple tutorial. Fixed some of my favorite shots and they came out great. Will play around more and see what I get. Thanks for the tips!
i also recomend to use the “match color”
1- load your image
2- load the image you like the colors off[mostly if it’s an image with cool, electric and bright and dark tones]
3- chage to the window where your image is
4- go to “iamge>adjustments> match color”
5- bellow you can choose the other image from wich you want the colors from
6- play with the settings and you are done
7- you may adjust brightness contrast at your likes
http://neviral.deviantart.com/art/A-E-collage-fixart-75781339 a small example
John Doe,
I tried looking online for why it wouldn’t work with a Canon, not much luck. Maybe this might help you narrow it down.
I used CS3 for this image. The image is very high-res 3008 x 2000 pixels, 300 dpi. I don’t know what camera shot this photo, but I wouldn’t think the type of camera would matter. Does it work with any other images? Anyone else know about this?
Good luck.
Wow I got the chance to try this today. I am very impressed. Makes the image so much brighter and crisp. I can see me doing this a lot on images.
I agree that most all photos can benefit from some touch up. The lioness has lost detail in the highlights and you blow out the highlights though. I’m not a fan of that. Also the first image appears over saturated. The results are best on the gorilla. I like color match, but one needs to be careful using this as well.
Weeeell. I don’t really like it. It’s oversaturated and has too much contrast. Curves are pretty cool for a lot of things, but I think you’re overdoing it. I, for one, would enhance the contrast only a tiny little bit, because the original image is looking just a bit dull. This way the highlight areas on the head and neck of the lioness don’t lose their detail, as they do on your version, and the shadows of the gorilla are not entirely black, either.
Paul,
I see your point and to be honest, after I posted this, I immediately saw that the contrast and brightness did kill the image. One thing I should have done was turn the opacity down on the adjustment layers and tone down the contrast. I guess it also depends on what type of look and feel you are going for, but I agree that the image could have been much stronger with less intense curve adjustments.
Thanks for you input!
Interesting. But doesn’t it just achieve the same thing as increasing saturation? Seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill to me.
Yes, I also thought that it’s similar to adjusting levels and saturation. I tried it with different photos… seems that only the saturation changes, though I think not so harsh as when you do it in RGB.
Thanks for sharing