Pete Ashton’s Blog

Photoshop is a great program but it’s also an enigma. So many tools and not a clue as to how they might work. Thankfully you don’t have to worry about them if all you want to do is crop, resize and save, which means you never actually get around to figuring out what they do until someone points it out to you.

I reckon I can’t be alone in my relative cluelessness regarding Photoshop but I have, over the last four years, figured out a few things related to making photos look better and so I’m going to tell you about them.

Just to reiterate, I am not a professional, I’m probably wrong and you should always consult a doctor before embarking on self medication for major illnesses.

Levels
Image > Adjustment >

This was the first thing I was taught and is probably the most useful general tool for improving photos. Here’s the box:

What you have here is a graphical representation of the image with the dark bits on left and the light bits on the right. As you drag the arrows underneath the graph around bits of the image are removed or their emphasis changed or something or other. Like most of Photoshop I don’t really understand what’s going on.

Levels is most useful for photos taken on a grey day or where the available light was not that great. I use it in two stages. First drag the left and right arrowheads in a fraction until they hit the start of the graph. Second, drag the middle arrowhead around until you’re happy with the result. Suddenly your photo looks more like it was taken on a bright sunny July morning than a damp November afternoon.

Hue/Saturation
Image > Adjustment >

You can no doubt do loads of things with this tool but we’re just going to use it for tweaking the intensity of colours. Here’s the box:

Grab the “Saturation” slider and move it to the right. Anything more that +20 will be too much but if you keep it subtle you can increase the vibrancy of the image while still keeping it realistic. This is most useful for photos taken on overcast days and especially when you want to emphasize bold flat colours.

You’ll notice that you can select specific colour channels with the top-left menu and if you want to get really advanced can use the colour bar at the bottom to determine what range of colours are affected. I commonly use this for bringing out the redness of bricks or to make the grass greener, but use caution and restraint. Your aim in all of this is to get the photo closer to reality, not to bypass it.

Curves
Image > Adjustment >

This is a horribly complex tool that I avoided for a long time because of its unpredictability, but like all complex things it’s really pretty essential and once you’ve started to master it you’ll never turn back.

There’s a shit-load of stuff going on here but it’s easiest if you think of it as similar to Levels, only in two dimensions. Maybe. Move the cursor over the line in the middle of the graph and click on it. Holding the mouse down drag it up a little and the image will lighten. Move it down and it’ll darken. As the name implies, the nature of the lightening process is related to the shape of the curve and I’m not even going to attempt to describe how this works because I barely understand it myself.

But I’d highly recommend you start playing with it. Just remember that you want to keep it subtle and that what works for one image probably won’t work on another. Eventually you’ll never use Levels again.

Channel Mixer
Image > Adjustment >

When photographing bands in low-light venues I was getting frustrated by the limited colours available so I started switching to black and white which helped make the detail clearer. Black and white is a lovely and under-appreciated style but converting your colour photos effectively can be tricky. Just switching to Greyscale is easy but doesn’t always give the right effect. Often what you want to do is reduce the intensity of certain colours to increase the contrast otherwise you just get a load of grey. There are a number of ways to do this but this is one I’ve stumbled across recently.

The Channel Mixer is, again, a horribly complex tool that doesn’t make a lot of sense if you don’t have a working knowledge of how colour works, but with a little trial and error you can produce some lovely black and white images while still keeping your colour photo on file. Here’s the box:

The first thing to do is check the Monocrome box at the bottom which will produce something similar to the basic Greyscale. Now change the percentages for Red, Green and Blue until you have something you’re happy with. On the whole these should add up to 100% but you might want to experiment with going slightly over or under that to lighten or darken the image.

The biggest frustration with this is you can’t compare before and after when tweaking. Also I have no idea how this all works and what the percentages really mean. I keep thinking I’m getting a handle on it but then it gets away from me so don’t worry if you feel you’re going in blind.

Unsharp Mask
Filter > Sharpen >

The basic Sharpen and Sharpen More filters in Photoshop are okay and generally do the job but they’re not very subtle and, on the whole, should be avoided. Unfortunately the next level up from them, Unsharp Mask, is, you guessed it, horrifically complex. Here’s the box of doom:

What does Unsharp Mask even mean? Fucked if I know and those controls are terribly unintuitive, but if you get it right the results are very impressive.

Some tips to get you started though: If the photo is slightly out of focus shove the Amount up to a good 150-200%, wiggle the Radius to between 1 and 3 pixels and keep the Threshold to between 3 and 10. This should bring everything into crisp focus.

You’ll note that the preview box, when viewed at 100%, looks pretty awful. This is fine as Unsharp Mask works best on images that are shrunk down or printed out so keep the Preview box clicked and view the original image at the size you intend it to be seen at. This tool takes up a lot of time and can be pretty frustrating when you’re working through loads of photos but the results, especially when making physical prints, are worth it.

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I think that’ll do for now. Those are the main Photoshop tools I use to prep my photos for public consumption. Bear in mind that I don’t really know what I’m doing and this has all been figured out by trial and error. My best advice would be to get in there and figure out what works for you.