Need advice on touching up photos

Hm... Let's see where to start.

Well, let's go with the doggie first:

Usually, the first thing I would do is to adjust the levels. The thing with digital photos is that you rarely get an absolute black point without having to adjust it in photoshop. You'll notice this when you go to adjust the levels.


See those three triangle things? Looking at the black lever, the histogram shows that there isn't an absolute black point. So you want to move the black lever to the right. All the dark pixals will become darker. You want to get it as dark as aesthetically possible without loosing important information in the dark areas.

Next your mid-tones. This is the middle, grey-ish lever. This can have a dramatic effect when trying to create a certain mood. Its common use is to remove color casts. You see its corresponding eye-dropper to the right under the options button? Click that. Now experiment. To remove color casts, you would take the eye-dropper and select a neutral grey. However in this case, I decided to increase the brown slightly. And that does it for the levels.

One thing that irritated me about the photo was that the floor was too bright. when levels doesn't catch this, then use the Burn tool located here:


Select a fairly large brush size (around 150 or so), set the range to Midtones and lower the exposure somewhere below 10% so you don't get a harsh and obvious mark. The result is this:



Another thing that bothered me was the the right side of the dog was too dark when compared to the floor. I wanted to balance it more. So I used the Dodge tool located where the Burn tool is. The settings are generally the same (big brush size, low exposure, midtones) and I slightly went over the right side to bring it out a bit more. The result is this:



The last thing that irritated me was the pink pillow in the background. It was drawing too much attention away from the subject. Since the color is fairly uniform throughout the pillow, I went to Select --> Color Range.


Fuzziness should be set somewhere low like 20 or 30. Select the clear eyedropper and click the pillow. Next, select the eye dropper with the plus sign. Click and hold the mouse and drag the cursor over the interior of the pillow. This will add the corresponding colors to your initial selection. Click ok.

[edit] Now that I think about it, It'd be easier to use the Sponge Tool located with the Burn/Dodge tool. Set it to Desaturate and a select a brush size that would cover the majority of the pillow without disrupting anything else. Set the Flow to something low (between 10% and 20%). [/edit]

Next go to Image ---> Adjustments ---> Hue/Saturation and lower Saturation by lowering the Master lever. Resulting in this:



I'm fairly pleased with how this came out. I usually stop after a quick level and hue/saturation change so the Burn/Dodge and Pillow Desaturation is optional of course. They just bothered me personally.

Next!

The Fishes of Doom:

This was actually pretty easy. This is a great example of a color cast.



The first thing you notice about this photo is that it's too blue/greenish, and it's flat. There's no depth at all. So again with the levels. Again, this photo lacks an absolute black point so move the black lever to the right keeping the important information in the dark areas in mind. I actually moved it further than the first picture.

Once you get that done, click the mid-tone eye-dropper and experiment again. I think I clicked one of the fishes in the lower right hand corner and the results were absolutely incredible.



There wasn't a whole lot else that needed to be done.

And last.

Statue dude:

This was probably the most difficult. The statue is slightly silhouetted which makes a straightforward level change impossible. There are a few ways to take care of this but this is how I did it:

First I took the magic wand and quickly selected the areas of the statue that have the most color conformity. After selecting most of it, I used quick mask mode to select the rest. Quick mask mode is located here:



The right button enters the mode. When you click it, you'll see red (red is the default color which can be changed by double clicking the Quick Mask Mode button) where there is no selection. To refine the selection you already have, select the paint brush tool along with the colors absolute black and absolute white. White makes the selection, Black deselects.

When you have the statue selected (everything is red except the statue) return to Standard mode by clicking the button directly to the left of the Quick Mask button. Now you'd want to go to Select --> Save selection as a new channel so that you'll always have that selection on file should you need it. Name it accordingly (Ex. Statue)

Now, with the statue selected, select a selection tool (any is fine), right click within the parameters of the selection on the image, and click Select Inverse. This will select the background. Now you can change the levels without darkening the statue.



If you ever loose your selection, go to Select ---> Load Selection and select your saved selection.

Now, with the statue selected, adjust the levels.



The statue is too dark now. To correct this, I selected the Dodge tool (settings for this usually stay the same) and lightly went over the statue until it matched the background somewhat. Now it looked too washed out. So I took the Burn tool and went over the dark areas to create depth. Then I lowered the size of the brush and darkened the finer details like the folds in the sleeves until I got this:



It still looked a little dull so I went to Select --> Load selection ---> Statue and selected the statue again. Raised the saturation in Hue/Saturation and got this:



The only thing that bothers me about this image is the sky. You could add in a sky from another photo using a layer mask but that would take some time. Check your camera, is there an option that alters the exposure levels? Perhaps you could lower them a little so the whites aren't so harsh.

[Edit] Ok, I looked at your manual and Page 54 talks about exposure settings. Usually you wouldn't mess with this cause you can just adjust these in Photoshop but if you find that your lights are too white like the sky in this photo, then adjust the exposure compensation.

Oh, another thing I should mention is when altering the levels and Hue/Saturation, you should go to Layer --> New Layer Adjustment instead of Image --> Adjustment. This way your adjustments will be stored on a new layer so that you don't alter your original.

Or you could just copy the original image and work on the copy...

Yea that's about it. Pardon the lengthiness.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Oh, just to add something to Silver Ogre's entry about aperture:

In addition to stopping motion (well it's more shutter speed related but shutter speed and aperture are both interrelated), aperture can bring more focus to your subject. Here's an example of a wide aperture (or f/stop, same thing) vs. a narrow aperture:



The top is a wide aperture of about 1.4. Notice that point of focus (the tripod) is sharp while the surrounding background is rather blurry. Now compare it to the second photo which had a narrow aperture of about 16. The subject is in focus and the background is clearer.

Good for like portraits and junk. This effect can be replicated in Photoshop but I feel it’s too contrived. There’s a blur option in CS that’s supposed to imitate this but I don’t have CS :p.

[edit]Ok, I looked at your manual and on page 50 They talk about aperture and shutter speed. Refer to that if you feel bold enough to manually set those.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Dee reminded me of something. I've just recently beeb trying to achieve that shallow depth of field with photoshop for my digital pictures (I can't manually select the f/stop or shutter speed ). So I did it to the dog image:

Spoiler:

I used the blur tool which is the water drop icon next to the burn/dodge/sponge icon with a relatively low strength (10%ish). When blurring, you want to select of point of focus. Here, it's the dog. The arm of the couch is rather close to that point of focus so not a lot of blurring needs to be done there. However, the other end of the couch is further a way hence, it would be more blurry. Keep in mind though that moderation is good. Don't go too overboard with the blurring unless it needs it. But yea, that's your call.

Also, part of the dog is beyond the point of focus. His tail for example. So blur that a little too. Just blurring around the dog will give it that cut-and-paste look.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.