Enhancing a photo in PhotoImpact

By Claudia Watkins

Sometimes, you take a photo and then realise the photo didn’t come out as you wanted for lack of a good light condition or the overall tonality is rather flat and lacking contrast.
That can easily be fixed in PhotoImpact.

I have this photo that as you can see there is almost no contrast. It looks flat. Next to it you have the final result after doing what we propose here.

So what are the faults?

First let us correct the angle of the horizon. It is falling a bit to the left as you can see by the grid I put on the photo.
Click on the second icon in the corner of the photo to maximize to have space to turn the photo.

Select the Transform Tool and then the Rotate Tool.

When you are correcting something that should be horizontal or vertical it is better if you turn on the Grid so you can compare with the lines of the grid. You do that by clicking on the VIEW menu, Guidelines and Grid and then on Grid or CTRL+SHIFT+R.

Now put your mouse in the corner and when you see a round line with an arrow you can start turning the photo. Turn slowly until you get the right angle and let it go. You can turn off the grid by clicking again on the view menu gridline and clicking on grid.
As you can see by the image below you now have your photo in the right angle but with dome white bits. You need to get rid of that and to crop the photo to a better shape.

Click on the Crop Tool, mark what you want to keep, don’t worry to get it right first time you can adjust by clicking on the marks of the frame that goes around. When you are happy with it click on the menu bar on the tick.
    

Ok now let us enhance the quality of the photo. We will use Levels. This tool enables amendments to three tonal parts of an image, namely highlights, midtones and shadow areas. If we correct the Light it will better the contrast and show more colour.

Click to open the Photo Menu, Light and Levels.

Playing with the settings marked in the image below you can modify the light of the photo. The vertical settings are for brightness, don’t use them. If after you click OK you are not happy with what you got, undo and strat again. Don’t redo on top of what you did as it will mess a lot with the photo.

And you are done…Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and it will be helpful for you.

Copyright 2009 Claudia Watkins