How do I make my photos look better with photoshop?

hey, dustPuppy...

How's life been treating you?

Working with photos in Photoshop is as much an art as it is a science.

When I'm working with a photo downloaded from my camera, the first thing I will usually do is apply a gausian blur of about 0.6 or 0.7 pixels. This gives an authentic "film" feel to the picture and takes away some of the digital artifacts that can be caused, especially if you're trying to enlarge a picture from a small mega-pixel camera.

As for adding effects to the pictures, there are many, many books published on Photoshop, including "Tips & Tricks" books. If you've got a Barnes & Noble or Borders store nearby, they make great "libraries". Bring a laptop if you've got one, and try the tutorials in the books.

For online resources, you might want to check out:
http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials... (lots of tutorials, mostly for CS2, but some will work with PS7)
http://www.absolutecross.com/tutorials/p... (also some good tutorials, including how to put flame on text)
http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photosho... (one tutorial is turing a photo into a "painting"...some other cool ones, too)

I hope this gets you started on the right direction. Let me know if you need anything further.

Take care,
Ric

Hi ric,
I'm on vacation right now, so I'm a bit slow responding here... but it's great enjoying the summer :)

Thanks for the tips and links. I will try them out.
Don't you use sharpening and adjust saturation at all? I read somewhere (i think it was on bigstockphoto) that those were the most often "errors" they told people to adjust when they submitted their photos. Also cropping if the frame is not the best...
But i was wondering in which order? if it matters at all? You know something about that?

Glad to hear you're enjoying your summer vacation - my wife is "kidnapping" me on Wednesday for a few days celebrating my birthday. I'm looking forward to getting away from the keyboard for a bit myself.

Now...back to your question...

I used to use sharpening when I was working with a scanned image, rather than a "direct" digital image from my camera. The scanned images were sometimes just out of sharp enough that I would put a little bit on it to clean it up again. Saturation is another "art", and really depends on where the final image is going to end up. There were many times that I would play with the hue/saturation/level of an image when I was using that image in a magazine or a print advertisement. Ink saturation levels played into it quite a bit, especially if what was on the other side was also a full image. You could actually end up putting so much ink on the page that the back-to-back images would end up "muddying" each other. Not something you want to happen in a press run of 100,000 magazines. Publishers get mad when that happens... :)

Working with digital displays are a completely different animal. What you see on your monitor may not be the same on the monitor next to it. Unfortunately, not everyone has a calibrated monitor that can properly display colors. So the best way to approach saturation is really to determine where the image is going to be displayed and then make a "best guess" for that target.

If you're going to produce stock photography, as you mentioned the site above, you're going to want to be most conscious of what's going in to the camera rather than trying to minutely fine-tune what's coming out. Lighting, shadows, depth of field and stuff like that are very important so that the people who purchase the photos will have the most latitude to adjust the photo to suit their needs.

I guess the best overall "advice" I can give is just keep playing with the images until they look the way you want them to. There are plenty of photography books available that can give you some fine points on framing so cropping the image becomes less of an issue.

Most important thing is to have fun...oh, and don't work on your only copy of the image! :)

Let me know if I can help you out any more...

Take care, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your vacation.

Ric

Thanks again for your long response, Ric.
I'm glad you pointed out the thing about calibrating monitors since it's something i know, but tend to forget.
Here are your well deserved points.