Hello everyone and welcome to my technique slow scrap! Today I want to focus on a couple simple tricks you can use to brighten up your photos and also adjust the color balance. These are both especially useful for photos taken indoors. Indoor photos often tend to have a yellowish cast due to incandescent light bulbs or just artificial lighting in general. The following tricks are for those of you who don’t have Lightroom and just want some quick adjustments on the fly while you’re creating a layout. I use these tricks on 99% of my photos and I do them within my layered (.psd in Photoshop) file as just another step to creating my layout. USING ADJUSTMENT LAYERS (disclaimer: this tutorial is for Photoshop, I use PS CS5, which is old, so some things might look slightly different) >>> Start a new document in Photoshop just like you would for a normal layout. You can even complete your whole layout and THEN adjust your photo(s). >>> Select your photo layer and then add a LEVEL Adjustment layer. You can find this at the bottom of your layers palette: >>> Click the half white/half black circle icon and select LEVELS: >>> This will create an LEVELS Adjustment Layer above your photo layer. Next, clip the adjustment layer to your photo. (if you don’t, you’ll be lightening your whole layout and not just the photo). >>> With LEVELS, the first thing to do is select the middle arrow and drag it slowly to the left. This will brighten your whole photo. I sometimes I also move the white triangle slightly to the left, but that can blow out your photo in a hurry, so be sure to make very small adjustments here. Sliding the Black triangle to the right will increase your shadows, so if you are trying to lighten your photo, you probably won’t need to move that one. >>> Sometimes a LEVEL adjustment layer is all I need, but almost always I want to adjust the color balance a little bit too. To add a COLOR BALANCE Ajustment Layer, you find that in the same flyout panel as the Levels layer: >>> If you are adjusting an indoor photo, I find that most of the time you want to increase the Blue and decrease the Red. I very rarely play with the Magenta/Green slider, but that’s just my preference. The best way to tell if your color balance is off is to look at the skin tone of the people in your photo OR find something that is supposed to be white in your photo and play with the sliders until the white actually looks white. >>> One final adjustment layer that I will add occasionally to a REALLY dark photo is a BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST Ajustment Layer. Sometimes just a Levels layer alone won’t brighten my terrible photos enough, so I’ll stack a Brightness/Contrast layer on top and bump up the Brightness just a little bit more. Things to note: >>> You may stack adjustment layers on top of each other and clip them all to one photo. >>> You can use TWO Levels layers for a little extra boost. SLOW SCRAP REQUIREMENTS: ONE - Create a layout with at least one photo that has been manipulated with at least one adjustment layer. TWO – Post your before and after layouts to show the difference the adjustment layers made. (And... if you don't have Photoshop... you may use ANY method you'd like to make your changes.) Here are my before and after layouts. The first one is with my photos straight from my phone and the 2nd one is after I fiddled with them by adding adjustment layers. These photos weren’t great because they were taken indoors and at night! Yikes! >>> Notice especially the skin tone in my son’s face! >>> Also what was I thinking buying my son bright orange sheets?!?!? Ha ha! You have 24 hours to finish your pages. Layouts are due TOMORROW, September 25th at 10pm Eastern time. Please upload your layouts to THIS gallery and post them below. Have fun!!! (Other Misc Tips) ...
To the top photo I applied levels and color balance adjustments. I just worked on color balance on the middle photo. And I used levels and brightness/contrast adjustment layers on the bottom photo. Below are my original photos.
Here are my two photos, which I edited before bringing into the page (it's much easier for me that way!): And my page:
Thanks for the good tips. I thought my before and after photos worked better on one layout. Here's mine:
So much fun. We WERE tan, but not sunburned as the original photo showed! https://the-lilypad.com/forum/galleries/09-19-slow-scrap_adjustment-techniques.405753/
I adjusted the levels, and the contrast: original photo: edited photo: Amazing by AnnaB posted Sep 24, 2019 at 10:07 PM
Thanks for the slow scrap, Karen. I lightened my photo and played with the color and contrast. Here's my layout with the edited picture on it. Here's my layout with the unedited picture on it.
Thanks for the tutorials! My phone is my only camera, that's why I love photoless pages! Anyway, here is the before. The two smaller photos were taken through the net of the trampoline, and they were really dark And here is the final page
Great Technique Challenge!...Since I Edited My Photo(s) Separately & Multiple Times...Here Is The Original Photo First...Really Dark & Pretty Blah!...: *My Finished Layout:Wild At Heart:I Used The:Bloom & Grow-Collab-The Lilypad(Some Pieces ReColored)
Sorry I missed most of the chat... And here is my original without the color balance and levels adjustments:
I'm sorry I couldn't participate on the chat..I was sleeping! but I loved the technique, very useful! here's my previous photo: and the final version:
I just played with this and I like your result more than my usual quick fix. So exciting! Thanks for teaching me some more tools to use! I think adjusting the brightness/contrast after I adjusted the level is what made it look better to me as it matches the color in another photo on my layout. I will post my page Friday. Thanks again!
Wonderful tips! I'm at work so I was able to play with a photo but not to scrap. I've used levels both not color balance and brightness contrast. I often use Screen on a second copy of a photo at 50% to lighten it. These are neater fixes. Thanks.
Here's the original, probably taken by a former boyfriend. I used the levels when the small image was imported to PSE and then duplicated that image to use a technique I use a good bit. I make the Blending Mode Screen, then add a mask to remove any areas I don't want lightened. In lightening their faces, the strange quality of the image became stronger but ...the story is now told.
I LOVE seeing all of these fancied up photos!! I’ll be back later tonight to leave you all some love!!
Karen - thanks for the understandable instructions. I never really knew how to use the adjustment layers and since this is my first try, I'm still learning. The photo I used of the group was very dark (it's the top one) and made under florescent lighting. Yuck! But it is what it is so I could certainly see improvement on the middle one with this technique. Sorry I missed the chat. Okay, and I had to add "lighten up" to the layout as a bit of humor!