Retouching & Enhancing Digital Photographs

Hi All,

For this week, I am going to update on the next topic, which is the retouching.

First of all, this is the final image that was updated from the previous tutorial.

 From here, we will move on to do retouching on the image that were damaged.

Choose Image>Auto Color to remove out the color cast of the image.

Then, we can also adjust the color cast of the image by choosing Color Balance from the adjustment panel.

Now the image got adjusted to have blue color cast.

We are then replacing the color of some of the image in it.

Firstly, we draw onto the image that we wanted to be replaced with color by using Rectangular Marquee tool.

Then, we go to Image>Adjustments>Replace Color to do the changes

The replacement of color can be made by just adjusting the Hue, Saturation and also Lightness on the panel above and when satisfied, just click OK.

Next, we are going to repair the damaged area by using the Stamp Clone tool and the target image will be the MMU signboard. Also used to repair the damaged area are Spot Healing Brush tool and also Dodge tool.

As you can see, the brightness due to the sunlight effect on the original MMU signboard on the right hand side has been repaired as the image above.

Next, we are going to move further to use the special effect from the Healing Brush tool to remove away things that we do not want like the image below.

Can you guys seen the additional part of the tree appeared on the building?

The unwanted thing has been removed away.

Furthermore, we can 'add' some features into the image for retouching purpose to make the image nicer. For this case, I've chosen to have some spark of lightning on the image. To do it, choose Filter>Render>Lens Flare.

When satisfied with changes, press OK and the result as below.

Then, we will continue to further enhance the image and firstly I chose on the Shadow and Highlights. That feature can be found at Image>Adjustments>Shadows/Highlights. We are advised to do all the editing on the copy of the image rather than doing it on the original image. This to enable us to have the original copy for editing if there is anything wrong with the editing at first place.

 From here, we can choose according to our preference on how we wanted it to be, and when satisfied with the changes, just click OK.

Meanwhile, to create some creativity onto the image, we can also adding some 'noise' onto the background of the image. 

To choose Add Noise, we can find it at Filter>Noise>Add Noise. I've chosen Add Noise for this image to clearly show the effect from the feature.

To create a slightly blur effect into the image, I've chosen 20% noise for the image and we can also get the preview of the effect after we ticked the filed of Preview, and when done with it, we can finalize the noise adding by clicking OK.

So, we are done here with the adding of noise and if we do not like the effect of noise, or if the images chosen is already having noise, we can also reduce it by choosing Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise.

When satisfied with the changes, just click OK and reducing noise process will follows as above.

After that, we are going to sharpen the edge of the image.

We able to find it as Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen

And when done, just click OK.

After done with the changes and retouching purpose, the final image was saved and as below.