Photo Editing Tips & Tricks

Adobe Photoshop and other photo manipulation software give the photographer a full darkroom without the dark and without the smelly chemicals. Photoshop follows most of the old techniques such as dodging and burning, but also adds many more techniques to provide better photo editing.

Basics

Toning is everything in photo editing, whether you are working with grayscale or color. There are many ways to tone photos, but the quickest---and one that works about 80 percent of the time---is using the auto toning tools. In older versions of Photoshop, go to "Image>Adjustments," and you will find "Auto Levels," "Auto Color" and "Auto Contrast." In newer versions, go to "Image," and you will find the same three, although "Auto Levels" now is "Auto Tone." "Auto Levels/Tone" will make a quick assessment of the image and tone it according to the colors and white, black and mid-range tones in it.

Shadows and Highlights

Starting with Photoshop CS, the program added a useful tool for fixing poorly exposed photos, especially those with a light background and dark or shadowed foreground. Go to "Image>Adjustments>Shadows/Highlights." This tool will bring up the light level in the shadow areas while leaving the lighter background areas untouched. You can use the basic pop-up window or click "Show More Options" for more control. One slight problem can arise when using this tool. It can shift the color to the red a bit. You can fix it by going to "Image>Adjustments>Curves," selecting the red channel and tweaking the graph away from the red slightly. Or you can "Color Adjustments" in the "Shadows/Highlights" pop-up.

Go Grayscale

If you have a photo that isn't that good or one that has a lot of color noise in it, a good way to make the photo better is to change it to grayscale. Grayscale photos are more forgiving than color. You can change a color image to grayscale several ways. The easiest is to go to "Image>Mode>Grayscale," but this limits your ability to control tone. A better way---in older versions of Photoshop---is to go to "Image>Adjustments>Desaturate." This will turn the image to grayscale, but leave the color information intact so you can adjust it. In newer Photoshop versions, go to "Image>Adjustments>Black & White."