How to retouch photos using Photoshop

Posted on September 4, 2008 at 5:29 am

Do you want to enhance your digital pictures? Balance the color, brightness and contrast of your treasured digital memories. In this tutorial, we will help you enhance these little memories using Photoshop.  The technique below is one of the most common you will see from Photoshop tutorial classes and documents. Another one of my favorite tutorials is learning how to remove red-eye. 

You can also check out some older posts if you’re looking for a  quick method to edit your photos online, rotate, crop or resize photos, add text to photos, or add special effects to your photos. 

Open your desired digital photo in Adobe Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer. First we need to identify the white and black points of your photo. 

In the layers palette,

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Click on the Adjustment Layer icon. Choose THRESHOLD.

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A graph window will appear. Adjust the pointer to the leftmost side of the graph window until the window becomes totally blank.

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Slightly adjust the pointer going to the right until a part of the picture becomes visible. If you can notice, the first part that will become visible is the blackest part of the image. Hold down the shift key and then click on one of the black parts. This will set your blackest point of your image.

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Again, adjust the pointer to the rightmost side of the graph window until the image becomes totally black.

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Adjust the pointer slightly going to the left until a white part of the image becomes visible. Hold again the shift key and then click on one of the white parts of the image to set your white point.

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After setting your black and white points, click the cancel button on the graph window.

We can now set the gray point of the image. Click on the new layer icon. A new layer will be created and shown in your Layers Control Panel.

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Go to Edit and choose Fill…

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A window will appear. In the window, choose 50% gray then click OK button.

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Click on the Layers mode dropdown then choose Difference.

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In the Adjustment Layer Icon, choose threshold again. The graph window will be shown. Move the slider to the leftmost side and slightly move to the right. Darkest parts of the image will be your gray point. Hold the shift key then click on any of the darkest parts. Click on the cancel button. Your gray point is now set. After setting your gray point, you can now delete the new layer that you have just created.

Click again on the Adjustment Layer Icon then choose Curves. The Curves window will appear. Turn on the caps lock key on your keyboard.

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Click on the black point eyedropper tool. Since this is the 1st point, match the cross with the part marked as 1 in the image. Do the same thing with point 2 and point 3. Then click ok.

For comparison, these are the images before and after correcting the color of the image.

Before:

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After:

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The mid-tone was improved and now we can see the reddish Bougainvillea in the middle.   Because of the poor quality of the original picture (it was taken from a phone camera) we can’t do much more about the definition but a lot more can still be done to enhance the picture’s color.  In the next posts we will look at how to mask some parts of the picture so as not to affect the entire thing when applying changes.  With that technique we should be able to retain the bluish sky and achieve a better contrast on the upper part of the scenery.

Also, a better way might be to enhance the picture using an automated script or software before applying the steps above.  Using the Microsoft Office Picture Manager, I was able to improve the contrast of the picture but still the mid-tone is murky – it should be improved once the Photoshop tricks are applied. 

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These tips are very helpful for folks who want to improve their shots taken from a poor quality camera like a webcam or cell phone. If you use Photoshop a lot, you might be interested in downloading free Photoshop brushes and vector graphics. 

Ben Carigtan writes about technology, computers and how to get the best out of them.

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2 Responses to “How to retouch photos using Photoshop”

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  1. How to apply the radial blur effect in Photoshop Says:

    [...] we get started, make sure to check out my other Photoshop tutorials, such as how to retouch photos in Photoshop and how to remove red-eye using Photoshop. Also, check out my post on how to swap colors using [...]

    September 7th, 2008 at 5:29 am
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  2. PhotoFiltre - Free image and photo retouching software Says:

    [...] I wrote about how to retouch photos using Photoshop, but this requires spending lots of money for a program which is overkill for 99% percent of PC [...]

    December 10th, 2008 at 5:24 am
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