Photoshop Beginner Tutorial: 4 Easy Steps to Improve Your Digital Photos

Have you ever looked over a Photoshop tutorial and said, "Well, this is nice, but just tell me how to make my snapshots look good, and by the way, I want to do it fast"? Have you ever wondered how the pros turn an everyday digital photo into an amazing digital photo so quickly?

The secret is, no photo is perfect to begin with. It's crooked, it's not centered on the subject, the color is too red, too blue, too yellow, and it's a bit blurry. Never fear! Using these four simple steps, you will turn your digital pictures from drab to fab in no time.

Now, a few notes before we begin. Feel free to skip ahead to the numbered steps if you simply can't wait.

First, keyboard shortcuts will be in parentheses, as in "Select the Crop tool (c)."

Second, while red-eye is an incredibly common problem, this tutorial is about enhancing the overall image. Red-eye correction is a more specific adjustment and while it isn't covered in this tutorial, there exist several excellent tutorials on the topic.

We'll be covering these four steps:
- Rotate
- Crop
- Color correction using Auto Levels
- Unsharp Mask

Step One: Rotate.
We aren't perfect tripods. It often happens that a picture that seemed straight at the time of the shot was actually snapped a bit...askew. Take Image 1 for example. Everything seems to tilt to the left. Let's straighten it out.

1. Click and hold on the Eyedropper tool. A short palette with two other tools will appear. Scroll over and select the Measure tool. If the Measure tool is already visible in the Tools palette, you can type the letter "i" as a shortcut.

2. Click and drag across the horizon line, or any line in the image that you think should be at a 90-degree angle, and isn't. In Image 1 I've dragged my Measure tool along the dark fence above the gardens.

3. In the menu bar, click on Image, scroll to Rotate Canvas, and select Arbitrary...

4. A little window will come up with an angle already filled in. Click OK. This is the angle Photoshop has calculated based on the line you drew with the Measure tool. Thank you, Photoshop, for doing the thinking.

Step Two: Crop
Usually when we take a picture, there's more "stuff" in it than we want to keep. You might catch a person's elbow jutting into the frame, or part of a building, or maybe just too much sky.

1. Select the Crop tool (c).

2. Click and drag to select the parts of the image you want to keep. See Image 2.

3. Adjust the crop area by dragging any corner, or by dragging in the middle of any side.

4. Double-click within the crop area to finish cropping.

Step Three: Auto Levels
Images will often have a "color cast" resulting from the lighting present, or a quirk of the camera. Indoor photos taken with a flash tend to have a yellow cast, while outdoor photos are susceptible to a blue cast. The outdoor photo from Image 2 is no exception. Making a Levels adjustment in Photoshop will usually clear up these color casts. Additionally, a Levels adjustment will enhance your photo's contrast, making it more vibrant.

1. In the menu bar, click on Image, scroll to Adjustments, and select Auto Levels (cmd-shift-L, ctrl-shift-L in Windows).

That's it. Really. The vast majority of the time, Auto Levels will give you what you want. Look at Image 3. The blue cast is gone, and now we can tell that it was a (gasp!) sunny day in Chicago.

Step Four: Unsharp Mask
The picture is rotated, cropped how we want it, and the colors are correct. All that's left is to remove the slight blurriness inherent to digital photography.

1. In the menu bar, select Filter, scroll to Sharpen, and select Unsharp Mask...

2. See Image 4. Oi. Now we get to confusing combinations of numbers. This picture used Amount: 85, Radius: 1.0, and Threshold: 3. Plug in those numbers and click OK.

Those numbers will work for most of your pictures. Feel free to play around with them, though. If you start seeing halos around things in your photo, you've gone too far. You want to bring things into focus without introducing "artifacts." Don't stress. Just try the numbers above and it should be fine.

See Image 5 for our rotated, cropped, color-corrected, sharpened image. It's a nice improvement over what we began with.

And that's it. Those four steps will be all you need to turn most of your photos from drab to fab - in less than thirty seconds! Have fun, and let me know how this technique works out for you.