After the holiday season, you undoubtedly have some great party pics you want to show off! In this tutorial I will show you how to use basic Photoshop tools—including Brightness & Contrast, Hue & Saturation, and The Burn Tool—to give your pics a little kick!
Find an image file you wish to use, and open Photoshop. The best type of picture to follow this tutorial is one that is a portrait of a couple people, with a dark background setting.
I will be using a picture of myself with my boyfriend, who was awesome enough to grant me permission to use this photo! (Thanks!)
Prep! Get all set up before we start:
Open Photoshop, then go to Window and make sure that at least Options, Tools, & Navigator are all checked off.
Now go to File > Open to open your image file.
The following tools are all basic and simple to use, and can be used in many ways. Try these steps to start, but continue experimenting with them in other scenarios! Let’s continue…
Hue & Saturation:
Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (or hit command-U).
This will open the Hue/Saturation setting window:
Often pictures only need a minor boost. Feel free to drag the different levels from -100 to 100 and back again to get a feel for what they do, but most of the time only moving these a slight amount can create enough visual impact.
For my image, I notice that our skin tones look a bit washed out, so Im going to boost the Saturation UP. Move your Saturation level to +3 or higher until you get a little more intensity!
Once I adjust my saturation I feel the skin tones look a bit too red, so Im going to select Reds from the drop-down box, and Im going to shift the Hue of my red tones to +3 so they turn more golden.
You can use this setting to reduce or adjust any overwhelming hues, or maybe you want to punch-up some colors! I almost always boost the saturation to bring out the color. Wearing a bright pink dress? Select Magentas and push the Saturation up a few notches!
Here is the new view of my image after adjusting Hue & Saturation:
Brightness & Contrast:
Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast, and again you’ll get a settings window.
Brightness will lighten all of your light tones, while Contrast will do both lighten your lighs, and darken your darks. I use Brightness restrictively until I see what level of Contrast I will be using. You don’t want to adjust your Brightness, then go to Contrast and find that you completely blow out all of your bright areas. For my image I acutally shifted the Contrast UP to +42 and my brightness only up slightly.
The Burn Tool:
The Burn Tool is used to darken areas. You use the mouse and click over areas of your image just like using a paint brush tool, though it exposes or darkens the hues that are already present in the image, instead of laying down new color.
The Burn Tool is located on the Tools palette, and looks like a hand in a drawing position, as shown. (If you dont see this shape in this location, click once and hold down your mouse button here. That area of the tool palette will reveal other tools, and the Burn Tool should be one of them.)
In the Options palette (Usually at the top of your screen) you can select if you want the Burn tool to affect Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights. You can also select how intensely you want these things darkened. For my image, I want to darken the dark areas of the background and create a nice face into my image, so I select Shadows, and set my exposure to 60%.
You can also now right-click (command-click) and set your brush size.
Now I gently paint in my background and stroke by stroke come in closer to my main image. I really love when it leaves subtle glaring lights in the background, showing that this is a party scenario. Here is a Before & After view of the background I am darkening:
I can also now lower my exposure down to 15 and use the burn tool on my face to warm up the skin tone. I right-click and make the brush size large enough to cover my face, and click once over the whole thing. I also then make the brush size very small, and go over my eyelashes to make them pop as well. Before & After views:
Last, I notice that the position of my shoulder looks a little strange, did you notice that? Ew, stop looking at it!
So, Im going to increase the exposure back up to 50, and Im going to slowly trace in from the background, making the back part of my shoulder face into the background.
You can also use this feature to blacken out anything in the background you dont want to see – something on the wall, a sleeve, a random drunkard who strolled into your shot – as long as the hues are already dark, just black them out!
The Crop Tool
Lastly, im going to use my crop tool, to crop my image to what I feel is an appropriate size. I would prefer my image to be a square, so that’s what I’ll do. Select the Crop tool from the Tools palette.
Now, click and drag the tool to the desired cropping. Release the mouse button, adjust the size of your crop lines as you see fit, and hit Enter.
Now you can see my final image compared to how it started. Here are my Before & After:
A few quick easy steps, and it looks more punched-up, and is ready to add to my online photo album!
