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Top 10 Photo Fixing and Image Editing Tricks

Kevin Purdy
6/05/10 12:00pm • Filed to: LIFEHACKER TOP 10 391.0K 43 3

You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can
benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and
techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists,
among other problems, from your shots worth saving.

Photo by Jase The Bass.

10. Create Your Own Bokeh

Bokeh is a cute name for something you've noticed before, but probably never
really pinned down—the gauzy, creamy light points that appear behind the
subject that's in drastic focus in a picture. Photo site DIY Photography explains
how to harness and control bokeh effects, using a photo lens like a 50mm F/1.8
and creating a small lens cover with just the right kind of hole cut out. Lacking
for the right kind of digital lens? The Photojojo blog details an analog-to-
digital lens adaptation, perfect for garage sale and eBay finds. (Original posts:
Bokeh, DSLR lenses)

Create Your Own Bokeh for Beautiful Photo Effects

What's a bokeh you say? It's that oh-so-wonderful fuzziness in the
background of…

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9. Make Pop Art from Your Photos

Some shots have great subjects, angles, or

scenes, but just can't be saved from bad
lighting or other mistakes. When that's the
case, your saving grace can be Photoshop
guru Melissa Clifton's pop-art-style fixes.
She's shown us how to Andy-Warhol-Up
photos, as well as make zoomed-in-
comic-style, Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired
pop art from photos both good and bad. If you're not a Photoshop lover, or
even owner, you can arrive at a similar bad-shot-as-art result by using Rollip
to Polaroid-ize your photo, or use the Poladroid desktop software. (Original
posts: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rollip, Poladroid)
 Make your own Andy Warhol pop art
Photoshop guru Melissa Clifton has posted a step-by-step tutorial for making
your own…

Read more

8. Convert to Black and White the Right Way

It's easy to turn a color image into black and

white on a computer, and sometimes that's
enough to rescue high-grain, fuzzy shots,
like concert photos. Before you hit the
switch, though, take Helen Bradley's advice
on black-and-white conversion, which can
make your shot actually suit the specific
strengths of grayscale coloring. Got a
specific subject to highlight? Try adding a
dash of color to give your shot unique appeal. (Original posts: concerts,
conversions, color in b&w)

Convert to Black and White for Better Concert Photos

If you're forced to shoot in high-ISO "night mode" while snapping pics at a
concert…

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7. De-Pixelize Graphics and Small Photos

Resizing images is grunt work enough—

having to deal with pixelated results is just
torture. Free webapp VectorMagic can make
your graphic-style images into vector art
that scales clean and smooth as it's sized up
and down. It works better with clean line
drawings and small, icon-like photos than
full-size shots, but if you can tolerate some
loss of detail, it's a lifesaver. (Original post)
 De-Pixelize Your Images with VectorMagic
Web site VectorMagic turns virtually any image into vector art that can be
resized as much as you…

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6. Make Photos Look Like Miniatures with Tilt-Shift Tools

With tilt-shift photography, you can put being 50 rows back from the action to
your advantage. A professional lens can run upwards of $1,200 for a very
single-use tool, so try some DIY solutions. MAKE shows us a DIY lens that
looks like it's made from, of all things, a plunger. There are also two web-
based software tilt-shift solutions: TiltshiftMaker and TiltShift—we prefer the
latter for its options and control, but the mostly automated TiltshiftMaker also
gets the job done in simple fashion. (Original posts: DIY lens, TiltShiftMaker,
TiltShift)
 DIY Tilt-Shift Photography Lens
Tilt-shift lenses create a great miniature effect on photographs of everyday
things. The problem?…

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5. Use Textures to Liven Up Flat Images

For whatever reason, perfectly fine photos

can lack definition. Sometimes it's tricks of
light and lens, and sometimes it's because
Cousin Jeff wore a sweater that just turns
out like a blob. Try adding textures to a
photo with layering techniques. A scanned
sheet of white paper, for example, saved an
otherwise washed-out photo in Digital Photography School's example. It's not
a save-all, and definitely has potential for abuse, but it's a nice saving grace to
have in your mental back pocket. (Original post)

Spiff Up Flat Images with Textures

Even if you master the focus and composition of a photograph, it might come
off as a bit too calm…

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4. Create Stunning and Realistic HDR Photos

High dynamic range photos are a world unto themselves, and difficult to pin
down in a few sentences. A noble attempt: they make your brights brighter and
darks darker, and give a more realistic look to photos. We've previously
pointed to a few good guides to shooting and editing in HDR fashion: the
Backing Winds' beginner's Photoshop tutorial, Gizmodo's guide to realistic
HDR, and a Flickr set by Leviathor that shows how unrealistic HDR can look, if
you're not careful with how you combine images. (Original posts: Photoshop,
Gizmodo guide, surreal vs. real sets)

How To: Create Stunningly Realistic High Dynamic Range Photographs

In the right hands, high dynamic range imaging can blend multiple exposures
of the same scene to…

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3. Sharpen Images the Smart Way

As we learned the hard way, giving your

images a crisper look requires more than
just leaning on the "Unsharp Mask" crutch
every time. It does have its uses, though,
especially if done the right way. But there's
also a more fine-tuned way to sharpen your
images, as Cameron Moll explains in a blog
post. (Original posts: Unsharp mask, Smart
Sharpen)
 A Beginner's Guide to Image Sharpening
Ideally all of your digital photos would turn out crisp and clear every time;
unfortunately…

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Sharpen your images

Web designer Cameron Moll schools common folk on how to get clean, sharper
photos onto the web.

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2. Remove People from Otherwise Perfect Shots

Stupid vacationers! Always standing and

gawking at the same thing you're trying to
capture just perfectly! There are ways
around the herd's tendency to wander into
your shots. For one, take a whole bunch of
images from the same position, with the
same settings, and use Photoshop's
statistics and stacks tools to remove the people, almost entirely, from your
shot. Online tool Tourist Remover does a similar task after you upload multiple
photos. No luck with automated filtering? Try removing the background
entirely and grabbing what you can from your perfect shot. (Original posts:
people-free, Tourist Remover, backgrounds

Take a People-Free Photo in a Crowded Place

You're at a popular location and you really would love a photo of the place
without all the…

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1. Craft Panoramas from Regular Shots

There's nothing wrong with your run-of-

the-mill digicam, but when you want to
capture the sweep and scope of a big scene,
its small lens can't quite tackle the job.
Don't give up, though—switch to manual
settings, take a series of shots, and stitch
together a panorama with free software. Our
own guide relies on the very adaptable and
customizable Hugin software, but we've previously pointed at a few good
packages for different levels of automation and customization: AutoStitch for
the click-and-go method, You Suck at Photoshop's PhotoMerge tutorial for the
PS-loving set, and Microsoft's powerful Image Composite Editor for another
alternative. (Original posts: AutoStitch, Photomerge, Composite Editor)
 Stitch Photos Into Panoramas with Free Software
You can get decent photos out of a standard, consumer-grade digital camera,
but a little…

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What image edits or Photoshop tricks are a regular part of your photo-fixing
repertoire? What editing techniques would you like to see covered or explained
in the future? We're all ears in the comments.
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