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Photoshop Basics

Photoshop Effects

Photo Dynamics

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Superimposing

Web Graphics

Examples

Note: This section uses Adobe Photoshop for Picture Editing
Find all current special offers on Adobe products. Before submitting your digital pictures to a photo database, stock photo site or your website you must ensure that they are of good quality. No blurriness, no bad colors, no bad contrast, no dull levels and overall no bad presentations. These are the filters and effects you need in order to fix your digital photos.


If you run your freelance photos through the following tools and filters (if needed), it will drastically change the presentation of the picture and guarantee more sales from buyers with a more professional eye for photography. Make sure your digital pictures are: Sharp, color balanced, and contrasted properly, there are a few other things you can do to spark your photos. Check out the Filters and Effects Page for more information. If you can't afford Photoshop check out some of our Photoshop Alternatives

Sharpen

Lets start simple, one of the best tools you will ever need is the sharpen tool. It is a filter that helps take away blur and gives your digital photos a more definitive look. Depending on what program you have, in this case photoshop, it is under FILTER - SHARPEN, you have two options: Sharpen and Sharpen more (pretty self explanatory). A word of caution, if you use this filter several times your colors and pixels will start to look harsh and can make for a ugly fix, some photos are beyond sharpen and just need to be re-shot or thrown out.


You can't always take a perfectly in focus picture, just use the sharpen tool.

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Levels Tool

Your picture may be of a good subject and have proper contrast but it just seems too dull. The levels tool can fix this for you in most cases, it will bring (or take) color to your picture and adjust color levels. This is a tool you must use manually and can be hard to see its significance, but this tool can help any picture with a dull sky, washed out street colors, or even a pale portrait. Just make sure you don't go overboard and take the realism from you photos. This tool can be found under IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - LEVELS, for more information on this tool go to the Dynamics Page.


After using the levels tool I pulled out some gray and kept the strength of the shades to improve the "pop" of the photo.

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Saturation

The saturation tool quite simply adds more color to the picture. It isn't appropriate for every picture but usually can make a digital photos gray or dull colors become full lush shades. It is great for landscapes, flowers, dull cityscapes and more. IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - SATURATION (or HUE/SATURATION), move the saturation slider, don't mess with the hue slider. It will alter the colors in your whole picture to a different hue.


This can sometimes be hardly noticeable when a picture has little color, but it strengthened some of the blue colors. Use as little or as much as you desire.

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Contrast Tool

Contrast will actually take more effort since it is up to you in order to use it correctly. If a digital photo seems too dull or there doesn't appear to be enough depth in the picture then the contrast tool might work. It will, obviously, give your picture more contrast and edge. The contrast tool is found under IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - CONTRAST, for more detailed instructions check out the Dynamics Page.


adding contrast makes for more depth and you can notice more detail in the rocks.

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The Final Product

As you can see it is much improved over the first picture




Here is a blown up version of the same picture, so you can see more intricate detail of what was done to improve the quality.