Thanks for visiting smudgeonmylens.com. This is a tutorial on basic color correction and noise reduction. I apologize in advance, as it was thrown together with some haste. Some notes on the tutorial... main text, and/or explanation text is is grey. Actions will be in light brown, as you see here.

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Below are the start and finish pictures of the tutorial. . Essentially, we're going to increase the contrast of the image, increase the lighting a bit on the image to correct the underexposure, and play around with some Photoshop filters. For this tutorial, I'm using Photoshop CS on a PC (not a mac user). If you have any questions with this tutorial, feel free to contact me at smudge[at]smudgeonmylens.com.

The beauty of PhotoShop is that there is really not a wrong way or a right way to do things… its versatility allows for the complete customization of photographs based on your preferences.. and there is oftentimes a number of different ways to accomplish the same task. In this brief beginner tutorial.. we’ll take a crappy photo I took, and attempt to “save” it by adding some elements that make it look better.

Step 1
First off. Save this pic I shot to your computer. Click this image for the enlargement, right click the big picture, and then choose “Save-As”. Open up the image in Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CS. As you can see, I didn’t do a very good job with this picture. It’s underexposed, and even worse, it’s not even in focus.. hehe (I’m still learning). But there is a lot we can do to fix this and either hide the blur, or make it seem as if it were intended.

Step 2
First off, make sure your background layer is selected in the Layers palette, and press Control – J (Command-J on mac) to create a new background layer. You won’t use the background layer again, we’re simply creating a new layer so we don’t have to edit our original.

Step 3
Now starts the color correction. As you can see, the image is really underexposed, the contract between purple and green is minimal, and the photo is boring (not to mention out of focus). We’re going to setup some contrast, and make the flowers stand out a bit. On the bottom of your layers palette, is a circle that is half black and half white… click that and choose “Threshold”. This is going to make your pic look really goofy for a minute. What we’re setting up to do by clicking this, is defining within your picture the shadow and the highlight settings. To do this, we need to know the dark spots on the picture, and the light spots on a picture. Sometimes, when you have a picture with a lot of black in it, you know right off which spots are black, and the same as well if you have an image with a lot of white. However, in my image, I can’t tell by just looking at it which is the dark spot of the photo, and which is the lightspot. Once you’ve selected “Threshold” a window will appear with a slider bar. Drag that slider bar all the way to the left. As you do that, you’ll see your image go completely white. Now slowly move your slider back to the right, as you do, you will see some parts begin to fill in as black spots. The first black spot you see is the darkest point of the image. Drag the slider right until you have just a few black spots on your canvas. (SCREEN). Then on that open menu, select “OK”.

Step 4
Go to your toolbar, select and HOLD the eyedropper tool and select the second tool in the list called the “Color Sampler Tool”. Take that tool and click on one of those black spots (picture to the left)… you’ll see a marker appear in your canvas. Now, double click on your threshold layer in your layers palette (d-click the circle). Now do the opposite. We’re looking for the light part of the photo now. Drag that slider all the way to the right, and then slowly back to the left. Once you have a white spot on your canvas, click “OK”, select your color sampler tool, and then click on the canvas where the white spot is. This again, will leave a marker on the canvas.

Step 5
Now you can delete your threshold layer.. we’re done with it. Click and drag it to the trash can. Make sure you have layer 1 selected as well as the color sampler tool, and go in your menu go to Image > Mode > Levels. This will bring up a small window the represents the color levels of your image. In the bottom right hand corner are 3 eyedropper tools. The one on the left, is the black point of the image, (or the shadows representation), the one is the middle represents the midtones of the image, and the right eyedropper is the highlights. Select the eyedropper on the left, or the black point eyedropper. Now click right on the black point market you defined earlier (picture 2 below). You’ll see a slight adjustment in your image. Now click on the right eye dropper, or the white point of the image, and then click on point #2 on your canvas (picture 1 below). Already the image doesn’t look nearly as bland as it did. Lastly, go to Image > Adjustments > Curves and click that line right in the middle of the graph on the levels palette and drag it up just slightly (See 3rd picture below). You’ll see the page brighten up a bit. Click “OK” on the levels menu. (Note, in reality, you should always use adjustment layers instead of modifiing the image directly as we have done here. An adjustment layer does the same thing we're doing here, but not directly to the image. Adjustment layers can be added for levels and curves and much more, and are found underneath the "Image" menu.)

Step 6
The photo is simply too out of focus for any amount of sharpening or touchup to be effective. As such, we’re going to elaborate on that and use it to make our photo a bit more “artistic”. Select layer 1 in the layers palette and hit CNTL-J twice to create two duplicate layers. Doubleclick the title of the layer titled “Layer 1 Copy” and change it to “Blur”. Doubleclick the title of the layer titled “Layer 1 Copy 2” and change it to “Watercolor”.

Step 7
Select the layer called “Watercolor”. Go to Filter > Artistic > WaterColor. A window will POP up where you can tweek some settings. Set your “Brush Detail” to 9, your “Shadow Intensity” to 1, and your “Texture” to 1 as well. Hit “OK”. The reality of Photoshop’s filters is that they are hugely overused with their default settings.. sometimes this is great, sometimes you’ll see the same effect over and over and over. If that doesn’t bother you fine, otherwise, always tweek settings to achieve whatever results suit you. Now your picture looks really goofy. In the upper right hand corner of the layers palette, is a setting called “Opacity”. Make sure the layer “Watercolor” is selected, and turn the opacity down to 40%.

Step 8
Now select the “Blur” layer. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Drag your slider up to 6 pixels and click ok. This softens our image a ton…. Keep this layer selected, go up to the opacity setting, and change the opacity on this layer to 50% as well. If your watercolor is still too pronounced, select the watercolor layer, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur and drag your slider down to 1.0 pixels. Hit “OK”. Now we still get some good effects from the watercolor, but we dilute it a bit, and kill the rough edges of the image. Now we have 3 layers that are contributing to the look of our image. A watercolor layer, a blurred layer, and the default image layer. In my opinion though… the image still does not have enough contrast.

Step 9
Select the “Layer 1” layer and duplicate it twice. Drag both of these layers above the watercolor and blur layers. Name the top layer “Vivid” and the one below it “overlay”. In the upper left hand corner of the layers palette is a dropdown box that is defaulted to “Normal”. Select the “Vivid” layer and change that dropdown box to say “Vivid Light”. Now, after you shriek “MY EYES!!!” , turn the opacity on that layer down to about 20%.

Step 10
Next, select your “Overlay” layer, and change the blending mode to “Overlay”. Drop the opacity on this layer to about 50%.

Step 11
When you did your watercolor effect, your layer produced some noise. When I used this photo on my site for the photo of the day, I kept the noise, cause I liked it…you can see it on my photo of the day. However, in this version, we’re going to reduce it. Select your eraser tool from the tool palette. In your menu on the top of the screen, change the opacity on the eraser to 50%. Select a large soft brush, and start erasing the sides of the watercolor layer.

Step 12
At this point, you should be pretty much done with the image. If you don't like the outcome of the picture, that's fine! Feel free to play with the settings as you see fit. Hopefully this tutorials showed you some basic things you can do with every image to enhance color.