Enhancing and Scaling photos with Photoshop Elements

This is a simple method to prepare great looking photos that will not consume large amounts of bandwidth. I use Photoshop elements for this task but most photo editing software have similar functionality.

The Original Photo

The original photo was taken on  Canon 300D digital SLR camera using the highest picture quality. I took this photo in poor light conditions to demonstrate the powers of photo editing. The resultant photo is 1.6Mb, far to big for most web applications. I will step through the process on how we can get this photo looking better at a fraction of the size. This is the original photo using the saved for web option. We will cover this later on in the tutorial.

Beginning

To begin, open you photo in Photoshop elements.

Enhancement Options

Photoshop Elements provides easy ways to enhance your photos. Click the enhance menu to see these options.

Auto Levels

To enhance the contrast of an image I use the Auto Levels command. Auto Levels defines the lightest and darkest pixels in an image, and then redistributes intermediate pixel values proportionately.

To use Auto Levels, click on the enhance and select Auto Levels.

This is the result of the Auto Level Command.

Auto Contrast

The Auto Contrast command adjusts the overall contrast and mixture of colors in an image automatically it does this by mapping the lightest and darkest pixels in the image to white and black, which makes highlights appear lighter and shadows appear darker. I usually use a combination of  Auto Levels and Auto Contrast on my photos. On occasions however, Auto Levels may leave an undesirable colour cast, in which case, I would use only Auto Contrast.

To use Auto Contrast, click on the enhance and select Auto Contrast.

This is the result of a combination of Auto Levels And Auto Contrast.

Auto Colour Correction

The Auto Color Correction command adjusts the contrast and color by identifying shadows, midtones, and highlights in the image as a whole, rather than in individual color channels.

This photo is the result of using the Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto Colour Correction Settings.

Saving for the Web

This is probably the most important part of the tutorial. How do we get that 1.6Mb file down to a reasonable size for web browsing. The answer is quiet simple, use the Save for Web Feature of Adobe PhotoShop Elements.

Crop

First of all let's begin by cropping the Image, to do this, select the Crop Tool in the Tool Bar menu.

Drag your cursor to frame the image and then select the 'Image" menu and select 'Crop'.

Save

The image is now ready for saving. In the File Menus, select the 'Save For Web' Option

We now need to change some options to get the size down. In the properties fields, ensure that the JPEG settings are set to high. In the new size windows, ensue that 'Constrain Proportions' is ticked and set the new width to the desired value. For escalemodels, select 800 for the width, the Height will automatically be selected for you.

 Click the OK button. Give the new file a name and select Save and that's it.

Final Photo

That's it, we have resized a 1.6Mb photo down to 39Kb and enhanced the photo in the process.