Photography captures a moment in time. It is a creative process as much as painting or writing and has the power to communicate the meaning of a scene

As more and more people are buying digital cameras and uploading their digital photos onto their PCs, people are starting to experiment with what things they can do to their photos to enhance them, cut out unwanted people from their photos, or take the people in their photos and place them on a different background. The enhancements you can carry out on your photos are endless. In this article I will give you a few tips on how to get the most out of Photoshop to take your photos to the next level.

If you don’t own a digital camera, do not worry. You can still use the following tips by scanning in your photos. Here the one thing to remember is to make sure that your dpi (dots per inch) is 300dpi for best results.

1. Lightening up dark photos

Open the photo you want to edit and select ‘Image’ from the main toolbar, then select ‘Adjustments’ followed by ‘Brightness/Contrast’. You can adjust these two settings until you are happy with the brightness of the photo.

2. Adding more colour to your photos

Some of your photos may seem dull, or maybe the opposite whereby it too much colour or redness. This can be adjusted by clicking on ‘Image’ from the main toolbar, then select ‘Adjustments’, followed by ‘Match Colour’. On this window you can increase and decrease the ‘Colour Intensity’ setting as required.

3. Removing the background from a digital photo

With this tool, you can cut around any object, background or person you would like to remove from the digital photo. From the ‘Tools’ panel on the screen select ‘Pen Tool’. With this tool, start on one side of the object you want to remove and click around the outline of it.

This is a delicate process, and the more accurate you are with the outline, the better your final image will be. Make sure you zoom into the image as this will increase your accuracy. Don’t be afraid to zoom in further than you think is necessary as this will only improve the quality of the final outcome.

The closer your clicks are, the more accurate the pen will draw around your outline. To draw around curves of your object, while holding the Ctrl key click on the line (between two clicks) which you can then adjust until you are happy with it. Once you have completely drawn around the whole object and you are back where you started, make sure your ends are joined together. Now right click on the image you just outlined and select “Make selection”, change the feather radius to 0 and click on OK.

4. Optimising your photos for the web.

Many people now want to send their digital photos through email or put them up on their own personal website where friends and family can view them. Images which have a size of more than 2MB take a long time to download especially with slow connections. Photoshop has an image optimise that reduces the file size considerably without losing any quality of the image which is noticeable to the eye. Open your image in Photoshop and choose ‘File’ from the main menu, then select ‘Save for Web’. A new window will open with some basic presets, select the file size you would like and save the document.

About The Author
Brad Bagherian is the founder and MD of elaborations Ltd (www.elaborations.co.uk). elaborations is a London based Design Company specialising in website design and development, graphic design and Internet marketing.