Photoshop:Professional Photo Contrast and Vignetting

With just a few Photoshop CS2 tools you can enhance the look of many of your photos. This tutorial will help to improve the colours, contrast and subject focus of your photography.
Before and after.

















First, open the photo which you want to improve and adjust the curves. Go to Image, Adjustments, Curves...



Create a very slight S Curve. Curves can be used to improve the overall contrast and colour tones of an image.

Next, go to Image, Adjustments, Exposure. Here we want to adjust the Gamma level. This changes the balance between light and dark areas of the image. For this tutorial photo the Gamma was set to 1.20...

The final element to add to your photo is Vignetting. Vignetting is reducing the brightness and/or saturation in the outer edge to help bring interest and focus to the centre of the image. Go to Filter, Distort, Lens Correction...

On the right hand side will be a list of possible options, find the Vignette controls and reduce the Amount to -35, leave Midpoint on +50. This will fade and soften the edges of the photo.

You should now have a much richer and professional looking photo. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!