Learn how to make multiple adjustments to the same image using Photoshop, including lens correction, brightness and contrast adjustment, vibrance and saturation enhancement, color balance modification, and clone stamp tool utilization. This professional guide is suitable for both beginners and experienced users looking to enhance their photo-editing skills.
Key Insights
- The photo-editing process includes creating a new layer from the background, adjusting the lens calibration using the metadata provided within the image, and fixing the brightness and contrast for a better image quality.
- Other crucial steps involve adding a non-destructive vibrance and saturation, changing the color balance, and utilizing the clone stamp tool to remove unwanted parts of the image for a more natural look.
- After making the necessary adjustments, the final step involves saving the work, preparing the file for a screenshot, taking the screenshot, and editing the screenshot for submission as part of the training exercise.
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 be making multiple adjustments to the same image. Let's start by opening our file.
For this video, we'll be outside of Lesson 2 editing photos and select the DSC01625 JPEG. The title of this image suggests that it's come straight from a camera, so we'll select Open. The first thing we'll do is create a new layer from our background and title it Austin Skyline*.
Next, we'll retitle our background layer Austin Original and hit ENTER. Finally, we'll lock the Austin Original layer and select Austin Skyline*. Let's save our file using CTRL+S on the keyboard and type in Austin Skyline*.
Making sure that it's a Photoshop file, we'll click Save and OK. The first thing we want to do with this image is adjust the lens calibration, as we can see it's a little fisheye. We'll go to Filter > Lens Correction, and here we can match from the metadata provided within the image.
We'll choose Sony for our camera make. For our camera model, we'll choose ILCE-7, and for the lens model, we'll choose 14mm f/2.8. All of this data is found in our image and provided below on the right. In addition to this, we can see we have a little bit of vignetting.
Therefore, we'll go to Custom and adjust the vignetting by lightening it and dragging it up to the right. Let's lighten it to about 56 and then hit OK. Next, let's make adjustments to our Brightness and Contrast.
Making sure our Austin Skyline layer is selected, we'll go to Brightness/Contrast, which will add a mask. Here, we're going to increase our brightness a bit and set it to 34. For our contrast, let's bring it down a little bit to -10.
This gives our image much better brightness and contrast. The next thing we're going to do is add a non-destructive Vibrance and Saturation adjustment. Making sure our Austin Skyline layer is selected, we'll go to Adjustments and select Vibrance. We'll change our vibrance to 27 and our saturation to 10.
As we can see, this helps our image to pop a little bit more. The next thing we're going to do is change our Color Balance. Making sure the Austin Skyline layer is selected, we'll go to Adjustments and select Color Balance.
For this image, we're going to adjust the red by moving it up one. We'll change our magenta-green to -12 and hit ENTER, and for yellow-blue, we'll set it to +9. This looks a little more natural and gives it a cooler, blue-toned look than our original.
The next thing we'll want to do is remove this concrete panel from our bike lane. We can do that using the Clone Stamp Tool found in the Tools bar. We'll hold ALT on the keyboard to select the pixels we'll draw from and begin drawing over this until it looks natural. I'll click ALT again on this side, and slowly we're removing our concrete panel.
Let's pull from the corner here, and it's beginning to look like it was never there in the first place. Finally, as our last change, we want to fix this bike lane. It previously had the concrete panel over it, but we want it to look like the paint stretches into the regular bike lane.
Therefore, we'll use ALT here and, working very carefully, we'll drag it out—it's a little crooked. We'll use ALT again and continue refining it until it looks natural. This looks pretty natural and gives the appearance that the concrete panel was never there.
Next, we're going to save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard, and we've made good improvements to this image. If we toggle our visibility on the left, we can see that we've made a vast improvement to the original image. Now that we've finished exporting our image, we're ready to take a screenshot, which will be submitted as your midterm.
To take a screenshot, we first want to prepare our file. To do this, we'll make sure that the Brightness/Contrast, Vibrance, Color Balance, Austin Skyline*, and Austin Original layers are showing within our Layers panel. Next, let's hide our Austin Original layer so that we only have our first four layers showing.
From here, we're going to select Color Balance 1 so that we can see the Properties of this adjustment above. With the Properties of our Color Balance showing, as well as our Layers panel visible, we're now ready to take a screenshot. On a Windows computer, we can take a screenshot by hitting the Windows key and, while holding it, pressing the Print Screen key on the keyboard.
If you're on a laptop, you may also have to use the Function (FN) key on your keyboard. If you're using a Mac, please use Command+Shift+4 on the keyboard to drag a box over the Photoshop interface. From there, it will save a screenshot to your desktop.
Next, we may need to edit our interface screenshot. We can do this by going into the Pictures folder and then into the Screenshots folder. From here, if we double-click the screenshot PNG file that we've taken, we can crop our image by selecting the Crop icon found on the top-right-hand side. From there, we can simply crop so that our image only contains our interface.
Be sure to expand the edges of your crop all the way to the edges of the interface, and again make sure that you can clearly see the Color Balance 1 Properties and all of the layers with Austin Original hidden. Once you've done this, please save a copy and upload this image to the portal as your midterm submission. There's no need to upload the actual Photoshop file, as you will be graded only on the screenshot provided.
In our next videos, we'll begin working with vectors. See you there.