“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

- Aaron Siskind

Photography is one of my biggest passions, and one good photo can make me happy even after many years, when I find it again on my computer.

I have been taking photos for a long time, but it has taken me some time to figure out how the professional photographers can make their photos look so intriguing, vivid, and… well, professional.

The most important thing is of course composition and the idea you have in the picture, but there are lots of other small things that make some photos really stand out.

Knowing how to use your equipment, for example if you have an SLR camera is really important, but in this article I am only going to focus on the simplest post processing techniques, because post processing was one of the most difficult things to figure out for me, and I am still learning it all the time.

Here’s a photo straight from my camera (you can click all the images in this article to see them in a bigger size):

Figure 1

This photo of Angkor Wat is taken in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

The temples of Angkor were built by the Khmer civilization between 802 and 1220 AD, and they represent one of humankind’s most astonishing and enduring architectural achievements. There were more then 100 temples in Angkor Wat, and the view was nothing short of spectacular during the sunrise.

The photo is now just OK, and there are quite many things to do in order to make it look much better. I personally use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Capture One –image editing software to work with my photos, but there are other options as well, such as Paint Shop Pro, and other smaller and still handy programs.

Here are the steps I took to enhance the original image in Photoshop:

1. Straighten the horizon and crop the picture

If the horizon is not straight, it usually gives an amateurish look for the picture, so you have to make sure first that your horizon is straight.

Cropping the photo is the second thing you should do, in order to only include in the picture everything that really belongs there and make the photo more precise and artistic.

Here’s how you can both straighten the horizon and crop the picture with one tool in Photoshop:

• In Photoshop, click “c” or select the crop tool from the toolbox.
• Drag out a crop marquee. You don’t have to care about the overall size, but position one horizontal edge near the horizon line (see figure 2). The line does not have to be the horizon – it can be anything that should be perfectly horizontal, such as a roofline of a building or a fence.
  

  Figure 2

• Move the cursor to just outside the marquee near a corner. Your cursor icon will now become a double-pointing curved arrow indicating that you can rotate the whole marquee
• Rotate and move the marquee so that one edge follows a horizon line.
• Now you should have one edge aligned with the horizon, so you can reposition all four edges to match the exact crop area (figure 3).
  

  Figure 3

• Click right button of your mouse and select “crop”. Now you have a picture that is both cropped and has a straight horizon (figure 4).
  

  Figure 4

Next thing I always do is to make sure that the image is sharp. If you are using longer exposure with your camera (in a darker environment without a flash), a tripod is very good thing to have, otherwise the images easily become blurred.

2. Sharpen the image

First zoom closer to an area in the image where you can see the details (figure 5), and then click:

Filter – Sharpen – Sharpen / Sharpen Edges

Figure 5

In this photo, I decided to sharpen only the edges, because there is a big dark area in the middle of the picture that has edges that need to be sharpened a little bit, but there’s no reason to sharpen the sky or the pond in front of the temple.

If you are not satisfied with the results, you can click “Sharpen More” from the same place, but usually there’s no reason to sharpen the image too much – it will just start to look weird if the original image wasn’t sharp enough to begin with.

3. Enhance contrast

Enhancing the contrast of an image makes it look more dynamic. There’s no reason to go overboard with contrast either, unless you want to make very unrealistic, but artistic images.

When you add more contrast to a photo, the darker areas become darker, and lighter areas lighter.

Click Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Brightness/Contrast

A new dialog box “New Layer” opens – just click “OK”.

Now a new menu opens where you can adjust both brightness and contrast of your image (figure 6).

In this photo I wanted to make the silhouette of the temple quite dark, so that the details of it cannot be seen, but only the nice black shadow is visible, so I adjusted the contrast to +100.

Figure 6

You should also adjust brightness at the same time, if the photo is too dark or bright in general.

4. Enhance saturation

Brighter and more vivid colors look usually nice to human eye, so it is often good to enhance the saturation of an image a little bit:

Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Hue/Saturation

Another dialog box will open. Just click OK and you should have an adjustment box like in figure 7:

I enhanced the saturation by +27, to make the photo look a little bit more colorful without going too much overboard.

Now the image is cropped and straightened, and the contrast and saturation are enhanced a little bit (Figure 8). It still looks quite natural, so if you don’t want to have unrealistic images, those adjustments should be enough.

Figure 8

However, if you want to give the image some additional wow-factor, you can follow the next steps.

For the additional steps I have used a program called Capture One by a company called Phase One. There are probably many different ways of getting the same results, but as I only know how to use this program to get the results I want, that’s what I’m going to show you next.

Actually it is quite easy to do all the steps I have shown you already in Capture One as well, but I wanted to show the basic steps in Photoshop, as I think many people already have that program compared to other photo editing software.

When you have saved the image as a .JPG in Photoshop, you can open it in Capture One.

5. Add clarity

First, I’ll add a little bit more clarity, which is a nice filter in Capture One. You can access that adjustment in “Details”, which is the orange icon in figure 9, that looks like a magnifying glass.

I put the amount of clarity to 50, it enhances the contrast and details a little bit more compared to the contrast adjustment in Photoshop.

Figure 9

6. Change color balance

This will make your photo look unrealistic, but if it doesn’t matter, you can play with it and create amazing scenes for example from quite ordinary sunset or sunrise pictures
.
I changed the color balance in Capture One from the color menu (three orange circles in figure 10), and moved the small ball in the bigger colorful ball under color balance submenu towards pink.

It changes the look of the picture completely, but I like it a lot. It is a matter of taste how you want to change the color balance (if you want to change it at all).

Figure 10

7. Add vignetting

The last step I usually do is to add vignetting. It is a tool that imitates some lenses that people use in SLR cameras, making the edges of the image darker. I like the mood that it brings to the image. You can find the vignetting tool under the lens menu.

I put the vignetting amount to -3,20EV in Capture One, as you can see in figure 11, and voilà, the image is ready for publishing!

Figure 11

Here’s the final picture – you can click it to see it in bigger size:

Figure 12

Final words

Editing images of human beings usually requires a little bit different kind of retouching, for example by making the skin smoother and adding different glowing effects to make the image more intriguing and to make the person in the picture look more beautiful or handsome. I’ll write about that in some other post.

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