Fun Photos Icon

Improving Photos

So you got a photo thats less than perfect, never mind we have more of those than we know what to do with. Some of them are just beyond hope, but for the others we have the technology. We'll show you a before and after, then explain how we fixed it. Most of the fixes will be using the 1-Click styles under the heading "Quick Fixes"

Dark Photos & Dark Subjects

Image

On the left hand side are the original photographs, on the right are the improved ones. So what did we do? For the first picture we used the quick fix "Attempt It All", for the second picture, we used the quick fix "Fix Dark Subject". These fixes can also be used to improve photos that aren't so dark. For the image below we used "Attempt It All".

Image

Incorrect Or Faded Colors

Image

On the left hand side are the original photographs, on the right are the improved ones. So what did we do? For the first picture we simply used the Quick Fix "Fix Faded Colors". With the second picture the "Fix Faded Colors" got us most of the way. We tweaked the green and blue colors in the "Color Balance" effect within the "Advanced Options". We then used the "Sharpen" effect (also within the Advanced Options). Finally we used the Crop tool to remove the white border. These fixes can be used to improve photos that arn't so bad. Below we used "Attempt It All"

Image

Washed out color, not straight and distorted.

Image

For the final part of this tutorial, we have this bad photo, which as the animation portrays becomes so much better than before. For this part we didn't use any 1-Click styles, we used the Advanced Options only.

  1. To start with we use the Auto Levels, it makes the picture more colorful, cutting away that grey area, making the colors look almost normal.
  2. Enable the straighten effect and adjust it until the picture looks straight, the guidelines really help to align the image.
  3. However in doing so we realize that the image has what it known as barrel distortion, we can see that some of the vertical lines that should be straight are curved. So we enable Barrel Distortion and adjust it until the lines appear straight.
  4. Enabling the "Sharpen" helps to fix the blurring.
  5. When Digital Flash is enabled is brings out some of the hidden detail, but make the image slightly grey again, so we drag the digital flash effect above the Auto Levels effect, the picture changes and gives more of the effect we're after.
  6. Lastly to make the image "Pop" we grab the levels tool, move the "In Black" up a bit and more the "In White" down a bit.

So there we have it, several ways to improve not so great photos.