Making Your Pictures Pop With Photoshop

Original photo taken with my iPhone 7

Using my iPhone 7, I took this photograph recently along Interstate 26 while driving home from work.

I was struck by the billowing stack of clouds and how they seemed to have emerged from the trees. The colors stand out: the green of the trees, the white clouds and the touch of blue sky at the top.

As is, this is a pretty fine photo I feel.  It is true to the image I admired from the road.

But I know there are ways to enhance such skyscapes or landscapes.



Adobe Photoshop is a tool I frequently use to tweak my nature photographs- all types of photos really.

"Processed" cloud photo via Photoshop

So I imported my cloud picture into Photoshop.  The steps I regularly do before sharing and/or posting pictures are these: Image-Adjustments-Levels.

In Levels, you can adjust what's called the black and white points. By moving the black triangle on the left and the white triangle on the right you can adjust the image's brightness and contrast. Move the triangle in the middle to adjust the mid-range.

In the Levels box, click Preview off and on to see how moving these points changes and enhances the photograph. See how my cloud photo is now more dramatic and the white and blue colors pop. But, the green of the trees has been muted, so that's a negative.

This short YouTube tutorial shows a more detailed (and professional) way to work the white/black point settings.

Cloud photo with text

Click OK to save your black/white point changes. Next in Photoshop, go back to Image, then Adjustments and Brightness/Contrast.  Move the center triangle right and left to see your adjustments and if they enhance the photograph.  Click OK to save the changes.

To finish your editing or processing, go to File-Save As- then name your image and save it where you choose.

Words can be added to your image using Photoshop's type tool.  On the left side of the Photoshop interface, select the "T" text tool, create a box over the image and type in your word or words. Change the font, text size and text color. Use the Move tool to place the words. See this short YouTube video for more on how to do all this.

When you save this image, save as a jpeg.  You can save a Photoshop project (PSD) if you may want to go back later and work more on the image and wording.

HDR-enhanced image

Photoshop remains a very popular program for processing photographs.

Also today are many phone apps for doing this. One that I like and use is Snapseed.  The Snapseed editor, which is free, can do many neat things to your images. One is make your photograph HDR, which is short for High Dynamic Range Imaging.

I took that same cloud photo and, on my phone, brought it into Snapseed, and with just a couple steps converted it to this image, which is very similar to what I achieved in Photoshop with the steps shown above.

Here is another example of a photograph I put through Photoshop to make better.

This is an American Crow. I took this picture recently through an upstairs window in my house.

Here's the same image after I tweaked its white and black points and brightness and contrast using Photoshop.

And here it is again with American Crow text added.

Here is another example of a before and after photograph.  This is SC State's new pedestrian bridge, which opened last spring.

Original photo taken with iPhone 7

"Processed" version after black/white point and brightness/contrast tweaking in Photoshop

Final version with words added using Photoshop's text tool