Freelance Graphic Designer London

Improving photos with Photoshop by a Graphic Designer

The above picture is one of my snaps taken very quickly at the end of clearish autumn day. I have improved this picture with Photoshop by selecting certain areas and altering the colour, brightness and contrast.

I first thing I did was to copy the photo to a new layer (Cmd/Cntl-J) I then use my method for creating a layer mask with the Gradient tool which was explained in the previous post to mask out the sky. I then used Image > Adjustments > Curves… (Cmd/Cntl-M) and clicked the Auto button (this finds the lightest part of the selection/layer and makes it white and finds the darkest part of the selection/layer and makes it black). Further contrast can be added by creating an ‘S’ shape out of the curve (see below). Contrast essentially means making dark areas darker and light areas lighter.

Then to make the picture more interesting I isolated the people at the bottom right with the Lasso tool (L) with a Feather of 15 to blur the edges and applied contrast using the same technique.

The original layer is now the lower half of the picture. I used Image > Adjustments > Curves… (Cmd/Cntl-M) to brighten the sky and, more importantly, to take out some green and add some blue to give the sky a more interesting look.