Friday Feature

For my friday feature I thought it might (hopefully) be helpful to a lot of you wonderful photographers to learn some quick but very useful things on photoshop. Photoshop is not very user friendly unless you know what you are doing, and my mom who is an amazing professional photographer taught me a few simple tips that can turn ordinary snapshots into really great pictures. There is so much you cab do on photoshop but I thought I would do just a few basic things that anyone would be able to do. Hopefully this isn't all stuff everyone already knows, if so I know a lot of other really fun photoshop tricks that I can post about another time.

This is my son Allston playing outside last summer, it's an ok picture but the lighting is a bit off and he has a scratch on his face right inbetween his eyes.

Here is the after picture, the scratch is gone his lips are darker and his eyes really "pop" and the colors are a lot more vibrant.

It only took about 10 minutes and was really easy.

Here are the steps I took.

First you need to know about the Dodge/Burn tool. It's on your tool bar on the left side of the screen. The burn tool looks like a hand and the dodge tool looks like a wand it's next to the water drop button. The burn tool makes things darker and the Dodge makes things lighter. To switch between the two right click over the button.

The picture was a little light so I went to image then adjustments then curves. Then pulled the curve down just a tiny bit in the middle to darken it up just a little bit. (click right below or above the line right in the center)

Scroll in close to the eyes and turn the burn tool to about 6% exposure (top middle/right of the screen) slightly darken the pupil and the outside edges of the iris. Also use the burn tool to darken the lips.

Get your dodge tool and turn it to about 50% exposure (top middle/right of the screen) and lighten the middle of the iris and the lightest spot on the eye.

To cover any imperfections get your bandaid tool and hold down the alt key on your keyboard and click on an area of good color then put your mouse over the imperfection and click again. So on the picture of Allston to fix his scratch I put the mouse over the skin right next to his scratch then held down the alt button and clicked then put the mouse over the scratch and clicked again.

I also used the bandaid to lessen the lines in his skin right under his bottom eyelashes.

Then I got the burn tool and made it really big (you can change the size of the tool using the [ ] buttons on your keyboard after clicking on the picture) I kept the exposure at %6 and ran it over the right side of the picture where it was a little washed out. I then I icreased the exposure to %10 and darkened the edges of the picture.

Then I clicked on Image-adjustments-hue/stauration then I increased the saturation to 10 but you can just do it until you think the colors are bright enough.

I hope this is has been helpful and easy enough to understand. I hope this was an okay thing to do for a friday feature (it's hard being the first one). If anyone ever needs any help feel free to call me 801-860-4695