I've been playing with photography for almost two years, but this will probably be the first thing I've written about photography on this website about doing photography, instead of merely pining for the latest photographic doodad. So tonight I'll write the first of two journal entries on using Photoshop with photos. Tonight's entry talks about using various adjustments available in Photoshop to make a photo look better. Tomorrow night's entry is going to explain the finer points of using the so-called unsharp mask tool.

But wait! Before I begin, I want to thank Christina O'Connor, to whom I owe most of this knowledge. It was she who really encouraged me as a photographer and taught me almost all I know with Photoshop.

Now I'll really begin. I'm going to use a photo that I took while wandering the National Mall with Sean on January 2nd, 2005. It was a very overcast day, with no sun showing through at all. This created some very drab, flat photos that were composed very well -- if I were to say so myself -- but didn't really jump out from the screen or the paper, or whatever it is on which one wishes to display them.

We're going to do five things to our photo to make it look better, in this order, and order is relatively important.

• Levels
• Curves
• Hue/Saturation
• Color Balance
• Crop and Sharpen

Now that we know what we're going to do, I'll explain how I've applied each one. but first, let's look at the original photo.



Step 1: Levels
Pretty flat, eh? Well, let's apply the levels tool to this photo. The levels tool is located in the Image menu under the Adjustments submenu. You can use the Levels tool to lighten or darken a photo that has been incorrectly exposed, and it can make a photo appear sharper without much effort. However, there are a couple things to keep in mind before using this tool

First, when you brighten a photo, you add noise, and noise is bad. The more you brighten, the more noise you add. Keep the noise levels in mind if you're going to be printing a photo larger than, say, 5"x7".

Next, always remember that while you can get detail out of darkness at the expense of noise on an underexposed photo, you cannot get detail out of brightness on an overexposed photo. Think about it the same way you do about cooking a hamburger. If you undercook it, you can always throw it in the microwave for a little longer, but if you overcook it, it's gonna be burned no matter what you do.

Now that we have those caveats out of the way, let's look at how I applied the Levels to this photo.



First, notice how I brought up the white slider on the right to meet where the histogram starts? That's because there's no data on the far right, so we don't want to consider that. You can do it with the slider on the left, as well, but there was no need to do it in this photo. Additionally, there can be a small spike on either side and you can bring the scrollbar past it without penalty.

What should you do with the middle handle? Push it around to where you think the photo looks good. When using the levels, err on the side of making the photo look brighter and flatter, because we can always correct that in later steps. Now let's look at our photo after levels correction.



Step 2: Curves
Located also under the Adjustments submenu is a tool called Curves, which is more colloquially known as contrast. Curves are the one thing I always, always apply to my photos because they can make almost any photo look better, no matter how marginal the original or how marginal the application of this tool. The trick is to applying them correctly. It's very easy to just use the Auto Contrast tool, or to use the more simple Contrast slider and move it around and change the contrast. The real power is when you can adjust the ratio between black and white to bring out detail from the shadows.

How can we apply this effectively? There is no one contrast level to apply to all photos, and there is no way to look at a photo and determine how much it might benefit from different amounts. Photos of flowers benefit from large amounts of contrast, but only most of the time. Photos taken at night in available light usually don't benefit much at all from any adjustment of contrast levels. The only way to know is to apply the curves yourself and see what they look like after nudging it around a little. To start working with the curves, we're going to load up the curve tool and and put a couple dots on the curve as shown below.



Those two dots, one put in the lower left by the black side, and the other put in the upper right by the white side, will hold each respective side of the curve while we modify the other side. That means that when I add white, it doesn't also add black by pulling on the other end of the curve, and vice versa. Now that we've placed the two points, let's start moving them into a simple S-curve.



By adding a little bit of white and a little bit of black, I was able to make the edges more defined on the bird's head and at the same time able to add depth to the photo by making the distance between black and white greater. This perceived depth between black and white, not to be confused with depth of field, is what takes away flat gray colors and levels brings the photo to life. This is what we use to compensate for the flatness added by the levels. But what is that dot in the middle?

The middle is the balancing point between black and white. Which way do you want the photo to go? Use the middle point to push the midtones one way versus another. Really, though, just play with it to see what makes it look better. Most times I never put a midpoint on the curve. For this photo, it helped.

Finally, it is possible to add too much contrast to a photo. If you add too much black or too much white, all of the dark or bright colors, respectively, will blend together and you'll end up with a big mess of colors. You will lose sharpness and the photo will look bad. Always keep in mind that just because you can add contrast doesn't mean that you need to add contrast, because it won't always make the photo look better.

Remember, while you're playing with the curves, that the coolest trick available in Photoshop to you is the Preview button. After pushing the curve around for a while, you may not be sure if the photo actually looks any better. To see for yourself, try turning the preview on and off and seeing what the photo looked like before you started compared to when you're done. It should look better, and thus verify that you are doing it right. Let's take a look at what we got after the curves.



