Quick retouching steps

Every morning I have myself a nice cup of coffee, sit at my desk and find an interesting image to grace the cover of morguefile.com. This is one of the more fun parts of my day. After diving into our massive archive and finding a great photo I begin the process to crop and upload to the front page of the site. Before I upload the image, I usually repeat a few simple task to really make the image pop. Here are some very quick and basic steps to make your images look great using Adobe Photoshop. This takes literally takes seconds and will make a huge difference. While these instructions are specific to Photoshop, the fundamentals are the same.

 

First we have this great image of a plastic snowflake that I used one day for the cover. I really liked the image, it has a great feel and nice composition. You may notice it has a bit of a yellow tinge. This is from the tungsten light that gives the image a very warm tint or temperature. This may have been the desired effect of the image, it looks fine like this, but for the purpose of this article I will demonstrate how I changed it with a click. Its also worth noting on morguefile the images are raw material and leave any image correction up to the end user.

 



 

 

Simple, go to menu Image > Auto Color.

 



 

 

Bam! The temperature has been neutralized and the image became much cooler. There is still more you can do to alter the image color and tone, but this little step took all of 5 seconds and made a big difference.

 



 

 

 

Here we have another example of an image of a pencil and an eraser. Great image shot on seamless paper. The background is a little dark but lucky for us, there is an easy fix using levels and the white point.

 



 

 

go to menu Image > Adjustments > Levels.

 



 

 

When the levels dialog box comes up, click on the little white eyedropper on the right.

 



 

 

 

Now the fun part, click around the image and try to click on what should be the whitest point of the image. When you click on the background, the levels will shift all the values in the image to adjust to the new white point. When you are done click OK.

 



 

 

Easy! If you want to adjust a little lighter, click on a darker part of the white background. Just zoom in and keep clicking around until you find the right white spot. You will notice it will also adjust the temperature with it.

Tip: If you want to revert back to where it was, hold down the option key and the cancel button will become a revert button.

 



 

If this seems like a little too much work, you can always just go to menu: Image > Auto Contrast.  or click the Auto button on the levels dialog box. You will get close the same effect. After this I always hit the image with a menu: Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen  after I have cropped, maybe increase saturation, and then upload to the front page. These are the very basic retouching steps that retouchers will do right after they open and image to get started before the dive into rubber stamp world and make more advanced adjustments with tools like curves. Here are a few before and after examples: