Tutorials

Basic Photo Edit Tutorial
Welcome to my very first tute...
Its a pretty simple technique i have used and  have found easy for editing some of my photo's using photoshop. Iam no photoshop expert nor am i up with all the "tech" lingo...LOL.. 
I'll stick to basic,easy to understand lingo thanks.. Oh and im on a PC..

Here is the before and after shot of my husbands wedding ring. 
It is actually white gold, not yellow gold as it appears in the photo..
(yes we have only been married 9 months and he has managed to scratch the hell outta it already)

I took the photograph using these settings on my Canon 500D SLR
on a sunny day,inside near the window and taken
using a standard kit lens.
ISO - 800
Shutter 1/200
Aperture f5.6

Open up your image in photoshop
Duplicate your layer (ctrl J)

You can see in the original photo that the background and foreground
are not the same colour and thats what we want to fix and
make it appear seamless.

Click the clone stamp tool and using a soft brush,sample an area
 from theforeground and clone it to the background section until
you have covered the background and it is now seamless.
(to sample an area, hold alt and click on an area in the foreground, 
unhold alt and click on an area over the background)

Next i changed the levels.. Image >Adjustments>Levels.
Move the sliders(shadows, midtones & highlights) 
to get the desired look your after and click ok.
These were mine
47           3.36             255

Here is my image after using levels.

I then brightened my image (Image>adjustments>Brightness/contrast) 
just a little upto about 12 and clicked ok.

Image after adjusting brightness


I then made my image back and white.. Image>adjustments/ hue saturation..
I dragged the saturation all the way down to -100 and clicked ok.


And lastly , i used the dodge tool in midtones range at 30% to just 
lighten any other areas i felt needed lightening.

Flatten image and save.

And here is the end result...


Hope this can help you with a bit of your photo editing...