Things You Can Do With a Bad Photograph in Photoshop

When you’re editing a picture—be it to dark or too light or taken with a crappy camera in general. You can go into Photoshop or even a free program like Gimp and work miracle magic on the picture of your choice.

In this picture today I am going to play with it in Adobe Photoshop  Elements 7.0

Firstly starting with Contrast, light and dark found under “Enhance” and “Adjust lighting”

Then by selecting the person in the picture with the Quick selection tool, I am going to lighten and darken ONLY the person. With this I will lighten or darken the shadows on only the person and give more depth in a way, also you can adjust the Midtone Contrast, or on another feature under “Enhance” you can adjust the brightness and contrast, which I will also do.

After that I adjusted the levels, giving a more artistic feel to the person. (Also under “Enhance” and “Adjust lighting”)

Then I will go back to the Quick selection tool, and deselect the person I selected before, now selecting the back-round. By doing this I am not going to edit the background in the original picture, but replace it with a snowy scene from another picture I have.

First, before putting the picture in the background, I will color the background white.

And then I will add the background by making that specific picture a useable brush by going to “Edit” and “Define brush”.

Then it will be defaulted black and white, and I will make the person in the picture black and white and select the background and use the brush to make it look like it’s snowing by clicking the brush tool and placing a good size on the background.

After that I edited the snowy scene and the person in the picture to make them look like they belonged together in the photo.
Then after I did that I played with the effects, making it Sepia and old looking.

All of these things are fun to do to Photographs, they make them look unique and artsy and very different from the original.
This original picture was taken from a Nintendo 3DS camera.

Anyway I hope you’ve learned something!
Thank you!