Photoshop How-to manual
Prepared by A Special Moment Photography & Video

Levels adjustments

Levels adjustment is by far the single most important procedure anyone can do to adjust their photos. Levels refers to the “brightness” of the image, broken up into 3 areas- shadows, mid-tones and highlights. To get to the levels window, first open up an image, then go to your image menu, click it, drag down to the adjust submenu, then select levels. You will see a graph known as a histogram. Notice the three little triangular shaped sliders at the bottom of this histogram. The far left one is for shadow adjustment, the middle one is for mid-tone adjustment and the far right one is for your highlight adjustment. Moving the shadow slider will also move the mid-tone slider equally in the same direction, and moving the highlight slider will also move the mid-tone slider equally in the same direction. Moving the mid-tone slider will only move that slider. We recommend to adjust highlights first, then mid-tones and finish up with shadows, going back to other sliders to fine-tune after. Back to the histogram- take a look at the graph. How far does it go in relation to the far right hand side of the scale? If the graph of your particular image stops before the far right side, generally you can click and drag the highlight slider to your left, not quite to the edge of your graph, but close to it. Notice how your brighter areas brighten up. Be careful not to “blow out” the bright areas. Next, you can drag your midtone slider to darken or lighten up your mid-tones. Generally, you will want to brighten up your mid-tones somewhat. The exposure and lighting of the shot will dictate which way to go. Then you will notice your shadow slider is already all the way to the left, which means you can only darken shadows. You will find that darkening shadows slightly cleans up the image very nicely. It will clean up a milky looking background better than anything else. Now bounce around and fine-tune all three sliders until the image looks like you want it to. If your image graph goes beyond the far right side of the scale, this means you have over-exposed this image somewhere. This can be a bad thing, but often times it is not. It is bad if you over-expose something really central to the photo, like a white dress. Generally said, significantly over-exposing that white dress destroys detail in the dress and cannot be corrected. On the other hand, over-exposing an overcast sky is something that is hardly avoidable because the sky is so bright that to expose for the sky would render very dark subject areas, so if your histogram goes off the map and it’s the sky, you can even further brighten your highlight slider, in most cases that is what you want to do. Your mid-tone slider is often where the most pleasing kind of brightness adjustments are made. The beauty of this process is that you can see the differences clearly, so develop a good eye, and don’t push any one slider to far. Use all three to achieve the best results, and you can undo or re-do any adjustment easily. Successful levels adjustments are dependant on your monitor being referenced for gamma. Use the adobe gamma program to do this and follow the directions carefully, choosing the more lengthy options rather than the simpler preset kind of options, ie- go thru the custom adjustments fully. This will not perfectly reference your monitor, but it will probably make it miles better than where it was prior to adjusting. Make sure to print one or two prints at the photo lab and see how the lab prints them by comparing the print to the same image on your monitor. Once you have some consistency, then you can print many at the same time. If you are printing on your computer printer, you can use printer profiles to tweak your monitor. Try using epson professional matt paper to print on if using your home printer rather than glossy inkjet paper. If printing at home, it is recommended to use a printer with at least 4 color inks, preferably with 5 or more. Ink can cost you more than going to a photo lab. If going to a photo lab, Kodak professional paper is the best. Fuji paper is usually what most consumer labs use. It is very flat and requires you to increase contrast and color saturation to make it look half way decent. Kodak professional paper is the best. Ask your lab what they use.

Contrast and saturation adjustments

Go to image> adjustments> brightness/contrast menu. You will want to only use the contrast slider and never the brightness slider. Levels is how you adjust brightness in a superior way, separating shadows from mid-tones from highlights. Brightness lumps all three into one, and lets suffice it to say that you do not ever want to use the brightness slider. Contrast adjustment increases the difference between bright and dark pixels, which makes the image sharper, cleans up that “milky look”, and also increases color saturation at the same time, whether you like that or not. If an image is unsharp, increasing contrast will dramatically sharpen the image. Moving the slider to the right increases contrast, moving it to the left decreases contrast. Be careful to not adjust contrast too high as it will blow out your highlights and make the image look unnatural and overly sharp. Again, the beauty of it all is you adjust to your taste, and watch it happen on your monitor in real time. The saturation adjustment is accessed by going to image> adjustments> hue/saturation. Use only the saturation slider. Slide it to the right and increase the intensity of colors, going to the left decreases saturation. All the way to the left will give you black and white. There are better ways to create a black and white image, but this will work. Make sure to re-do your levels again as that is almost always necessary to make the black and white image look great. To make a sepiatone shot from the black and white image, just go to image> adjust> color balance and move the sliders around until you get a tone you like. If you use the desaturate command, you will not be able to make a sepiatone image at all, so use the hue/saturation window and drag the saturation slider to the far left to make the black and white.

