Hello everyone. In todays tutorial I’ll give you five simple steps that will make your average point-and-shoot photo into a much nicer one. This took me about five minutes and I had fairly good results. When you’re working in photoshop you want to use high-resolution photo’s as often as possible but depending on your camera you might not always get this. I’m using an older picture with an old camera that broke my own “res” rule It will work for this tutorial though.

Here is a comparison of our initial photo to our end results.

Step 1: Start by increasing the brightness/contrast by going Image –> Adjustments –> Brightness/Contrast. Increase the contrast and brightness. After looking at my photo later I may have gone a little overboard with it, but you almost always want to increase the contrast a little.

Step 2: Next change your levels. Image –> Adjustments –> Levels. Add a little more black by sliding the left slider to the right just a little bit. Or you could also play around with the center slider.

Step 3: Adjust the color balances. After you have changed the contrast and played with the levels your ocean or thing’s in your images may have changed color. In my case the ocean was just too blue. So go Image –> Adjustments –> Color Balance. You will also notice the three radial buttons for highlights, mid tones, and…. ummm…. shadows? I can’t quite remember the last one. But you will want to adjust your colors; in my case I toned down my blue.

Step 4: Get rid of imperfections in the photo. Many people think this is a really difficult step and takes years to be able to make sailboats and birds disappear.

In all actuality it’s very easy. First, select the healing brush and paint over your object. Once you release the mouse it will just disappear!

Step 5: Lastly many photo’s look nice with a vignetting effect. This is just making a new layer on top and taking a really large round brush with a zero % hardness. After selecting a black foreground color paint on the very edge of your photo. Just close enough that it feathers around the edge. After that you can decrease the opacity with the slider over your layers. Your end result will look much better than it previously did! And it only takes a couple minutes!