HELLO! Making a gloomy photo look sunny for beginners...?

Hello there.

I keep being supplied with photos for leaflets etc that my clients have taken themselves. With their eyes on their pockets, I don't think they'd licence me to spend hours trying to edit their images to brighten them up, and I'm cautious about applying filters etc with little experience in photo enhancing. I wonder if anyone could suggest a beginners process taking no longer than 1-2 hours whereby I could enrich a dull photo and make the day look sunnier and the colours look richer, more polarised.

Also, I'd be interested in where a beginner might look for training in this area.

Thanks for any advice.

Kind regards
Gill keeley

look into Image>Adjustments>Auto (color, contrast…) and Curves (after Auto); add some Blue, a little Green… work on copies until you learn how to make adjusting layers

It all depends on the image, but often Image>Adjustments>Shadow/Highlight can make a big difference right off the bat using the defaults. And you can always back off using Edit>Fade...

Work on a duplicate layer.

Gillian,i think something in the 30 minutes or less range would be more of a target to shoot for in your time schedule to rework a photo thats a piece of crap to begin with. you could post a sample here via <http://www.pixentral.com/> , and maybe someone will try a shot and how they did it. remember you cannot magically take a dreary day and make it have sunny skies and what not. you can bring out colors and details, but unless you want to replace skies and such,you are not going to make spectacular images out of mediocity.

Hello, thank you so much everyone.... I'm off to do my homework! Gill

Hi Gillian,

Beside the worthy comments already made, I'd like to add some. This might be easy for me to say because I've done it so often, but the edit you need is often pretty easy (depending on the original of course).

If they are only kind of dull (as a grey day) they one needs to make changes from a grey cloudy day to sunny. At its most basic (without totally blowing out highlights) is to add contrast. When it is cloudy there are few shadows due to the diffused light and less saturated colors due to they eye depending more on rods than cones.

Adding contrast (whether with curves or any of the above and HSB) you will add shadows that a bright sun creates and pop colors as a brigh sun triggers you cones more then the eyes rods.

In part I'm saying some things don't need to be overthunk.

alan

Also consider downloading the free lightroom Beta and play with its Brightness and Contrast sliders.

Same with the new Camera Raw, if they're sending you .jpgs.