Photo Manipulation using Adobe Photoshop

Improving Image Quality

Photoshop is very user-friendly in terms of improving image quality. If you take a bad picture, Photoshop can bring it a long way.

Let's take this image as an example -

This is just a picture of two cats - it has bad lighting, but we can make this image clear and sharp.

First, you want to fix the color in the picture so that it is bright, but clear instead of being so dark. To do this, you want to go to Image --> Adjustments --> Auto Levels in the main menu. This will automatically fix the contrast and color of your image to be at optimum level.

The image is a lot clearer now. Say that you only want one of the cats in your picture - the orange one is larger. Use the Crop tool to select around the cat and get this:

We can improve the colors in the image, too, using the Saturation feature. If you go to Image --> Adjustments --> Hue/Saturation and change the saturation, the colors in the picture appear brighter. In this picture, the saturation was increased +24.

That is a little introduction to basic photo manipulation. Any of the commands under Image --> Adjustments are good for editing your photos.