Basic Image Adjustments in Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated and I in no way affiliated with Adobe. Okay, so for this tutorial I'm actually going to talk about making the adjustments, for making this picture pop out just a little bit more. As you can see I unlocked the layer right here which is, I renamed it master and what I want to do is actually go to image adjustments and curves. Not what I like to do usually is make a point right there, drop that down a little bit to make the blacks black. Click that and make that up a little bit to make the whites white. As you can see we've got a slight little curve here. And it's kind of like the preset that we have. It's called increase contrast. It kind of looks like that. So, you hit OK. As you can see the picture looks a whole lot better already. And if you to we can actually duplicate by hitting thematic control J. But, let me go back in time. This is our original. I'm going to duplicate by hitting command and control J. That way I have this bottom one as a reference. Turn it off, though. Okay, now let's work on this one. Go to back to image - adjustments. We'll do the curves once again so you guys can understand. Click, drop it just a little bit. Click up on top and pick that up just a little bit. That makes the picture pop a little more. Then hit image, adjustments and usually I like to go to color balance. I'm sorry, I hit contrast. Image, adjustments, I keep hitting contrast. Image, adjustments, and color balance. Okay. So, to me the picture looks a little red on it's face. So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to add Cyan. Just a little bit. Negative five is good. And then I'm going to add yellow. Just a little bit to add a yellow yellow to their skin. So, as you can see it looks a lot better. That's before and that's after. Hit OK. You want to go to image, adjustments. Image, adjustments, saturation. Boost the saturation. I always boost the saturation a little bit, but not too much. I go to like plus eight. Hit OK. Hit image, adjustment, and you can go to contrast now. And just add a little bit of contrast, like six. Okay, so now we have our image here and as you can see, the before and after. That's before. That's after. Looks a whole bunch better and it's not oversaturated. It's not killing your computer. It's not looking horrible. So some people go over, a little crazy on saturation. But, that is it for the main adjustments and if you want to go to shadow and highlights you can also do that. Adjustments, shadow and highlights. And it kind of gives you that look. Drop down to amount. Add highlights to it. You can see the previews, before and that's after. So, I like the way that looks. Now I'm actually going to hit OK. You can see the difference between that and that. It just looks a whole bunch better. And that is it for making the adjustments."