The invention of digital photography made it possible for everyone to enjoy better photos. But how is this possible when we are not all the world’s greatest photographers? Obviously using modern sophisticated digital cameras helps a lot, but the ability to use a technique called photo touch up is the real reason why we can produce truly memorable photos. Digital photography and photo touch up go hand in hand.
By touching up your raw photos with digital photo editing software you can make what was once an ordinary photo into a great photo. Retouching photos is not just photo make up like removing blemishes and imperfections from your portraits or making people slimmer and better looking. Sometimes you need to lighten your image, crop it, rotate it, clean up some unwanted spots, and just do a general optimization and enhancement of the whole photo. It is all quick and easy to do once you know how!
All photos need some sort of adjustment! You can never take a perfect photo straight from the camera. This is simply because every camera, no matter how good and expensive, can only take a picture with one fixed exposure setting for the whole frame. This means there are always either underexposed details in the shadows or overexposed details in the highlights, or in most cases, both.
Every photo should be improved before being saved or printed. It is amazing how many people don’t realize that. They believe their photos are good straight from the camera until they see the improved version and then they say: “Wow, this is so much better! How did you do that?”
That’s what image editing software is for. It helps make your photos worthy of recording your precious memories. Before you print or save your photos you should analyze their brightness, contrast, sharpness, color balance and exposure problems. Once you know what needs improving you can easily perform a photo touch up service. You can fix, optimize and enhance everything, which will make you feel like you have created brand new photos and also make you proud when showing them off to your friends and relatives.
Photo optimization and enhancement, which was once only available to professional photographers, is now available to everyone. With the current advances in digital photo editing software there are so many things you can do. Don’t be afraid to experiment while learning! Practice makes perfect when it comes to touching up your photos. Digital photo editing software offers so much more now than it did only a few short years ago and it is getting easier all the time. Even an absolute beginner can start using tricks like the pros!
Easy trick to improve every photo
We know that every photo is different and requires different digital image processing. But there is a trick we can do to improve every photo, no matter what that photo is.
The trick is to use “Unsharp Mask” in a different way. Most people use it just to sharpen the image with the following settings: Amount – 100%, Radius – 1 and Threshold – 0. In Photoshop we can find “Unsharp Mask” in “Sharpen” from the “Filter” drop down menu.
Now we can change the settings to the unusual: Amount – 20%, Radius – 50 and Threshold – 0. What we are actually doing by this is LOCAL CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT. Yes, this is the trick we can do on any photo.
You can already notice some Local Contrast improvement. The good thing about this is that you can do it twice even three times without worrying about the settings, just by clicking “Unsharp Mask”, because Photoshop remembers the last filter you used with the same settings and places it at the top of the “Filter” drop down menu.
If you overdo it just click “Undo” from the “Edit” menu. Once you are happy with the result you can save the photo which is now a lot more vivid and punchier. You can see the “Before and After” below.
This trick works on every photo. Now you can easily make all your photos better looking. Enjoy it!