Miss Behaving: Lighten, Brighten & Tighten

Ohhhh … if only!

Today we’re going to lighten, brighten, add a bit of color and tighten up select areas of our dark fuzzy photos. So strap yourselves in and we’ll see you after the jump.

Before:

 

After:

 

First, duplicate your layer so we’ll have the original intact (just in case). Right-click > Duplicate layer.

Duplicate your copy layer and set the Blend Mode to Screen.

Much brighter, right?

Now we’re going to add a nice soft romantic glow to the overall photo.

Select all of your layers, Right-click and Merge layers.

Right-click > Duplicate layer. Change the Blending mode to “Soft Light” and lower the Opacity to 50%.

Go to Filter > Gaussian Blur

These are the settings I used:

Right-click > Duplicate this layer and change the Blending mode of this layer to “Screen”. Keep the Opacity @ 50%.

Select all of your layer, Right-click and Merge layers.

Hit “Ctrl + L” to bring up the Levels Menu. These are my settings:

Beautiful. Now we’re definitely lighter and brighter.

Let’s add a bit of color, shall we?

Hit “Ctrl + B” to bring up up the Color Balance Menu. These are my settings:

Mommy likey.

More? You want More? Yes!!!!

Alright then. We’re going to shapen up select areas of the photo to give it a bit of crispness. This gets a bit more complicated but definitely do-able. Screenshots = lifesavers.

Hit “Ctrl + A”. This will select your image.

Go to Edit > Copy Merged. Make sure you hit Copy Merged not “Copy” or this won’t work.

Go to your layer palette and select the Channels Tab. Then Click on the New Channel Layer button @ the bottom (circled in red).

It will be and Alpha Channel and it will be black when it comes up. Hit “Ctrl + V” and it will paste the photo into the Alpha Channel. The photo will be in black and white, but don’t panic.

Go to Filter > Stylize > Find Edges

Now we have a very cool looking pencil sketch.

Ctrl + Click on the Alpha 1 channel. This will select all of the white areas of the channel. What we want are the black areas (the edges) so we need to invert this selection (Shift + Ctrl + I).

Do NOT deselect. With your “ants” marching, go back to your layer palette and click on the “Layer Tab” and highlight the photo layer.

Go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

These are my settings:

Well, what do you think? Not too terribly painful, right? heh

Before:

 

After:

 

I really really hope you all find these forays into photo fixing fantastically fun and fabulous. Yay for alliteration!

Big hugs to you all.