How to process a photo in Photoshop - the first steps and simple tips. Basic Photo Editing Techniques in Adobe Photoshop: Noise Removal

Hello everyone! Today I want to tell you how to process photos in Photoshop for beginners or those who have just recently started learning this wonderful editor. It's no secret that sometimes photos turn out, to put it mildly, not the way we expected to see them. Either they are too dim, or bright, a lot of acne, then the sharpness is not best quality. Therefore, today I will try to tell in an accessible language how to fix this.

First of all, I recommend looking at people, if there are any in the photo. The first thing that is important in processing is the identification of defects. In this situation, I mean acne, scars, herpes (God forbid), from an outbreak, scratches, emerging hair, bruises, etc.

I do not see much point in writing in detail about this, since I have a separate article for each of the cases. I would just like to list a few tools that usually eliminate defects.

Patch. Select this tool and select the problem area of the skin with it, then drag it to a healthy area by holding down the left mouse button.
Healing Brush - Before using the tool, you need to select the donor area by holding down the alt button. And then you will need to paint over all pimples, blackheads, etc.
Precision repair brush. This tool is also designed to cover up defects, but differs from the “brother” in that it is not necessary to select the donor area. He takes information from neighboring areas.

I described all these methods in an article about. You will see for yourself that it is not difficult.

Applying a Camera RAW Filter: Editing a Photo in a Minute

This method is insanely simple. Filters are used by many photographers. I would even say differently. They initially shoot in the format CR2 which is essentially higher quality. After that, by going into Photoshop, this filter is automatically turned on.

But in fact, there is no trouble, since starting from the version of Photoshop CS5, the filters have been replenished with a new brother. I hope that everyone has been using a more advanced version of the editor for a long time.

Main feature this method is that absolutely anyone can handle it, even a beginner and a complete zero, since everything happens in only one single filter, which only intuitively needs to be adjusted a little. Let's use this photo as an example.

By looking at the stories at the beginning, you can see for yourself what wonderful changes have taken place with photography. I just think it's excellent.

Using the Adjustment Menu on a Single Layer

This way of processing photos in Photoshop is quite rough, but for novice users it will do.

Now you can compare the changes. They may not be particularly large, but the processed photo clearly looks better. Of course, the absolute disadvantage of this method is that you cannot return to the previous step and edit it. But there is a way to do this, and I will talk about it below. Well, in general, see other functions for yourself and turn the sliders. Perhaps you will find something interesting for yourself.

Processing a photo with adjustment layers

This method of processing photos in Photoshop may seem complicated for beginners at first glance, but in fact it is very simple, and any user can handle it.

Adjustment layers

A great photo editing feature that doesn't require any special skills. The essence of this method is that we apply each function on a separate adjustment layer, of which we can have a great many. And in fact, it is much more convenient than the method that we did above.

For example, I took a photo with a girl, rather faded shades. She herself begs to be made brighter, more saturated and simply to please the soul.

This completes the work with adjustment layers, but we have to move on.

Area selection

Now we have to work with some areas separately, since applying effects to the entire image at once will not end in anything good. For example, we need to make the sky brighter, more saturated and bluer, and if we apply everything to one photo, then our girl will also apply everything to herself. Therefore, let's do the following.

Select a girl with any of the . I'll use , because I think it will fit perfectly here. We begin to single out the girl. Do not chase accuracy too much, but the main thing is that the whole body is captured, or rather, its naked parts and face.
Now, be sure to make sure that you are on the background layer with the girl, then right-click inside the selection, and select "Copy to new layer".
After that, the cut out girl will appear on a new layer, which is above the background one. Your task is to put it above all so that the adjustment layers do not affect it. To do this, hold the button on the new layer and drag it above the rest.
Now go back to the background layer and start selecting the sky. In this case, I decided to use the . Select a brush, and then click on the quick mask button itself, and then start painting over the entire sky, remembering to change the brush size to get into more hard-to-reach places.
After that, click again on the quick mask to deselect it. Next, we will need to invert the selection so that we work with the sky, and not with what is around it. To do this, press the key combination SHIFT+CTRL+I.
Next, you will need to add some saturation. To do this, without removing the selection, press the key combination CTRL+U, then move the Saturation slider a couple of dozen units to the right. You can also play with the brightness until you reach the most interesting shade.
Now back to the girl. No wonder we carried it. Since we moved it from under the adjustment layers, it became pale again, as it looked originally. But if this is not done, then on the contrary it will be too dark. And now we can find the right balance. To do this, we need to reduce the opacity of our copy of the girl until it seems to you that enough is enough. In my case, 33 percent is enough.

