A UX State of Mind

(Click to enlarge) The Original Party Pic. Feel free to download this to follow along with the tutorial or use your own party pic!

Here is a photo of me with a good friend of mine in Antwerp for her birthday party a while back. Yes, we are singing karaoke in the photo and yes, we were fabulous (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!).

As you can see, the flash washes out our features a bit, the composition could be more interesting, and the background is busy enough to distract from the subjects.

I like my party pix nice and high-contrast, with deep, dark blacks and rich colors. Before doing anything with the image though, I’m going to save it under a different filename, so I can keep the original.

1. Cropping the photo

I enjoy breaking the convention of the typical digital camera aspect ratio, so I’ll first crop the photo to give it more of a “widescreen” feel. Hopefully, this will make the photo more interesting. The crop tool can be invoked by either pressing c or clicking on the crop tool icon in the tool palette .

Here's the pic, cropped

2. Sharpening it Up

The Smart Sharpen Dialogue in Photoshop

Before tweaking any color or light stuff, let’s go ahead and make it a bit sharper. There’s nothing wrong or out-of-focus with this image, but I personally would like to open smart sharpen and subtly sharpen it up. This can be found under Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. There are other sharp filters there, but smart sharpen provides the most control.

To keep it subtle, I’m keeping the amount low and holding myself to a radius of 2 pixels. The important thing is to not over-sharpen the image, which could put halos on the more pronounced edges.

3. Adjusting the Levels

Levels Dialogue Photoshop

So now, it’s time to do something about the general light situation… Let’s start by adjusting the levels of the image by selecting Image > Adjustments > Levels... or pressing Ctrl+L (Windows).

I usually don’t mess with the output levels, preferring to play with the input levels instead. As you can see in the screen snippet on the right, there is a long tail on the left side of the histogram, which I find common in party pics and pics taken with mobile phone cameras.

For this photo, I’m moving the black level (black, up-pointing triangle below the histogram) up to the edge of the histogram to make the shadows darker. I also moved the midpoint (greys) more toward the right, making the mids darker, too.

Here it is after adjusting the levels

4. Adjusting Hue (and Saturation)

Adjusting the red colors' hue... slightly

After adjusting the levels, I see that the shadows on my friend’s face look a bit too red. In other words, we want to change the red colors on there to something less red without affecting the rest of the colors.

Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation adjustment dialogue does the trick! It’s under Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation… or pressing Ctrl+U.

To limit the changes to the red areas, we can select Reds from the drop-down menu. I only shifted the hue to the right by 5, because more than that would make the both of use look yellow. See the effect:

Notice the change in the red shadow on her face here.

It’s also clear that my poor friend has red-eye in this photo, so we can use a quick and dirty method of removing it (more thorough method here).

Since it’s the quick and dirty method, I won’t go into it here in detail, but I just used the wand tool (press w or click in the tool palette) to select the red pixels in her pupils. I then used hue/saturation to lower the lightness to the point that the pupils became more dark grey than red.

5. The Burn Tool

Adjusting the levels helped to compensate for the flash washing out our features, but we can further enhance the effect with the burn tool, which can be invokes by pressing o or clicking in the tool palette. The burn tool takes whatever color you pass it over and makes it darker. The opposite is the dodge tool.

For this image, I just burned midtones in our faces and arms to bring out the details and burned shadows on our clothes and my friend’s hair.

(Click to enlarge) Here is the picture after burning some midtones and shadows on the subjects.

(Click to enlarge) Here's the image after burning the background.

To bring out the subjects a bit more though, we can burn some of the background to subdue it. For this, I will increase the size of the brush and stay away from the subjects. My approach here was to gradually darken the background more moving outward, so that the edges of the image are almost black while the area around the subjects remains a bit lighter.

6. Faux Bokeh

Another way to make subjects stand out from the background more is blurring the background. Usually, this is done by using clever focus settings when taking the picture, but we can fake it with Photoshop. The word bokeh comes from Japanese and refers to the aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas in an image, but people also use it to refer to the “blurred background” effect.

We can find the blur tool in the tool palette . All I am going to do is blur the background around the subjects while trying not to overdo it but still achieving a pop-out effect.

(Click to enlarge) Here's the final image after blurring the background.

And That’s It!

Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment, especially if you’ve got suggestions on how to do it better.