Step 3: Hue/Saturation
Really, on this step, we only add saturation, and this step isn't always required. Saturation is for bringing out colors, such as the reds of tree in autumn, or the green grass of a spring morning. If you go in the other direction and desaturate, you remove color. Desaturate too much and you have a black and white photo. A little bit of saturation is usually a good thing, but not necessarily noticeable, so don't fret if you add +10 or something and don't see anything, Adding too much saturation, that is unneeded saturation, will result in really bad noise that looks horrible and you don't want that. So err on the side of caution with saturation. So with that summary, I'm not going to get too much into saturation beyond showing you the tool and the resulting photo.



In this example, I pushed the saturation up to +27, which is lot. It happened to help out for this photo by making some areas more red, which always makes for a warmer photo, which is usually a good thing. However, when applying it to normal family photos, you really shouldn't be pushing it higher than +15. Here is the resulting photo from our saturation manipulation.



Step 4: Color Balance
The rule of thumb with color balance is this: make the whites white. There are really no other rules, though. You basically want to adjust the colors so that the whites are white. But, there are things that you usually do to make that happen.

To make that happen, you really don't want to use the default Tone Balance. You want to be adjusting the Highlights, not the Midtones. So be sure to select Highlights. The highlights are the things you see, the Midtones are the average. Now how should you adjust them.

Usually, and for this photo in particular, I'll push towards Cyan and away from Red. The amount to which I push depends on the whites in the photo. It appears that this bird's head is white, so I want to make his head white. So I'll push towards Cyan.

The middle bar, on the other hand, can go in either direction. If the photo could stand to gain some red, push it a very little towards Magenta. If it needs some yellow or green, push it towards Green.

Finally, to offset the Cyan tone added in the top, because cyan is really a pretty ugly color, add a little bit of Blue. The amount of Blue you add isn't necessarily the same as the amount of Cyan you added, but enough to, again, make the whites look white, instead of magenta, or red, or blue.



The other rule of thumb for color balance is to never push anything larger than +/-15. Anything more than that, unless you can see an obvious need for it in your photo, is too much and will result in weird colors.

Of course, always remember that if you can't get the colors the way you want them, you can always make the photo black and white and then skip this step entirely. What does our resulting photo look like after applying the above changes?



Step 5: Crop and Sharpen
The final step is sharpening your photo, which is a topic about which I could write an entire journal entry on, or more. I intend to do that at some point in the near future. In the meantime, I'll mention a few things about sharpening your photos here.

You may be asking why I put cropping off until last. You are probably saying to yourself "but won't all those other modifications be applied to areas about which I will be cropping and thus don't care about and ultimately affecting my final photo?" The answer to that is no, not at all. Because nothing we did above is "automatic," and because you did it all yourself, there is no need to worry about the rest of the photo being cropped out affecting decisions on the sections being kept, because you are probably focusing on the keeper sections yourself anyway.

The other reason you want to save the crop for last is simply because what if you change your mind? Say you crop your photo to 4"x6" and then modify it and realize "oh hey, this looks so good I want an 8"x10"!" Too bad you have to undo all those changes you made to get the sections back that you already cropped out, otherwise you're squeezing blood from a stone. So always crop second to last, before sharpening.

So why don't we sharpen before we crop? Because sharpening is an automatic process and does depend on everything in the photo being there. So if we cut out what we don't want before sharpen, we can get a more accurate sharpening. Also, if you change the DPI while cropping, after sharpening, that messes things up, too. So always make sharpening your last thing, and cropping your second to last.

So what are the guidelines for sharpening? They are very simple. Always sharpen while looking at the picture at 100% so that you can actually see the effects. Set the threshold to 0 to avoid any harsh sharpening. Then, set the radius to 1 or 0.5 to, again, avoid harsh sharpening. Then, move the slider around from 0% to 500% to see what looks good. But remember that more sharpening results in more noise, which we already know is bad. Only sharpen as much as you have to, keeping in mind that when you print it, it's going to appear softer and smaller regardless of what you try to do.



But why are we setting the radius so small? The radius is the distance around each pixel that will be affected by all the other pixels. So the larger the radius, the more pixels that get affected for every other pixel. This can lead to weird errors in your photo that you don't actually want, such as noise and artifacts. Keep this small, between 0.5 and 2, but no larger, or else the sharpening will appear very harsh and not look good at all.

So what should you do with the Amount? A good default is between 50% and 100%. You can't really go wrong with that for any and every photo. However, if you are in need of more sharpening, feel free to push that amount up higher. But as you push the Amount up, you might want to think about whether the photo is actually all that good. Sharpening cannot correct an out of focus photo. If it's out of focus, there isn't anything you can do, so don't try. Sharpening is there to overcome soft printing and softness in your lens, and other minor softness in the photo, not to overcome motion blur, or camera shake, or misfocus.

So what does our photo look like after we sharpened it?



And that's what I do to most photos that I take and publish.