7 Most Basic Photography Editing Steps

Every time I edit a picture I find myself repeating the same basic steps before I enhance the picture with more customized little tweaks. Since it took me over a year of using Photoshop almost every day to become somewhat proficient at it (and I still haven't finished learning all about it), I figured I'd share these simple steps with you to make the whole process a bit less intimidating! Let's go through them together while working on this image of my sister. In between each step you might want to click on Layer-Flatten Image in order to avoid confusion.

Step 1: Adjust Brightness

This image is obviously a little bit too much on the dark side. In order to fix this, go to Image-Adjustments-Brightness/Contrast and move the sliders until you think your image looks good.

In this case, I picked +32 Brightness and +10 Contrast.

Step 2: Sharpen

Unless you prefer a dreamy/hazy look, it is probably a good idea to sharpen your image at this point. Go to Filter-Sharpen-Unsharp Mask. You can play around and watch the preview to see what that does to your picture. Personally, I like to set my Amount to 18%, my Radius to 55 Pixels, and my Threshold to 1 Level.

Step 3: Adjust Levels

The colors in this image are a bit dull, so let's fix that! Go to Image-Adjustments-Levels. Now you have two options. You can either use the left and right arrow and slide them towards each other (about 5-20 steps on each side, depending on your taste and image) OR you can click on the left drop tool and select the blackest part of your image with it. Then you pick the drop tool on the right and select the whitest (blown out) part of your image. The great thing about this is that if you make a mistake and don't know how to correct it, you can just cancel the whole thing and start over.

Either way, your image should immediately look a lot more intense and less hazy.

Step 4: Remove Blemishes

Now my little sister here counts herself among the lucky teenagers who has very few problems with her skin, but upon a closer look there are a couple of tiny spots that I would eliminate before handing the image over to her - or a client. This is where the Healing Brush Tool comes in handy! You can find it on the left in Photoshop, it looks like a band-aid. With the tool selected (and the brush sized according to the blemish you wish to correct; 14 in this case) press the ALT key on your keyboard and click on a part of the skin that is close to a blemish, has a similar color, but is clear. Now you've saved that part of the skin as a sample and you can easily replace any blemish with it simply by clicking on it (the blemish, that is)! Very easy and quick. As soon as you move on to a differently colored area of the skin, pick a new skin sample to base the "transformation" on, so you avoid differently colored spots all over the person's face.

Step 5: Adjust the Color Temperature

Since my sister was sitting in the shade, the image looks a bit cold. In fact, it was freezing outside, but she insisted on wearing short sleeves for this. In order to make the image more appealing, let's give it a nice sunshiny look! Clicking on Image-Adjustments-Color Balance will do just that. A window will open up for you to play with. Right now the Midtones are selected. By moving the sliders you can now adjust the midtones and make them a bit more yellow, red, and magenta. Now click on shadows, which will affect the darkest areas of your image (the green bushes in the background, for example). I wanted the green to be a bit more prominent, so that's where the slider went - just a bit, we don't want her to look sick. :) The highlights will deal with, well, the light areas of the image, like her skin. I added a bit of yellow to fake sunshine and a pinch of cyan to get rid of the redness on her nose (it was COLD). 

After doing all of this, here is what the image looks like:

Step 6: Pop the Eyes

Now I am going to tell you how to make eyes really pop... BUT you need to make sure you use this "secret" sparingly. No alien-eyes, please! After all, we edit in order to enhance beauty, not to make a person look unnatural and photoshopped... It's like make-up, you want it to look like you are wearing none. :) Our first step is to use the magnetic lasso tool to select the iris in each eye. After selecting the first one, you can press and hold the SHIFT key to add another selection without losing the first one.

Now right click on the image with the tool still selected and pick "layer via copy". You now have a separate layer that only contains the eyes. With that layer selected, go to Filters-Other-High Pass and choose 9 pixels. Now change the blending mode (on top of the layers) from "normal" to "soft light" or "overlay" (again, be careful, we don't want alien eyes). With the "Sponge" tool on the left (set to "saturate", not "desaturate") you can pop the color of the eyes a bit, too. It's a slight difference, but very powerful! If you like you can now also use a soft white brush at about 15% opacity and paint on the white in the eyes. Just a bit.

Step 7: Remove Eye-Bags

Another thing I like to do is to remove/soften the bags some people have under their eyes. Sometimes the healing brush I described earlier works well, but you can also use a brush for a similar effect. First, you need to right-click on your background layer and duplicate it. With the new layer selected, use a brush tool roughly the size of the iris in the image. Click on the ALT key and hold it; your cursor has now turned into the eyedropper tool. Select a color close to the person's eyes, but not as dark as the eye-bags. Now change the brush opacity to about 20% and simply color over the bags (and other parts of the skin, if you like)! By adjusting the layer opacity you can now lessen the effect if the skin looks too soft.

After these 7 little steps, check out the difference (please forgive the fuzziness, this is re-sized for protection):

And because these steps are a bit time-consuming, the nice people of Photoshop have enabled us to create Actions that do a bunch of this and much more for us at a fraction of the time! :)

Hope this helped and I'd love to read your comments if you have something to add or alter!