Enhancing Your Pictures I
What we have here is a picture of water droplets on a leaf taken by the Canon IXUS 60. It’s a decent picture but it lacks the ‘umph’. Now, there are a lot of photo-editing software out there which you can purchase/grab. However, I will only discuss Adobe Photoshop as that is my current favourite photo-editing program at the moment. I have used Lightroom before though.
Look at the picture below. Which is better? The top or the bottom one? Assuming you have chosen the bottom one, I will now guide you step by step on how to achieve similar results as the bottom picture.
Step 1, find a picture that you would like to edit (which we have already chosen).
Step 2, duplicate the original picture (make sure you do necessary adjustments to the picture before hand eg. levels, sharpening and etc.) by selecting its layer and pressing CTRL-J on your keyboard. If you are not a fan of shorcut keys, you can duplicate the layer by clicking layer -> duplicate layer. You should have something like this on your layer window.
Step 3, select the image that you have just duplicated. Press CTRL+U to bring up the hue/saturation menu. It can also be accessed by clicking image -> adjustments -> hue/saturation. Set the saturation of the image to 0. If you want a quicker way to desaturate the image, click CTRL+SHIFT+U on your keyboard.
You should get something like this.
Step 4, set the blending mode to overlay (for the image you have just desaturated).
You will end up with something like this.
Step 5, now, the picture has more ‘umph’. If you like the results, you can stop at step 4. To give it more color/contrast, duplicate the ORIGINAL image and set its blending mode to overlay.
You will end up with something like this.
Step 6, if you are still not satisfied with the color boost, you can duplicate the layer (the layer that you have just duplicated from the original) again until you are satisfied.
Here are some of my takes. Cheers!
P/S - I used other blending modes too. Go test them out!
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really nice pic u have there and good tips !
Thanks =]
wee thanks!
i tried it out step by step. ok im happyyy i learnt something new.
Wonderful pictures you got… love it
Good one…