Making the best of a bad photo

The first thing I do when I upload new photos to the Mac is to start weeding out the losers--the photos that may be technically correct, but lack any sort of life, or are just aesthetically awkward in some way. Many subpar photos can be redeemed with a simple crop or exposure adjustment, but many are just not worth archiving at all. If I can look at a photo and say to myself that there’s nothing in there that I’ll ever love, I throw it away on the spot and move on to the rest of the batch.

But every once in a while there’s a shot that--while far from good--may have some single element that suggests it could be good, or even great. The question then becomes, what can I do to fix it? What is the solution to this problem?

Take the photograph to the right, for example. I was going through an archive of older pictures, and something about this image caught my eye. There’s certainly not much to like about it. It’s dark and muddy with no interesting lighting to speak of, the color is bland, the background is boring and flat, and the angle is not very flattering to the model. It’s not sexy or fun or dramatic...just amateurish and kind of cheesy.

This is exactly the kind of bad photo I would have happily thrown away, except that I kind of liked the look on the model’s face. There was a very retro-pinup feel about it, and I thought it would be fun to explore that. I didn’t have a vision in mind for exactly how I wanted the photo to turn out, but by solving each little problem one step at a time as they were presented to me, the final image revealed itself a little more with each stage in the process. Eventually, I ended up with an unexpected image that I was very pleased with. (By the way, this is not intended to be a step-by-step tutorial, so I won’t be going into great detail on this sequence of manipulations.)

My first step [thumbnail No. 1] was to crop the image in order to focus attention on my subject (her face) and remove all of the distracting elements. In this case, I decided to go with a square aspect ratio.

Normally, I would explore a few different color treatments, but I wanted to play up this retro-pinup look, so I converted the image to black & white [thumbnail No. 2]. I have always used several different methods to convert images from RGB to grayscale in Photoshop, but as of version CS3, I find myself using Photoshop’s new “Black & White” adjustment almost exclusively. For this photo, I simply applied the “Green Filter” setting, which is a great filter to use for skin tones.

At this point, the photo was still very muddy looking, with nearly all of the color data in the shadows, so I increased the contrast of the image by using “Curves” to dramatically raise the midtones and highlights [thumbnail No. 3]. I followed this up with a quick adjustment in “Levels” to bring the shadow areas back towards black without affecting my new midtones and highlights.

This was certainly a better image at this point, but it wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be yet. It was a pretty good photo now, but it struck me as sort of a backstage candid, and I had originally envisioned a more dramatic sort of studio shot. What it needed was more interesting lighting.

Fortunately, this particular pose provided me with a very simple solution. Since the whole right side of her body consisted of darker shadow areas (her hair and blouse), it would be very easy for me to blend a dark gradient onto the image without having to do any fancy masking on areas with high contrast (areas with black and white butting up against each other). The darkness of the gradient would blend with the dark areas of her hair and blouse very seamlessly.

I created a new layer, filled it with a simple black & white gradient, and set the gradient to “Multiply” mode at 80% opacity [thumbnail No. 4]. Then I added a mask to that layer and masked out the gradient in the areas over her skin, basically “painting” her back in. As a final touch, I created one more layer, added another simple black & white gradient, this time at 50% opacity in “Screen” mode, which added the effect of a brighter light coming in from the right side of the image. Et voila...

There’s no replacement for taking the best photo you can take in the camera, but sometimes a little creative photo manipulation can make up for a lot of mistakes in the field. And every once in a while, you might even stumble upon something fresh and unexpected. Perhaps it’s the graphic designer in me, but as much as I love going out and taking photographs, I love working on them after the fact just as much, or maybe even more.