Quick tips on how to enhance your photos

There are many things you can do to a photo to enhance them, but I am going to show you some things that you should do to every photo. These are simple easy things that will make your photo more professional.

Step 1

There is a really easy way to get rid of some of the blemishes on people’s faces. Blemishes are generally red, so we can go in with the color range tool and pick those out. To do this first we are going to use the example of an elderly lady below which can be found here.

Now that we have it open lets name the photo “original.” There are the big purple/reddish spots that we want to get rid of. So go to select>color range. Click on the red spots on the woman’s face until we have something like below. Click OK.

Step 2

Now that we have our selection, press apple + j to put the selection in a new layer. Name the new layer “red.”

Step 3

Hide the layer with the original layer on it so just the red layer is showing. Take the erase tool and erase all the non-face areas.

Step 4

Turn the original layer back on. Now make sure you are on the red and press apple + u to open up our hue/saturation options. We want to adjust the hue so that it matches the skin color of the woman like below.

Step 5

Now that the severe blemishes are out of the way (we don’t want to get rid of all of them because we want to keep the realism) we want to do some general adjusting. First off we are going to start with the levels. Adjust the black and white triangles so that they are on either side of where the graph starts to rise. This gets rid of the unnecessary grays and gives it a better contrast.

Step 6

Next we want to go into the hue/saturation (the same place the levels were) and adjust the saturation somewhere around +15 max, depending on your photo. This gives the photo an added punch and brings back some of the colors.

Step 7

Lets merge the original and red layers by click on one and linking the other one to it. We are then going to press apple + e to merge.

Step 8

Go to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. This makes the photo crisper, but use sparingly, because it can easily be over done. The key to all of this is to make it look like we haven’t done anything to it, keeping it as natural as possible.

That’s it. There are a lot more different things you can do to the photo after this. You can use the healing brush to get rid of some wrinkles, add a glow to the photo or add makeup, but these few things give the photo a more professional look to build on.

Final Outcome

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