Dare the smartphone

Did you know that you can open your photos to edit directly from your smartphone to your image processing software? All you need to do is respond favorably to your computer’s operating software to do the needful. Here Windows and PSP to process the image. You will use the adjustment layers sometimes color by color as well as the fusion masks to annihilate the effects on certain areas of the image.

smartphone picture

Final picture

1- Photo via smartphone
Open your phone app through your computer. Upload your photo from your Pictures folder. On the photo displayed on your screen, right-click your mouse. In the window that appears, choose the second option Open with… In the choice available to you, you will choose your image processing software; here Photoshop Classic.

2- Image display
now, your image called up from your smartphone is displayed in your image processing software. You will be able to make the desired improvements. Open the Raw Camera filter to get the processing tools you’ll need – in the Menu bar, activate Filter. Choose the Camera Raw Filter item or the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+A.

3 Camera Raw Filter
In Camera Raw, click the grayed out Auto button. It is always interesting to know the analysis that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of your software does of your original photo. If not, open the Basic Settings panel. You will see in the second part of the cursors, the new values ​​given.

4- Exposure
The shooting conditions weren’t the best. The lack of light is obvious. Bring the exposure slider to 0.70. Be careful, this slider is particularly sensitive. Handle it with gentleness and caution. However, this modification, even if it brightens the whole image, does not yet give a satisfactory rendering.

5- Textures
If your subject was a portrait, you would give a negative value – slider pushed to the left – to soften the details. Here it is an urban landscape, to improve it drag the slider to its right. For the exercise, the positive value of 65 is chosen. You can notice the improvement. To help you, open the Before/After icon at the bottom of your screen on the right.

6- Clarity
The function of the Clarity slider is to act on the edges of the image via its micro-contrast. On the right, you increase the values ​​accordingly, especially the sharpness. And on the left, on the contrary, you soften the details. This is what you will do in its entirety by bringing the slider to the negative value 100. See the result!

7- Haze correction
To increase the painting effect of the operation performed previously with the Clarity slider, use the one called Dehaze. It will allow you to accentuate the effect by dragging it to the right up to the value 61. Take the opportunity to check that the use of these three sliders Sharpness, Clarity and Haze Correction, allowed you to highlight the hidden details of the image.

8-PSP
After leaving Camera Raw by clicking on the Ok button, you find yourself in the basic PSP software. Point to the Background thumbnail in the right panel. Right click your mouse. And choose the Duplicate Layer option. You reproduce Background in a thumbnail called Copy Background.

9- Saturation
We are going to “raise” the colors, but not all of them and not with the same values. In the right panel, open the Settings tab. This panel allows you to add various settings. You could do this via the Image/settings menu bar. But you wouldn’t have the layer management flexibility. Open Create Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer.

10- Saturation layer
The saturation layer properties open. You could open the list of presets. But, prefer, here, that of the colors in order to be able to apply the desired value to each of the colors to be worked on. And this, unlike the Global Saturation slider, which acts on all the colors of the image in a uniform manner.

11-Yellow saturation
Activate the yellow color – keyboard shortcut Alt+4. Saturate this single color with the saturation slider. For example, take a strong value of 63. If the yellow line takes on a nice color, it is not the same for the other parts of the image. Also, activate the blending layer on the right. And paint with black color on the background parts you want to remain original.

12- blue saturation
The same operation as the previous one was done on the blueprints to give a little more substance to the sky. But, this is an image taken with a smartphone. The format is not sensor raw (.Raw). As a result, the dynamic range is very low and lends itself less to work. Nevertheless, we applied a value of 15 to get more detail. But, let’s continue our improvements.

13- Selective correction
As you did for the Saturation adjustments panel Open Create Selective Correction Layer. In fact, we are going to create 3 different layers: black, gray and white. Name to find them. Each time, the Black slider was changed. For the blacks we have the value 17, the grays 33 and the whites -96%. And with the brush, we removed the unaffected areas.

Tip: when you use several layers, it is preferable to name them to be able to know which has received a particular adjustment. Thus, during processing, or afterwards, you can go back to one or even simply cancel it. Attention, for later modification, save your work as is without Flattening the image and in .psd file format. On the other hand, for distribution on the internet or on paper, the image must be flattened and saved in .jpg format or any other accepted by your medium.