Fird's Domain

Tired of clicking File -> Open? How about if you can open an image in Photoshop without using the Menu bar OR pressing Ctrl+O?

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Sometimes when you visit a certain website, you’ll notice a certain combination of colors that you really like - and perhaps planning to use it on something you’re working on, or as an inspiration for future use.

The way I normally go about to get these colors is by taking a screen shot of the website and use the color picker in Photoshop (or other image editing software) to pick the colors up, and save the colors for later.

Recently, I’ve discovered a very handy trick to make this task a lot easier. (Note: I’m using Photoshop CS3, so I am not sure if this would work in previous versions of Photoshop).

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I’m sure most of us have taken landscape photos in one way or another. Most of the time you’ll notice you either get a flat-out image, washed out sky or very dark building/grounds. In this guide, I’m going to show a very simple editing process that can improve your skies and make it more dramatic.

The sample we’re going to use for this guide is this image of Berjaya Times Square I took somewhere in 2006:

I took this picture with my Fuji Finepix S9500 (which I have sold off to make way to DSLR). If you’ve read my previous guide on enhancing image with S-Curve and try it out on this photo, it’ll become pretty weird, something like this:

While this might look okay for some creative use, I personally don’t like it because it distorts the color of the building a little bit.

So how do we improve the overall image without distorting it in such a way?

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Among the many questions that I was asked when subject of improving photos with photoshop is “What did you do to your photos that it stands out?”. Took me a while to figure out what they mean - after all, I didn’t think the photographs that I took was outstanding.

Later on, I did manage figure it out. What they mean was this:

Top: Before. Bottom: After

It’s subtle, but it gives more dramatic effect on the image. The best part? It’s only a few steps process. Let’s use the same image above for this guide.

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I’m sure a lot of people are pretty sick of using MS Paint to process basic images - most of us that is using corporate PC’s are restricted in the options to install our own software - especially those that are of questionable origin.

I don’t know about others, but I’m for one, is not a big fan of GiMP. At least not on Windows platform. Let me introduce you to a small, viable, free and powerful image editing application, called *cough* Paint.NET

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