Outcome

Having studied several various ways, I came to the conclusion that if you want to make fast and high-quality processing, then it will be enough to use the Camera RAW filter in Photoshop. He showed himself perfectly, and the time it takes to process a photo even for novice users really takes 1-2 minutes.

The only thing I would not recommend is to create an action for this case and start streaming photo changes. Even if the pictures were taken by the same photographer on the same day, the settings that you made for one picture may not be suitable for them. I know that many unscrupulous wedding photographers do exactly this to save time. You see, they are reluctant to process 300-400 photos one at a time.

But if you really want to do high-quality photo processing, as you are drawn to this, then I highly recommend checking out these cool video tutorials, which clearly explains how to use Photoshop for awesome photo processing.

And if you are new to Photoshop, then the first thing I recommend is to study this course. Everything is literally chewed up to the smallest detail and looks just in one breath. . And most importantly, everything is told in human language, so you don’t even want to be distracted.

As you can see, there is nothing complicated. Therefore, no one should have questions about how to process photos in Photoshop for beginners. At least I am sure that these tools will be enough for you.

Well, this concludes my article. Hope you like it. Do not forget to subscribe to my blog updates, as well as follow the news in my publics. Good luck to you. Bye Bye!

Sincerely, Dmitry Kostin.

Often the photos we take come out dark and dull. This can happen for various reasons, for example, you took pictures in bad cloudy weather, in dark time days or in a poorly lit room. And of course, when viewing photos on a monitor or printing them out, you were simply upset and no matter how you tried to select, the result of yours left much to be desired. But don't be discouraged, as in this tutorial, you'll learn how to improve your photos in just a few steps!

The beauty of this tutorial is that all these steps are very easy to understand and universal for almost all photos. On the simple example we will take you through the processing steps such as: cropping and correcting the horizon, increasing contrast and brightness using curves, creating a bokeh effect using texture mapping and sharpening. So let's get started!

For example, I chose this photo of the cat Snowball:

Photo taken with Pentax K-5, 50 mm lens at f/1.6, 1.40c and ISO 800

The note: I'll make a small digression. I used Photoshop CS2 to edit this photo. Why? First of all, Adobe now officially lets you download and use Photoshop CS2 absolutely free! I wrote about this. For beginners, this is just a fairy tale. Secondly, all the tools are present here necessary tools, as is allowed in the CS6 version. So, let's finally start correcting the photo.

Step 1 - Correcting the Horizon and Framing

Some pictures are obtained with a littered horizon, as well as with extra objects captured in the frame. To fix this, you need to use two tools:

Transform Selection(Selection Transform Tool)
Crop(Crop Tool)

About these two tools, I wrote a separate lesson: where everything is described and described in detail. However, let's take a quick look at how they work again.

To use the tool Transform Selection, first you need to make a selection of the canvas by pressing the keyboard shortcut CTRL+A.

Remember: without a selected object, you won't be able to activate the transform tool.

You will notice dashed lines appear around the canvas. This is our selection. Now you can activate the tool Transform Selection pressing a keyboard shortcut CTRL+T:

Pay attention to the highlighted points. Thanks to these points, you can stretch the image. However, for now, we just need to rotate the image and flatten the horizon. To do this, move the mouse cursor outside the canvas. The cursor should take the form of two arrows. Now hold down the left mouse button and rotate the photo:

Now let's use the tool Crop for cropping and trimming everything superfluous. This tool, you can activate both from the palette and with the power hot key C:

Deselect by clicking CTRL+D and dragging the points, crop the area as shown below:

Then press the key Enter:

Step 2 - Brightening Up with Levels

Now let's make our photo brighter and more contrasty. We can use an adjustment layer for this. Curves(curves) or just a tool Curves(Curves).

For this photo we will use the tool Curves(Curves), but first make a duplicate of the main layer by pressing the keyboard shortcut CTRL+J:

After that click CTRL+M to activate the tool:

Experiment with the curve until the image gets brighter and lighter. Raising the point of the curve up, you increase the brightness, lowering the point down, you make the tones darker. That's what I did:

More often than not, you will need to create multiple points on a curve, as in this case. You can know more about curves.

