lightening a too-dark photo in photoshop

There are a thousand ways to lighten a too dark shot, this is just the way I did it and don't want to forget.
  1) create new layer, make black and white, opacity at 20%
  2) create new layer- screen.  Now pick out a lemonade color and do a solid color overlay.
  3) touch ups. add blush, eye highlight, blur cheeks, add gloss to lip

Adding Ethereal Glow to a Dull Iphone Pic

 I really love this picture of my daughter on her first day of school, morning sunlight streaming in, pondering the possibilities of a year full of learning, puzzling over how she ever got so lucky to have the world's best mother...
  Or maybe it's just some pretty clever photo editing.

Here's the before shot:

  Not really something I'd waste $0.15 to print off.  Definitely not something that captures the moment. In truth, the moment was me wondering what time it was--when this magical first day of school would ever happen-- grabbing my iphone to check and deciding to take a picture to send to dad. The true moment was pretty fully captured.  It's just that I don't want to remember the moment like that-- I want a pretty memory.  Thanks to photoshop I can have it and you can too!   Follow the jump for a quick tutorial. 

Brighten eyes in Photoshop tutorial

 

 

The above picture is one I took the other day. Nothing special, so a good one to see if I can create something pretty.

Here is a close up of S after I brightened her eyes. 

Here's the steps I took to brighten the eyes using photoshop elements:

Use the Magnetic lasso, right click to make sure the middle, magnetic one is selected. Feather set to 5

I need to select both eyes, HOW? at the top left of screen are boxes. select the second from left, the "add to selection" box.  This will add the two eyes together and make one layer of them.

Lasso the eyes.  If you make mistake, just go back, hit delete and continue.

Next need to put in layers box by going to Edit-> copy. and Edit--> paste.  You get a new layer of only eyes.

Filter--> other --> hi pass  radius 20

Layers, normal --> soft light.

to double the effect, click on bottom right to create new layer.

Now, I'll go and fix up the entire photo, just didn't want to forget how to do this.

blurring with photoshop

Sometimes a really cool effect can be achieved by letting one subject stand out.  This can be done by blurring the background through photoshop.

Bright eyes photoshop tutorial

Though it's only March here in Minnesota (that's usually dead center of the hard cruel winter) Spring seems to be here.  The kids and I went out to soak up some rays of sun and I wanted to capture a few of the moments but of course, like all good moments, I was enjoying them and hadn't toted along my camera.  All I had was an iphone. So I snapped away and when I later loaded the snaps of the day onto my computer I was pretty let down.  None of the sun was captured. None of the brightness of the early Spring through the eyes of a toddler lit up my monitor.

   Photoshop can fix that.  I have Elements 8 and here's the tutorial on what I did to turn some iphone pics that weren't even quality enough to print for grandma into something that makes my little girl look lovely.

Here's what one of the shots looked like straight off the iphone:

After a little time on Photoshop

Step 1) Brighten entire image. Go to Enhance, brighten, 30%
Step 2) Zoom in on face using Cntl +
    She had a messy face and circles under her eyes.  Select Clone tool. Set to 35% to clean up     crumbs around lips.  Set to 13% to clean up under eyes.
Step 3) Lips. Use eyedropper tool to select lip color. Select brush tool and brush size to work as lip pencil. Fill in lips a bit.
Step 4) Eyes.  In this photo the dark blue is already pretty darn awesome, but there's absolutely no luminosity, no spark- her eyes look like monocolored zombie eyes. I want to add the light blue and gold around the pupils. Use brush tool, select a nice sky blue color. Opacity 12%.  Dot around iris.
Select gold color for fire around pupil. Draw it like spokes around a tire.
Step 5) Accents. Cntrl D to set palette back to black. Use brush like eyeliner and dot it in along lashes. Add few dots of black to lashes. few dots of black to outer edge of iris and lower eyelid.
Step 6)Smooth skin using Blur tool (looks like water drop) 100% strength.  Go over skin avoiding mouth and eyes and nostrils.

Done.

How to make collage with Photoshop8

I've been traveling a lot and have turned to photo documenting outfits so that I can pack quickly. And I'd like to report that as the month has just come to an end, it's worked out quite well and helped streamline all sorts of decisions.  I'm gonna keep it up and I highly recommend it for getting you out of your clothing ruts.

Also, I just learned how to make a photoshop collages and don't want to have to relearn next year so here's the play-by-play:


File--> New--> blank--> US paper.  This gets the template.

Next, open the file you want to collage with. Drag little image icon from BIN.  Drop it onto blank.

To resize and position your images. go to top bar, Image--> Transform -->Free Transform

tracer box will show up around image.  Drag the vertices at sides and/or corners.

To overlap just the way you want, move position of images in Layers tray.

Add Font. (Milk and Cereal 110pt. in Red)
Merge Layers. Save.