Figured it might be interesting for folks to how I use PhotoComplete at home. Having just got back from a week’s holiday in Scotland, with lots of new photos in tow, now seems like the ideal time :)

Here’s our starting photo:

It’s already been cropped and resized, but other than that, it’s not yet been altered. I tend to crop first, then resize, as I’m usually editing images to stick on the photoblog (quick plug - photo.funkypixels.com !), so know the final size I want. Resizing to a smaller size at the start makes the following actions run much faster.

First thing to fix is the contrast - looking at the histogram it’s all pretty bunched up in the middle, so adding some contrast spreads things out a bit more. I added a ‘Brightness & Contrast’ action, and upped the contrast level:

Whilst that’s made things better, the image is still very dark. The sky looks reasonable, and we don’t want to risk blowing it out, so rather than adjust the brightness (which will make the sky too bright), the ‘Shadows & Highlights’ action is the thing to use. This allows me to make the shadows brighter without affecting the sky:

The overall contrast looks much better now, but the colours are very muted. The ‘Color Saturation’ action is your friend here. I’ll add one and move the blue slider right the way to the right:

Much better - no longer looks like it’s black and white! I’m quite happy with the colours and contrast now, but the image isn’t very sharp. ‘Unsharp Mask’ action to the rescue. The settings are a fair amount of voodoo sadly. What seems to work here is to decrease the radius by about half and increase the amount slightly, but it’s totally dependent on the photo…

Almost there, the only final thing I notice is that the sharpening has brought out a bit of noise in the sky (although it might not show up on these JPEGs). So I’m going to add a ‘Noise Reduction’ action, but rather than add it after the sharpening (which tends to blur the image again), I’ll add it before the sharpen:

And that’s our final photo. If you want to play with the PhotoComplete file, here it is - starting from the full size original photo, right down to the final image. Enjoy :)