This is more of a tip then a tutorial, I think, but I’ve noticed that most digital photos come off the camera with a few similar shortcomings, at least as far as displaying them on the web is concerned. So these are just the sort of baseline adjustments that I almost always use, no matter what I’m going to do with the photo in the end.
The raw picture from a little canon point-and-shoot
It's not a drastic change, but it's certainly an improvement
I don’t want the picture to look photoshopped. I just want it to look like my little camera did a better job than it actually did. So, first up create a new adjustment layer for brightness and contrast. I try not to boost anything too much, so these are the settings I used:
Next up is an adjustment layer for hue and saturation. We’re really only interested in saturation, so make sure the colorize option is not checked and then bump the saturation up a little bit. Something like this should do:
Finally, we do just a touch of Curves adjustment. Curves is probably the heaviest hitter in terms of photo effects, so if you want your photos to look more photoshoppy, this is the layer to do it with. For now, were just going to create three anchor points on the line, lined up with the grid, one upper right, one dead in the middle and one lower left. Then just select the upper right and bump it up and to the left a little bit, and take the lower left and bump it down and to the right a little bit. You should have something like this:
The nice thing about these is that they’re subtle enough to apply almost all the time. So if you were recording that session, or if you made a little droplet, you could run a whole set of snapshots through this and you know they’re all going to improve.
Tags: adjustment layers, digital photos, layer effects, photo retouching, Photography, photoshop