Enhance photos with different techniques Tutorial

Intro:

In this free photoshop tutorial I will show some different techniques on how to enhance your photos or any type of screenshot from Games etc.

Step 1:

Open up the following photo of The Burj Al-Arab hotel. I used a pic of this hotel before just because its an AMAZING building.



When opening a photo your layer will be locked, to have all the proper adjustments available you need to unlock the layer, simply do this by double-clicking the layer in the layers palette, fill in some name and press OK.

Step 2:

Layer adjustments are very handy, the most handy function of it is that you can always edit your adjustment later if your not totally satisfied with the result. For example: if you use the menu option Image > Adjustments > Levels (or any of the other shortcuts), it is forced onto the layer you've selected, this way it cannot be changed, you can only go back and redo the step. So I advice you to use layer adjustments.

Create a new adjustment layer, it's the following icon in the layers palette



And choose Levels.

Note: You see it makes a new layer in the layers palette, when you ever have to change one of your adjustment layers double-click the adjustment thumbnail.

Moving on.. You see the 3 Black, gray and white pointers? Those are your buddies .If you slide the black pointer it will darken the darker parts (Shadows) of the photo, but if you go to far it'll darken the rest too. Same counts for the other 2, gray for the mid dark (midtones) parts, and white for the light parts (highlights).

I used the following settings for the levels adjustment, Input levels (from left to right): 25, 1.19, 255 and Press OK. With these settings I basically darkened the background with the black pointer and a tiny bit more with the gray pointer and left the white pointer on its original position leaving the lightning as it is, since its pretty good lightning. You have to experiment with every photo and see what gives the best result. I didn't like the background of the photo because it was to gray, I darkened it and left the lightning on the building and reflection on the clouds intact, making the building really pop out! Every photo is different and will need different values obviously.

This is my result:



You can also use an adjustment layer of Brightness/Contrast to darken an image but I prefer levels since you can really adjust the parts YOU want. For some jobs Brightness/Contrast will do, but those are jobs that don't need to be enhanced that much.

Hide the Levels adjustment layer by clicking on the eye in front of the layer in the layers palette. We're hiding this layer because now we're going to discuss Color balance.

Step 3:

Now I'm going to explain Color balance, I've made a tutorial about Color balance before, but that free photoshop tutorial didn't explain much.
Make a new adjustment layer like you did before but now choose Color balance instead of levels.

Color balance is great for photos / screenshots that already have some colors but need to be enhanced. A lot of people use Hue/Saturation for this but I personally prefer and advice you use Color balance for jobs like these. Color balance is more tweak-able and can create a more flowing color result with much nicer colors. With Hue/Saturation you can give something color that has none.

Now hopefully you got the Color balance pop-up window still open =). When you open Color balance it'll select Midtones as the Tone balance, The tone balances are basically the same as of the levels but then for colors. As you can see you have 3 different sliders on every Tone balance.

- Cyan > Red
- Magenta > Green
- Yellow > Blue

You can adjust these colors and all in between for every Tone balance. I advice you to tweak the Midtones first, then Shadow and Highlights. That's the way I do it but you can change it around if you prefer. After I did my way of starting I tweak up the sliders some more and just feel the color coming alive and adjust it to what I think needs to be adjust.

For this photo I used the following values (from left to right):
Shadows: -40, +61, -16
Midtones: -5, -100, +29
Highlights: -8, -2, +10

I lowered the opacity of the Color balance adjustment layer to 52%, Which leaves me with the result below:



And that about wraps it up for this free photoshop tutorial, you can explore some of the other adjustment layer options but these 2 are the ones I use the most and wanted to show to you beginners out there!