Notice: The tips in this post are not recommended for creative manipulation or editing, simply fixing or compensating for errors or camera deficiencies.
Creativity-oriented tutorials will follow this shortly,
1. After organizing your photos in iPhoto, drag the TBE album, or individual photos onto the Adobe Photoshop icon on your dock. This should both open Photoshop and the files. If not, open Photoshop, then: File>Open>Media>Photos>TBE, or CMD+O>Media>Photos>TBE.
2. Correct the exposure. Even if the photo seems perfect, at least try it out: Image>Adjustments>Exposure. The top slider, ‘Exposure’, should be pretty self-explanatory. You should not have to move it very much in either direction to get big results, so be careful, Mr. Sausage-fingers. ‘Gamma Correction’ is a fun tool to remove sun bleaching, but again, be careful. It can really alter your colors and contrast.
3. Adjust the curves: Image>Adjustment>Curves. The general rule for curves is an ‘S’ pattern. For RGB, Red, and Green, it is the norm to lower the left, hold the center at the center, and rise the right side. (and do the exact opposite for Blue). This rule is a very good start, but shouldn’t be as much a rule, as a suggestion. Certainly, the goal here is to make the photo look better, so if you have to, break the rule. Sometime you will have to lower the red completely, without raising it on either side, and maybe you won’t have to touch the green. However it is, pay attention to the photo over the rule.
4. If you are still having trouble with the color, go to Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer. From here you can change the amount of output of each RGB. It is default to have every color put out 100%, but again, this is not as much a law as a suggestion. Do whatever looks right.
5. Image>Adjustment>Shadow/Highlight will bring out the darker out of the light and visa versa. This tool automatically puts highlight at 50; drop that down to about 5, and shadow to about 1 or 2. From here, play around with the sliders until you find something you like.
6. Adjust the levels: Image>Adjustment>Levels or CMD+L. Shifting the White slider left will lighten the photo; Black slider right will darken, and the Gray slider can do either to the middle-tones.
7. After all of these adjustments, you may have lost some of the photo’s original feel, so:
8. Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. Play around with these sliders to make up for sll of your edits that may have distorted photo’s feel.
9. Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. Use the saturation bar to bring back some of the photo’s color and warmth. Avoid using the Hue or Lightness sliders.
10. Save your file. File>Save As. If you are doing a series of photos of one person or thing, open Finder and create a new Folder. Name it Photoshop, or Edited, or something to that effect, then drag to the left bar, under places. Make a new sub-folder within it for every photoshoot you do. Now when it asks you where to save the file, instead of going to documents, save it to that folder. To name the file, do something uniform, like first initial, last name, number of photo (i.e. f-last-3).