Step 3 - Create highlights and shadows in the eyes and remove defects

In this step, we will give the cat's eyes expressiveness. The best way to do this is to use two tools:

DodgeTool(Dodge Tool)
BurnTool(Dimmer Tool)

Select DodgeTool(Clarifier) and in its settings set the parameter Highlights (Light). Thanks to this, the tool will only affect the light areas:

Now try to make the highlights in the eyes brighter:

After that, activate the tool Burn(Dimmer), and in its settings set the value Shadow(Shadows) so that the shading effect affects only the dark areas. Darken some areas in the eyes:

Apart from the eyes, I also darkened the cat's nostrils. Let's remove the defects in the eye area. In this case, it is most convenient and easiest to remove defects using a conventional tool. stamp(Stamp). But in order to make it as high quality as possible, you need to lower the opacity of the tool's effect in its settings.

Choose a tool stamp(Stamp) and in its settings set the parameter Opacity(Opacity) value at 25%

This tool allows you to use the texture from anywhere on the canvas. To select the texture, hold down the ALT key and click on the area next to the eye:

All the texture is selected, now release the key and with a few mouse clicks retouch the "dirty" area:

Do the same with the other eye:

Step 4 - Sharpening

Now the photo does not look as clear as we would like. But Photoshop allows you to correct this shortcoming. The method that will be presented here, in my opinion, is one of the most successful and correct, since it is more flexible and, moreover, does not “destroy” the image, unlike filters.

First, merge all layers into one by pressing the key combination CTRL+SHIFT+E. And then make a duplicate of this layer (CTRL + J)

Change the Blending Mode of the first layer to overlay(Overlap)

After that, apply the Hight Pass filter ... (Color contrast)

Watch the contours in the filter settings. Adjust it so that the contours become a little noticeable, but be careful, the main thing here is not to overdo it. You will immediately see the result of the sharpness adjustment.

When you are satisfied with the result, click OK and merge all layers into one by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+E.

You can find out more about setting clarity.

Step 5 - Create the Bokeh Effect

In the final step, we will give the photo some mood by creating a bokeh effect. For this you can use various textures, for example for this photo I used the texture from here.

All you need to do is add the required texture to the canvas:

Then change its blend mode to soft light(Soft light) and lower the opacity a bit:

You can use the eraser to erase part of the texture on the cat's body. Then you can increase the brightness a little with the same Curves tool.

That's all. Remember that these steps are universal for almost all photographs. Now you know the sequence of actions and the necessary tools. I hope you found something useful for yourself. Ask questions, subscribe to site updates, add to social network please like and all the best to you.

Photoshop is the most famous graphic editor that tears off wide opportunities for photo processing. Almost everyone who has a computer is aware of its existence. Professional photographers and advanced amateurs know how to process a photo in Photoshop. But what about a beginner who has never done it before?

There is an opinion that the interface of this program is complicated, and not every beginner will be able to figure it out on their own. In fact, Photoshop is good not only as a graphics editor, but also as an example of optimized usability. V more this applies to the famous versions of CS5 and CS6. By the way, in any of the modern versions, the main set of tools does not have big differences.

The main menu is located at the top of the program window. With it, you can control the capabilities of Photoshop. On the left side is a toolbar necessary for processing photos. On the right - layers, adjustments, masks, text and more. In the future it will be possible to exhibit necessary set panels as desired using the section in the top menu "window", by checking the boxes next to the desired panels.

What can be found in the article?

In the section of the photo manipulation wizard, the beginner will learn how materials software Adobe Photoshop will help to qualitatively change the pictures: create a vintage effect, adjust the appearance, remove problem areas, work with the subject and background, turn a photo into a pencil drawing or oil paints. Record the result in beautiful frame and enjoy the result. Here you will get some valuable photo editing tutorials. Learn how to work with basic retouching functions, masks, layers. Get to know useful tricks applying tools, speeding up Photoshop, using adjustment layers to create black and white shots, portrait photos, decoration landscapes, movie effect.

Experts will talk about the main differences between versions of Photoshop CS5 and CS6. You will learn what computer hardware requirements are needed for fast and effective work programs, computing power performance.

