Photoshop: "Umphing" Your Shots, 10 quick steps

A little background on the photo first:
This was like one of the first shots i took with my Nikon D40x . The steps i took are not necessarily the best steps to use, but they are the "basic" get to know and play with photoshop steps. Masters these and you will start to understand the software a lot better.

And maybe sooner we can move into some MUCH more complex and complicated and TIME consuming tutorials etc.

To get a time ref, this took me about 5min to fix up. I did it quite fast and not very detailed.

As always there are alot of new people walking into the digital photography world in general everyday, so i though i would go ”back to the roots” this time.

For this entry I m going to try to explain how to add that little bit extra to your shots, as some people call it around the web the “umps” effect, if you will.

Step 1: Select the image, and open Photohop (or Elements because the steps I m going to do are really simple and if I m not mistaken should work there as well)

Here is the image I choose:

As you can see there is nothing really wrong with this shot as it is, but its missing that little extra in my opinion.

Step 2: I always do the following step, I double click the “Background” layer twice, this brings up a “New Layer” dialog box, and then I just pres Ok, unless you want to change the name in that case feel free to do so.

Step 3: Duplicate the layer (press command/control + J) to do this, or go into Layer > Duplicate Layer.

Now you have two exact same copies of the image in two separate layers, one at the bottom called “Layer 0” and “Layer 1” – “Layer 1” being the copy of “Layer 0”

Step 4: Click on “Layer 1” so you have it selected, make sure that its selected if not the following steps will not work.

Step 5: Create a new fill or adjustment layer, how do you do this? Well you can either click the round button that is half grey and half black (in the layer palette) and click on Hue/Saturation, or you can go into Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation, which brings up a dialog box, just click Ok, which will bring up a new dialog box: the Hue/Saturation

dialog box

Step 6: Adjusting the Hue/Saturation, if you just want to increase the saturation of the entire image just grab the saturation slider and drag it to the right, until your happy and press Ok, this will apply a saturation increase for the entire image.

But I m going to go a bit step further.

In the Hue/Saturation dialog box, at the top you se a little drop down box, and at first “Master” is selected, what this means is that its going to apply any changes that you make to the entire image, but this is not what we want.

So i played around with the drop down boxes, till i was happy, look around on the photo to waht colors you see.

Note: that you don’t need to press OK between each step because it will “save” the settings, OK button is only for when your 100% satisfied.

Step 6: Fixing the Contrast/Brightness, to do this either click the circle logo in the layer pallets and select Contras/Brightness, or go into Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Brightness/Contrast (if your using this method it will always bring up a dialog box, so press Ok to get the actual Brightness/Contrast dialog box)

Step 7: Adjusting Contrast/Brightness, now before you go about anything here think about what effect you want. And then play aroud with the sliders.

Step 8: One thing to note that every time you add a new adjustment layer you will get a layer mask with it, so lets put this to use. Select your Brush Tool (B) and press D (D will render the colours with your brush tool to black and white) and click on the Brightness/Contrast 1 layer mask, the white box next to the circled symbol. Make sure you have black as your foreground colour and now lets pain “away” the Brightness/Contrast 1, this means to remove that Brightness/Contrast where we don’t want it to be.

Step 9: Get a new Contrast/Brightness adjustment layer, but now lets focus on the foreground, so play around with the sliders till you get something you like and paint away what you dont want.

(Step 10: Croping the image, only if you want to but i dont always do)

Here is the final product:

And Here is what we hade before any PP:

Conclusion: there is a pretty big difference between the before and after as you can tell, hope this helps out with some of you starter ups out there. Maybe i will throw another tutorial together later tonight or another entry dont know yet!