Adjusting images using simple Auto Levels and Auto Colour
to enhance them using Photoshop
Here's a portrait that was taken on an overcast day using available light. I used the 'cloudy' whitebalance setting on the camera which added warm tones to the photograph. There is often a bluish tinge to photos taken in low light, especially on such an overcast day with no external lights.
I took this photograph with Stan standing in front of a white door background. I asked him to look 'mean' and to take a bouncer's stance. I wanted a moody emotion and I definitely got it! It also has a lot of texture which can be intensified when the photo is desaturated. The light and shadows are also enhanced. This is how I did it. First, we need to do some housekeeping. Skip to the next step if you have this covered.
1. Backing up your original photo. I usually save as .psd (photoshop file) or as tif. Many people prefer to shoot in RAW and convert to tiff files. Why do this? One good reason is that when a tif photo is manipulated there is no loss of quality when you save the photo, especially when you save more than once. It was explained to me that each time you save a jpg file it is compressed slightly which can cause artefacts and noise in the resulting images. It's also helpful to have a master or backup file
2. Open your tiff and create a duplicate layer from the background. This makes it easy to compare between original and edited version plus you can always delete the new layer if you don't like the edits. It also comes in handy if you like to use layer adjustments (color dodge, overlay, screen etc) and then moderate the effect of the adjustment by making the top layer opaque (increase the opacity or reduce the fill %.). If you don't want to work in psd or tif format you can always use the Image>Duplicate to create a copy of your file, just don't save the original.
Ok, housekeeping over! As usual there are many ways to adjust the white balance and add some contrast. Here is just one way. You might do it differently but sometimes it is good to explore new methods.
Auto Levels
Not entirely necessary but I feel it does give me an idea as to what Photoshop believes the levels should be.
Click Shift+Control+L or use Image>Adjustments>Auto Levels to perform an Auto Levels adjustment
Image>Adjustment> Auto Levels
If I don't like the result then I do a custom white balance in Levels by clicking the white eyedropper onto the section of the photo that I want to be pure white, then the grey onto greys and the black onto the blackest part of the photo. More on that in detail in another tutorial.
Auto Colour
Next, do the same steps as above but this time choose Auto Color
Next I did a Curves adjustment.
Comparison of images for each step:
Part Two: Manually editing white balance, levels and curves
