How to make ANY PHOTO LOOK BETTER in a few SECONDS: Easy Photoshop tutorial

  

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

How to Make Any Photo Look Better in a Few Seconds - Easy Photoshop Tutorial Hey, Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE. com and today, I'm going to show you how to make any photograph look better in just a few clicks. This is a technique I call the euro glow or the euro tent just because I don't really have a real name for it, but it's something I've been doing for years. It works for people, it works for landscape, it works for all kinds of photos, and there's basically three steps. What we do is we take the background. We duplicate that layer by hitting Ctrl J, that would be Command J on Mac, or we could just click and drag it as that new layer icon. So what we've got is we've got an extra layer. So there's two different ways we can approach this. One is with the Overlay Blend Mode, and if we'll look at the Overlay, we're going to take the Opacity down. That's a little too much. We're just going to pull it up a little bit and I'm going to bring it down to about there. And then, what we're doing if we look at this before and after, you can see it adds contrast. It darkens the shadows and it [00:01:00]_ up the colors in some of the skin tones anythings. So if we look at that before and after, that's Overlay. The other way of doing it is that we can go into Soft Light. Soft Light gives you the same effect but a little bit more subtle. So if we look at that before and after, we might even have to increase the Opacity little bit on that. Now, Hard Light does exactly the same thing as Overlay, in this case. You see that?You don't really see any difference. Okay, so that's the first step. We've been able to do that. Now the next step we want to do is we want to add a little bit of a blur to this. So if we go up to the Filter and we choose Blur, and we use the Gaussian Blur, what we're going to do is just give it a little bit of a blur. Now you'll notice there's a sweet spot that you'll see. If we do it very low, it doesn't really do much, and then, if we go too high, it doesn't do a lot either. It just starts to look really kind of weird. So what we're going to do is we're going to find a sweet spot in here where there's some kind of a glow, and I'm noticing it around at 6 pixels for this particular image. Now, this is going to change depending on the resolution you're working on. All right, so if we apply this here, now if we look at this before and after, notice the hair can look straw-like and stringy, and when I do this, it gives us beautiful, silky hair. And a lot of the time, I might apply this effect just to the hair, and mask it into the hair. In this case, it looks a little much in the skin because this particular image I got from Adobe Stock looks like is a little over retouched to start with in the first place. So if you do have a little bit of acne and some different things like that, the softening on the skin can really help. Now, we're looking pretty good, but what we want to do is we want to paint back some of these areas here like the eyes and the lip line. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a layer mask here, and notice we'vegot that layer mask, and then, we're just going to paint with black, so we're going to grab a black brush. So grabbing the brush there, make sure black is the foreground color. Make sure the Hardness is turned all the way down, so it's a nice soft brush. And what we're going to do is we're going to go and first of all, we're going to paint over the eyes. So I'm just going to use the right bracket key to make that a little bigger. There we go. See now?We're starting to get some of that color back in the eyes because we didn't want it as darkall the way in, and we'll make it a little bit smaller, and then, just kind of follow those lines into those tear ducts. And we're just bringing back a little sharpness where we need it. Now the next place you want is the lips. We don't want to do all the lips though, because this is a great technique to smoothen outdried chapped lips. So what we're going to do is just follow the lip line in the middle there, and give thata nice, little bit of sharpness back there while keeping everything else nice and soft. So if we look at this before and after, you can see we got a pretty awesome effect there. Now you can adjust the Opacity a little bit lower if you want to make it a little bitmore natural, so you can do that, so there we go before and after, and you can see weget a huge difference. Now this works on portraits. It works on landscapes. It works on any kind of photo. It's a technique I've been doing for years and a lot of the time, I will apply this tocertain parts of pretty much every photograph because it just makes a dramatic difference in just a few moves. There might be other techniques you want to combine with it, and, also, you know, thisis just the power of using Blending Modes. Check out the e-book; I got a free e-book on Blending Modes that you can see on the comments underneath. Check that out. It's a lovely little e-book. It gives you a lot of information. It gives you examples of all the different Blending Modes, as well as some practical examples and how to use them. So, anyway, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. It's short and sweet. If you want to be part of the Cafe crew, join up by just hitting that Subscribe button,and you'll get a new tutorial every single week. Now if you enjoyed this, hit a Like and, also, add a comment. Let's get a discussion going what do you like, what don't you like, and what would you like to learn next. Let me know. So, thanks guys. Thanks for watching. Until next time, I'll see you at the CAFE.