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!

Photoshop: Simple Stylised Web Banner

To create a web banner like this, start with a new document at 468x60.

First, select Filter, Render, Clouds. Then select Filter, Render, Difference Clouds. Repeat the Difference Clouds process by pressing Ctrl+F several times untill you have something like this...

Go to Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast. Change your Brightness and Contrast levels to blacken the darker areas and lighten the cloud sections. I used Brightness:+10, Contract:+50.

Duplicate your Difference Clouds layer by selecting Layer, Duplicate Layer. Leave the default name and select OK. Now rotate this layer 180 degree so that it is a vertical and horizontal mirror of the original layer. Do this by selecting Edit, Transform, Rotate 180.

Select the top most layer and change its Blending Mode. These can be found in the Layers Window, by default this layer will be Normal. Change this to Pin Light.

You should now have an image looking like this...

Merge your layers by selecting Layer, Merge Visible.

It's now time to add some colour. With the layer selected go to Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation. Tick the colourize box and adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness untill you get the result you want.

Next step is to add your name onto the banner. Select the T from the Tools Window, click into the banner and type your name, then move the text into place. Duplicate this Text Layer. Select the lower Text Layer and make sure the font colour is white. Now select Filter, Blur, Motion Blur, when asked about rasterizing this layer press OK. Select Angle:0, Distance:108, and press OK.

Finaly, select your Unrasterized Font Layer and change it to a colour of your choice, I found white worked quite nicely, even though its not 100% readable. That completes this tutorial.