photography blog
We’ve all been there.
You’ve gone out with your camera, got what you thought were lots of really nice shots, but once on your computer screen they seem to be lacking a little something.
The colours aren’t as vibrant as you’d hoped, the exposure is a bit off, the picture looks a bit flat.
They’re a severe case of almost and you’d like to fix them on the computer but you just don’t know the best place to start.
Fortunately, there are five quick and easy fixes you can run in your photo editing software to give your image a bit of a boost and rescue it from the reject pile. We’ll look at each in turn.
Photoshop Elements calls it the Auto Smart Fix, Paint Shop Pro has a Smart Photo Fix, Google Picasa has a button marked I’m Feeling Lucky, Photoshop has Auto Levels and iPhoto calls it Enhance.
Whatever your software calls it, the function’s basic purpose is to make an educated guess on how to fix your photo by adjusting the contrast, brightness and saturation automagically. Sometimes, it’ll get it wrong. I would say that Paint Shop Pro X’s Smart Photo Fix (the software I use to edit my images) gets it right about 9 out of 10 times.
Remember, the Undo button is your friend. Try the quick photo fix button - if you hate it, you can always undo it.
Digital noise, the grain you get on many images especially when using a high ISO setting on your camera, is the bane of many photographers.
If your editing software has a noise reduction button somewhere, now is the time to use it to remove the noise created by the camera and that generated from the previous photo fix adjustments.
Just like in the washing powder adverts, your whites may not be whiter than white - they may have a slight orange or blue tint to them and other colours in the image look slightly “off” to how you remember them. This happens when the camera gets the colour temperature wrong, for example when you’re taking pictures with indoor lighting.
Most photo editing software has an automatic colour balance correction option. Some make a good guess at how to correct the image without any user input, others allow you to use an eyedropper to pick the area of your photograph which is white enabling the software to match the colour temperature correctly.
Either way, this is a great way to clean up your colours and get skin tones looking more realistic again.
Unfortunately, this step is unique to Paint Shop Pro and even Corel themselves have been rather vague about what the filter actually does. However, if you’re a PSP user, then it’s really worth giving it a go on your photos (remember that Undo button if you don’t like the result!)
It can be found under the Enhance Photo drop down menu on the toolbar and it seems to go through the image and improve the brightness and contrast in certain areas to give the whole image a bit more “oomph”. I find it’s one of my most used tools in my photo fixing arsenal. Try it, experiment with different strengths of effect, you might like it.
This function always looks a bit scary and advanced the first time you see it, but it is much easier to use than it looks and is invaluable to really make the colours pop!
In Photoshop, the function can be found on the menu path Image>Adjustments>Curves and in Paintshop Pro it’s located at Adjust>Brightness and Contrast>Curves.
What you should see is a 4 by 4 grid with input written at the top and output written at the left and a straight diagonal line running from the bottom left to the top right.
What you want to do, using your mouse, is to drag the line slightly to make it into a very gentle S-curve - just like the one in the image to the left.
(This screenshot is taken from Paintshop Pro X, but you should find the dialogue box is very similar in other photo editing packages).
Of course, the exact shape of the curve and how extreme you take it will very much depend on the image and on your preference, so don’t be afraid to experiment and see what you like best.
And here is one of my rescue images.
It’s not perfect - it was a simple snap I took of my husband and boys while out on a countryside walk which came out disappointingly drab and lifeless.
With a couple of minutes and a few clicks of the mouse it’s looking a lot better - still not perfect (the composition isn’t ideal, and I could probably do with dropping the saturation of the red tones a little) but it’s certainly rescued it out of the slush pile.
I should state that all of these steps aren’t compulsory, nor are they exclusive - they’re just the five things I find I use again and again when tidying up photos. Individually, each step we’ve talked about is quite subtle, but together they can give a photograph more impact and make it more pleasing to the eye.
Have a go, experiment with some of your “almost but not quite” photographs and let us know how you got on. Or perhaps you have your own top tips to save an image otherwise destined for the recycle bin.
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