4 quick ways to fix photos in under a minute in Photoshop, that you may not have known

4 Ways to quickly fix a photo, using Apply image and more in Photoshop

There are many ways to fix photos in Photoshop and I have written many tutorials about them. I want to offer some less common techniques here, so I went to the humble Apply Image tool. Lots of people have never used this powerful tool, which has been in Photoshop for a long time.

Today we are going to look at 4 ways to fix common problems including under exposure and over exposure.

Fix under exposed photo (dense)

Here is a photo that’s plugged up and dark.

Choose Image>Apply Image

Change the blending mode to Screen.

Now the photo looks much better. That took, what? Less than 10 seconds?

Fix Overexposed photo (washed out)

This work well for those washed out images.

Choose Image>Apply Image

This time, change it to Multiply mode. See, all the contrast is back. Maybe too much?

Drag the opacity to a place where the result is just what you want.

Adding detail contrast to a photo

Let’s try something different on this image, we want detail to pop.

Choose Image>Apply Image

Change the blend mode to Overlay

This time, change the channel. Try all 3 to see which looks the best.

In this case The green channel looks the best.

Roll back to opacity for a nice image with detail pop.

Can you see how useful Apply Image is?

4 Sliders to make any photo look better.

When I’m in a hurry, there are 4 sliders in Camera Raw that will make your images look better fast! (For a more detailed Camera Raw tutorial, check this out)

Slide the Highlights all the way to the left

Slide the shadows all the way to the right

This shows the maximum detail in your image.

The result can look too saturated and fake.

Reduce the saturation and then increase the vibrance (more subtle this time)

You can also adjust the Exposure and contrast if you like. And of course, you can use the other tools, but thats the fastest way to get the best improvement in ACR (Camera Raw).

I hope you enjoyed this weeks tutorial!

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Colin

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