The acquired knowledge and useful secrets will help you create work no worse than that of professional designers of glossy magazines.

Beginning of work

For a beginner, it will be most convenient to use the Russified version of the program. In this case independent study its capabilities will be close to intuitive, the interface is so convenient. If "Photoshop" on English language, then you can download and apply a crack to it.

To start working with a photo, you need to open it through the "file" menu, "open" or drag it with the mouse into the program window.

Removing imperfections from a portrait

For many, acquaintance with Photoshop begins with the desire to embellish a photo of a person - himself or his girlfriend, girlfriend or boyfriend. It was then that they wonder how to process a photo in Photoshop.

First of all, it is necessary to clean the human skin in the photo, if it has pimples and other irregularities. To do this, use a set of tools from the left side of the program window "stamp", "healing brush" and "patch".

For more accurate work, you need to enlarge the image using the ctrl + keyboard shortcut. Then select the "stamp" tool, define right size tool by decreasing or increasing it with the [ and ] keys. Next, you need to left-click while holding alt in place next to the pimple. The "stamp" will acquire a gradient base of the copied place, now you can click on the point to be deleted. So you need to do with all the small imperfections of the skin.

If the imperfections are minor, you can remove them with a Spot Healing Brush. By the way, it, the usual restoring brush and the patch are in the same cell of the toolbar, you can make this or that tool active by clicking on the cell with the right mouse button.

You can correct highlights, larger skin irregularities using the “patch” tool by selecting the desired object and transferring the contour to a nearby, similar in color area of the photo. Errors in the work of the stamp can also be corrected with this tool. By the way, the “patch” will also help if you need to remove it from the photo unnecessary details larger, for example, a person accidentally caught in the frame.

When processing, it is important not to forget about other areas of open skin - the neck and arms.

For a beginner “photoshopper”, when processing a photo that is clean enough in terms of defects, it will be enough to remove imperfections using a spot repair brush.

Face Alignment in Photoshop

This stage of processing is necessary if you want to slightly transform the portrait, remove bumps.

To align the face, copy the current layer by pressing ctrl + j. Next, you need to go to the "filters" section of the top menu, select "blur", "gaussian blur". In the window that appears, set the pixel values \u200b\u200bto no more than 5 - 8. The photo will “blur”, this is what you need. The next step is to convert this layer to black mask. To do this, find the “layer mask” button at the bottom of the layers panel and hold alt click on it with the left mouse button. The image will become clear again. Now, in order to erase all the roughness of the skin, smooth it out, you need to select the “brush” tool in the left panel of the program window, select convenient size brush and gently work through the entire skin of the face, neck and hands. It is important not to touch the lips and openings of the nose. Otherwise, the photo risks losing its naturalness.

After careful study, with the “opacity” slider in the upper right corner of the panel, you need to set values from 30 to 50%, depending on your desire. After this action, the photo will take on a more natural look.

To make the processed face even closer to natural, and so that no one would guess for sure that they had to process the photo in Photoshop , you need to add some noise to the cleaned areas. To do this, you first need to merge 2 layers into one by right-clicking on the top layer and selecting "merge with previous" from the menu. Then, copy the layer, in the "filters", "noise" menu, find the "add noise" option, set the values to about 2 - 2.5. Next, create a black mask and work out all areas of the skin with the brush tool.

After that, the retouching of the portrait can be completed. If you want to correct the color of the photo, blur the background beautifully, you can use the following tips.

Saturation

Professionals try not to use automatic color correction functions when they need to process a photo in Photoshop. They have their own secrets. Here is one of them.

To make the photo juicy, saturated colors, you can do the following:

- translate the photo into the LAB color space ("Image", "mode", "LAB");

- make a duplicate layer (shortcut keys ctrl and J);

- go to the menu "image", "correction", "curves";

- in the window that appears in channels a and b, change the position of the pointers in turn: the lower point - by 1 division towards the center, without breaking away from the bottom line, the upper point - by 1 division towards the center, without breaking away from the top line.

The result is an oversaturated color image. To smooth out this oversaturation, you need to select the "overlay" blending mode in the layers panel, then set the layer's transparency in the region of 20 - 35%, depending on the desire.

After that, you need to merge the layers and convert the image back to RGB.

The skills described above are one of the main ones and can help to process a photo in Photoshop with sufficient quality.

