PSP: Photo Adjustments

Tutorial by Amy Martin

Open the photos you wish to adjust.  In this case, my final goal is to have photos nicely black and white in order to not overpower my already colorful layout.  There are multiple ways to achieve black and white shots, so this is just one option to consider.



In this case, the first step I took was to adjust the Hue & Saturation -> Hue/Saturation/Lightness to get the picture changed to black and white.  A lot of photo editing is playing around with the different adjustments to get the effect you’re looking for.  Here, there is a color wheel with various adjustments to toggle.  To get the photo black and white, I simply ticked the colorize box.

Sometimes a simple black and white photograph isn’t exactly the desired effect.  In this case, I felt a little warmer almost sepia toned set of pictures would work better.  In order to acheieve this effect, I adjusted the levels in Brightness & Contrast -> Levels.  In this area, you can adjust not only the contrast of the photo, but also the various channel outputs.  For instance, if you feel your photo has too many red or green undertones, this is a good place to attempt to adjust the tones out.  Here, I lowered just the blue channel a tiny bit on the slider in order to get the photos to turn slightly sepia.  It is just a subtle change, but works much better than the plain black and white for the project in mind.



A side-by-side comparison will really show how minor adjustments can make a huge difference in the appearance of photos.



Finally, I decided the photos were a little darker than desired, so that needed to be adjusted.  To do this, I used Adjust -> Brightness & Contrast -> Curves.  Here, the little graph allows for additional adjustment of contrast and more.