Okay, so the last tutorial was about opening photos in Camera RAW and making adjustments. This one is going to continue from that one, but even if you didn’t read that tutorial you will still be able to follow along completely!!
Sometimes when you take a photo it needs a little “doctoring” to get it as perfect as you want it to be! After you have edited in Camera RAW (or not) you can then open the photo (or just open a jpeg) from Photoshop and edit it a bit more!
This picture has been edited already in Camera RAW and now I am just going to tweak it a bit more:
We are going to go up to the Tab at the top that says “ENHANCE”
You can use the auto fixes if you desire, although I find that they sometimes give you an undesirable look to your photo. If this happens you can always click “Undo”.
Right now we are going to go to “ADJUST LIGHTING” and then click on shadows/highlights
When you click on this, the photo will automatically change a bit(it evens out the shadows and highlights) …if you like the look it gave your photo click “OK”. If not, you can now adjust your sliders to create a look that you like. Play around with them and get familiar with what they do. If you don’t like it, you can always cancel and redo this step! : )
This is my photo after shadow and highlight adjustments:
I brought the “lighten shadows” back to the left a little because I like the darker shadows around her face and I also increased the mid-tone contrast a bit. I kept the “Darken highlights” right where they were as I thought the highlights were just right on this one.
Now, we are going to go back up to the “ENHANCE TAB” , back to “ADJUST LIGHTHING” and select “LEVELS”
This histogram allows you adjust how much shadow and highlights you want to bring to the photo by moving the three sliders underneath it. Again, play with the sliders and get a feel for what each of them does to the photo. If you want to start over you can press “RESET” .
I brought my shadows (the left slider) in a bit more and also brightened my highlights (the right slider) by bringing that slider in a bit also. When you are finished, hit “OKAY”.
One other thing I like to do, depending on the photo is to go back up to the Enhance Tab, back to “Adjust Lighting” and go to “Brightness/Contrast”. I sometimes increase the brightness but most of the time, I just increase the contrast a bit.
There are several other things that you can do under the enhancement tab, but if you have already adjusted these things in Camera RAW then you will not need to make these adjustments again in Elements. Play around with some of the other things in the Enhancements tab…you can always cancel and reopen your picture. : ) nothing is permanent unless you save the photo!
After these steps, I usually run an action or two over my photo to complete it! Check out the Actions Tutorial if you want to learn more about these!!
Here is a before and after with only the adjustments that I have showed you in this tutorial:
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