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Today I'll be sharing a few of my favorite effects to use on on photos, that are easy to do, and can bring some really good results!

For my example, I will be using this photo:



Before we start, you need to pick a photo. I've found that these effects work best on things like scenery and architecture, and not so well on picture that contain people/animals. So grab yourself a photo, and follow along


The first thing we are going to do is duplicate our layer (you should only have one layer at this point. If there is a background layer, you can delete it.), the shortcut to duplicate a layer is ctrl+J.


Now, make sure the duplicated layer is selected in your layer stack, then go to filter > other > high pass. I generally keep the radius pretty low, around 1 pixel, but feel free to mess with it and see what kind of results you get. Hit ok, and you should end up with something like this:



Obviously this doesn't look very good, so let's do something about that. In your layers pallet, click the blend mode drop down menu, and select overlay (don't forget to make sure you're still on the duplicated layer).


At first, you may not notice any difference, but if you toggle the layers visibility you will see what it did.


Now we're going to make another duplicate of the bottom layer (ctrl+J). On this new duplicate layer (should be the second layer in the stack), we're going to go to filter > blur > Gaussian blur. Again, we're going to keep the radius pretty small, around 1 pixel. Hit ok, and it should apply a slight blur to that layer. We obviously don't want a blurry image, so go to the blend mode drop down again and set it to overlay. Depending on the picture, sometimes soft light looks better than overlay, so experiment with them.


That should enhance the colors pretty drastically, and you should now have a much better looking photo! Here is a comparison of the original and end results:




That's all we're going to do for that photo, but there's one more effect I want to share. We're going to to follow the same general idea as we have been throughout this tutorial. Duplicate the base layer. This time, we're going to invert the image. You can do this by going to image > adjustments > invert, or by simply pressing ctrl+I.

Now that it's inverted, we're going to adjust the hue. You can do this by going to image > adjsutments > hue/saturation, or by pressing ctrl+U. Now, drag the hue slider all the way to the right, and hit ok.

Now set this layer to soft light. This should greatly enhance the colors in the image.

Here is an example where I used this effect, as well as the first effect I described in the tutorial (the high pass filter one) in conjunction with each other:

This is a great effect for bringing out details that weren't there before (look at the grill of the car, for example).




Now that you know how to create these effects, mess around with different settings and blend modes, and see what you come up with. You can come up with some pretty extreme effects, as seen here:




That concludes this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it, and can put these effects to good use. Enjoy ;)

Pretty simple tutorial, not many steps to it.
Which is why it is awsome!

It looks worse than the original.
Only the car one improved slighly. Much better techniques than this, sorry.

Yeh, the car looks good, the others not so much.

Sick tutorial man, helped out a lot...I'm sure I'll come back to take a few more reviews latter.

@untouch & fragma - The main example I used didn't turn out that great, but I think that had a lot to do with the original quality of the picture. The third one wasn't really meant to look good, just an example of how extreme of results you can get from these methods.

Try them out on some photos and mess around with 'em, I think you'll like the techniques ;)

It is basically to enhance poor image quality. If the quality is already good, then it will make it look bad.
That is why the car one looks much better then the orginal.

This is a great tutorial. Thanks. I shalt be putting it to use

Pretty simple technique and I agree with Impulses

Whoa, looks cool

-CFH