Color correction

This is a tricky thing to do because accurate monitor referencing is super critical with this. That being said, here are two ways to color correct:
1- Go to image> adjust> color balance and play with the sliders slowly and carefully. Do take a break and come back as your brain plays tricks on you If you stare at the monitor too long.
2- Go to image> adjust> selective color and select the color you want to manipulate and then tweak the sliders slowly and see what happens. You can decrease the redness of your reds and also increase the cyan levels in the reds so play with it and experiment. Usually a combination of both will yield the best results. Color correction is the most difficult thing for anyone to accomplish well. It requires a good eye and accurate monitor.

Sharpening

Three ways to do this. The first is adjusing contrast as described above. Second is called unsharp mask. This is the most subtle sharpening tool. Third- full sharpening. This is sometimes necessary if the shot is really unsharp. To do an unsharp mask, go to filter> sharpen> unsharp mask. You will see three adjustments- amount, radius and threshhold. I will suggest how to adjust these to simplify things. Set your amount to 98%, radius to 0.9 pixels and threshold to 38. Then tell photoshop to perform the settings by clicking on the OK button. You can go immediately to the edit menu and choose “undo unsharp mask” if you do not like the effect. To do a full sharpen, go to filter> sharpen> sharpen. This is much more severe, but it never hurts to try it as you can undo it in the edit menu. Sharpening combined with contrast adjustment will significantly sharpen any image. Blurry or out of focus images can be improved but cannot be made perfect. Blurry or imperfect images in general look better in black and white or sepiatone, especially images with over-exposed highlights. Consider making images black and white or sepiatone if they are less than ideal to see if you like them better that way vs in color.

Cropping your images

You will need a version of photoshop that is 6.0 or newer to get that magic cropping tool. If using photoshop elements, make sure it has the cropping tool in your version. Select the cropping tool, it is in your toolbox, the icon looks like two boomeranges crossing over each other. Once you select that tool, at the top of the screen, you will see three little rectangular shaped windows that say- Width, height and resolution. Highlight each window and type in the size of the print you want to make, in inches. Make sure it says “in” after the numbers, not pixels. You can set the resolution at 300 dpi if you are not sure what resolution your lab prints at. Once you select the crop size, simply click and stretch anywhere within the image window. Just click on any corner of the cropping to stretch it out bigger, or to shrink it down. Then click inside the cropped area and you can move the whole crop around to get the composition desired. The arrow keys on your keyboard can perform very fine movement. Once you have the exact crop that you want, go to the image menu> crop and that is it. The image will be exactly the size and resolution you typed into the little windows at the top of the screen, no matter how wide or how tight the crop. That is the magic of photoshops cropping tool. If you need to rotate an image for any reason, just go to image> rotate canvas and select which way you wish to go.

Tips on saving images and file management

When you do anything to any image, it is usually best to select “save as” instead of just saving it. The reason is- “saving as” will create a new file, and leave your original image as it is so you can do something else to it later and start with the same image in its original state. If you mess up, there is no need to panic- just re-intall that one image onto your computer hard drive from the CD. Here are some tips for naming files- If you make an 8x10, just save it as the same file name with “8x10” added onto the file name. Example- DSC00037-8x10.jpg. Jpg stands for a jpeg file, which is the most common image file. When you choose to save as a jpg, you will have many compression options. Always choose the absolute highest quality jpg. You can also save as a tif file, which is totally uncompressed if you think you might be working a lot on that image and saving it many times. If not, a full quality jpg is fine. Also choose baseline standard if youre on a macintosh. Later on if you get into layered image work, you would save your work as a psd or photoshop document, which keeps all your layers separated for later work. There is a history window that allows you to go back in time if you want to, as it keeps track of everything you do. Just click on the step you want to go back to. You can bring any window up by going to the window menu and clicking on the window name that you want to appear on your desktop. Our hope is that you will get hooked on photoshop and explore many more features that it offers beyond this simple introduction. A Special Moment does offer a great service to those who purchased ownership of their images- we can adjust the images of your choice and leave them at their native size and resolution so you only need to crop them. Check out the current prices at our website, on the photo pkgs page. Hopefully you can adjust your own successfully, but we are always here to help just in case. A Special Moment is a full-service studio that is here to serve you before, during and after your Wedding. You can even purchase proof albums at close to our cost that you can put your prints into, or have us create any custom album. We offer so many options, so do ask us if we can fulfilll your request. There are many benefits to owning your images, the best being your ability to adjust, crop and print by yourself.

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