Rescuing A Bad Photo

In this tutorial, we’re going to go through some basic steps for re-touching and correcting common problems in digital photographs, from color correction to sharpness to exposure problems.

To start with, we’ll need a not so great photo. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I took this photo of my friend’s drooling baby a little while ago. The lighting was poor to start with, the space was cramped so I had to use a wider angle lens than I’d wanted to, and the little guy just wouldn’t be still.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Rescuing A Bad Photo - Fig. 1

To begin fixing this photo, I’m going to start with sharpening it up a little. I like to do this first, because the sharpening techniques I use can also have subtle effects on the color of the image, so doing this first means we don’t have to do color correction twice.

Let’s begin by converting the image to Lab color mode. Go to Image - Mode - Lab Color. Now open your channels palette and click on the Lightness channel. This is where we’ll do all of our sharpening. Sharpening on this layer only reduces the amount of noice in the image, because it keeps our color data seperate.

Now go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask. Enter an amount of 20 and a radius between 20 and 50. Generaly, lighter images will need a larger radius. You’ll just have to eyeball it and see what looks best. For this photo, I’m using a radius of 30. The Threshold should be 0.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Rescuing A Bad Photo - Fig. 2

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Rescuing A Bad Photo - Fig. 3
As you can see, this sharpens up AJ’s features quite a bit. It also gives us more contrast.

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Added Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 9:59 pm under Photo Effects.