Learn to edit an image in Photoshop for maximum impact and vibrancy, while keeping the original file intact and unaltered. This step-by-step guide teaches how to adjust brightness, contrast, and vibrance, to bring your photos to life.
Key Insights
- When editing an image, it's critical to save the original version by creating a new layer for the edits. This ensures you have a backup to revert to if needed.
- Adjusting the brightness, contrast, and vibrance can significantly enhance an image. Manipulating these elements adds depth and makes the colors pop, bringing the photo to life.
- After editing, it's important to save the enhanced image as a Photoshop file, and then export it as a jpeg. This step ensures a high quality, compressed image suitable for various uses, like in a digital banner.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll begin editing the first photo that will go in the top frame. So let's begin.
We'll go to File, Open, and for the top photo, because we're talking about cities on the West Coast, we're going to use this photo of San Francisco. We'll click the JPEG and click Open. As we can see from this image, we have a view of someone's feet dangling right in front of downtown San Francisco.
Let's save this photo now before we do a lot more work editing it. We'll go to File, Save As, and we're going to save this as San Francisco, adjusted, and instead of a JPEG file, we're going to click and select Photoshop, so we'll save it as a Photoshop file. We'll click Save, and now we can begin to do some work on this image.
The first thing we want to do is drag our background layer into the New Layer icon on the bottom, and we'll retype "sf adjusted" and hit ENTER. This way we still have our background image, which, if we double click, we can retitle it "sf original" and hit ENTER, and then we'll lock this sf original image so that if something goes wrong with our sf adjusted image, we still have this to rely on. We'll then hide this image and start working with the sf adjusted layer.
Looking at this image right now, if we zoom in a little bit, we'll see that it's a little flat. We could add a little more range to this, maybe decrease the shadows and increase the highlights, as well as add a little vibrancy. We just essentially want this photo to come alive a little more, so to do that, we're going to go to our Adjustments.
Adjustments can be found to the right of the Properties panel, and here we have a couple of non-destructive ways that we can adjust this image. Remember, non-destructive means that we're not actually altering the image in a way that we can't go back and reverse. If we add any of these, we'll simply add an adjustment layer on top of the image to adjust the image.
For example, let's start with a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. If we click this, we'll see that Brightness/Contrast is added as an adjustment layer above sf adjusted. We can manipulate this layer in the Properties panel, and we can decrease or increase our brightness and our contrast.
As we decrease contrast, we'll see the image looks more flat, and as we increase contrast, we'll see that the image has a greater difference between the blacks and the whites, or lighter and darker parts of the image. Let's change these back to zero, then press TAB, hit zero again, and press ENTER. Now let's work with our brightness a little bit.
We're going to want to open up our Histogram found on the top right, and this will essentially show us the layout of this photo, and how we can adjust and manipulate it. Looking at brightness, it looks fairly bright with some of the highlights on the right side of the histogram. However, we can increase the brightness just a little bit.
If we bring it up to about 13, we can see the image is a little bit brighter, and let's increase the contrast a little bit so there's a greater separation between the lights and the darks. Here we can see that our image is a little more bright than it is dark in the histogram, and overall I think that this will help to draw a little more attention. We can toggle the visibility of this layer and see the difference, and overall it's a little bit brighter.
Let's keep adding adjustments. We'll go back to Adjustments, and this time let's change the Vibrance. If we select Vibrance, we'll see that again a vibrance layer comes on, and what we want to do here is add more color to our image overall.
Vibrance essentially adds color to the more muted tones, whereas Saturation adds color to the entire image. If we increase our vibrance, we'll see that we get a little more of the blue and the orange that come alive, and if we increase saturation, we'll see all the colors stand out. In this case, let's increase the saturation to about 23, and we'll increase the vibrance to about 36.
Let's toggle vibrance to see the difference, and we'll see that this image stands out a little more. Let's increase the saturation slightly further, just to make it really stand out. We'll toggle visibility again, and there's a lot more color in this edited image.
Let's go back to our Brightness/Contrast, and here I want to see what adjusting the contrast does even more. There may be a little too much contrast in the previous version, so we'll decrease that back to 3, and we'll again want to adjust our brightness, and we're going to leave it at about 10. If we toggle the visibility of both of these adjustment layers, we can see there's a pretty drastic difference between what we had and what we now have.
Let's now save this file, hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save it, and hitting OK, and now we also want to export this image. Rather than dragging all of these layers into our Phase 10 Construction Banner 1, we want to export this as a JPEG so it's a compressed image that can fit within the Phase 10 banner without making the file too large. To do this, we'll go to File, Export, and then we'll go to Export As. We'll then select our format, which in this case, we want the format to be JPEG.
We'll click JPEG. We'll keep the quality at 100% since we still want a high-quality image for a banner that's going to be large and printed. We'll maintain the same width and height, and we'll simply click Export All.
We can then save this image as San Francisco_adjusted.jpeg, and click Save, and we're now ready to put it into our banner. In the next video, we'll adjust the second image for the bottom of our banner, and then import them. See you there!