How to edit a photo in Photoshop CS6

Naturally, different versions Adobe Photoshop programs have some differences. In some cases, very noticeable. Professionals in photo processing say that, for example, the CS5 and CS6 versions differ significantly. However, the beginner will not notice these differences, since they are in areas that he has not yet reached. The changes relate to working with 3D, drawing tools, automatic functions such as auto-correction, distortion correction and some other functions. In addition, the program interface has changed the usual light gray color to dark.

For a beginner, editing a photo in Photoshop CS6 will be as easy as in CS5. By the way, thanks to the updated frame tool, cropping a photo is easier. Yes, and auto-correction modes have become more “smart”.

And the color correction in this version is more advanced, so it will probably be more pleasant to process a photo in Photoshop CS6 than in previous versions. Work in this application makes demands on the hardware of the computer - working with graphics requires a lot of computing power. So comfortable work without "brakes" is guaranteed for modern machines with powerful processor and large capacity random access memory, and even better - with a good video processor.

It happens that a picture needs minimal processing, it happens the other way around.

Everyone determines the amount of processing and the degree of intervention in photography for himself. This is a personal choice and taste, so I will not dwell on it. As well as on how what is done and why, here it is more convenient for someone. As you know, the same thing can be obtained in different ways.

Perhaps someone will disagree - I do not pretend to be an absolute truth, just my personal approach. Is not step by step lesson, namely the algorithm. Therefore, the material is designed primarily for those who already have experience in photo correction in Photoshop, and not for beginners.

So, let's begin.

Let's open the image in Adobe Photoshop, exporting from RAW with settings of our choice in 16-bit mode, in order to reduce photo degradation and "tone compression" during processing.
Then cleaning the skin, background and removing unnecessary elements. I usually use the Healing Brush Tool, the Clone Tool and sometimes a little Patch Tool.
If necessary, we fight with redness of the hands, ears, nose, legs and other parts of the body. IMHO, carefully applied Hue/saturation (sometimes in combination with a mask) has no equal here.
Skin smoothing. I prefer the frequency decomposition method, as it is the fastest, highest quality, completely manually controlled and allows you to preserve the texture of the skin as much as possible.
Correcting shapes - Liquify is a great and powerful tool, in most cases I get by with it, sometimes, however, the Warp mode (in Free Transform) can be useful.
Correcting makeup, working with details. We draw eyes, give brightness and saturation to the iris, whiten whites, work with lips, etc. It's a matter of taste and the main thing is not to overdo it.
After that, when you can see what we are working with, we move on to drawing volumes. We draw shadows and highlights / highlights. Here whoever loves, I'm in Lately I prefer to work in two layers: one in Screen mode, the other in Multiply, and use the brush color to match the color of the treated area. When finished, you can blur these 2 layers of ours a little, for soft transitions, if the strokes seem rough or visible.

In fact, sometimes I change points 6-7, depending on my mood and on what is more annoying and whether the black and white pattern needs to be corrected.

Final color correction, adjustment of contrast, brightness and toning (initial adjustment and color correction is done even before Photoshop is launched in the RAW converter). Here are the ways you want. The taste and color of markers are different.
The final stage. Work analysis, sharpening and saving finished photo. We look at what we missed, what went out of sight, whether everything suits us, we fix it. We sharpen the version for printing or for a reduced copy for publication on the web. We translate the photo into the sRGB color space, into 8-bit mode and save it.

In the photo on the example, for some reason I really wanted to draw something like lights in the "bokeh". Alas, I didn’t have a photo with real lights for overlay, so I just added 3 layers of multi-colored spots, and blurred them to varying degrees with Lens Blur, adding a drop of noise and setting different transparency of these 3 layers. Normal and/or Screen modes.
I don’t pretend to be photorealistic at this stage, but, in my opinion, it’s better with them.

For those interested in before / after photos a little larger and crop with skin.

How far can you go?

The first part describes the retouching algorithm in the form in which I personally see it.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the before / after example was deliberately chosen to be rather grotesque, just to show how far one can go.

There is a question about the degree of interference in the appearance of the model, where is the line that cannot be crossed. It is clear that for each type / genre of shooting, it is different.
Today there will be a simple example, following the same algorithm that I suggested above, but with a much more gentle approach.

As you can see, using the same algorithm, you can get a much softer and more natural photo.