Quick Steps to Improve Photos Captured from a Cell Phone |

Quick Steps to Improve Photos Captured from a Cell Phone

Tuesday 29 Jan 2008

Barack Obama came to my church today to give his testimony. I was able to fire off a few pictures of him with my cell phone’s built-in camera, but as you can imagine, the quality was a little less than spectacular. I want to be able to post these to my MySpace page, but they need some serious work before I’ll be satisfied enough to show them off. So here’s a few easy steps to quickly tweak your cell phone photos.

First, open up your picture in Photoshop. Click and hold the Eyedropper Tool until the tool’s option window pops up select the Color Sampler Tool. Move the Color Sampler tool over your image until you find the darkest black in your image (Tip: the Info Palette displays the corresponding RGB values for the pixel the Color Sampler Tool is hovering over. To select the darkest value in the image, look for the lowest RGB reading in the Info Palette. 0 is the lowest value for any RGB output). Click to set the value which will appear on the info palette as RGB #1.

Next we want to select the whitest white in the image. Using the Color Sampler tool again, find the lightest white value in your image. In the Info Window, light colors will have a higher RGB reading - 255 is the highest value for any RGB output. Click again to set this value which will appear as RGB#2 in the Info Palette.

Now to correct the color of the image. Go Layers>New Adjustment Layers>Levels and then click OK. You should be looking at the Levels dialog window now. Change your channel from RGB to Red. Enter the R value from your RGB#1 reading top left box to set the image’s black point and the R value from your RGB#2 reading in the top right box to set your white point. Now you can use the sliders to fine tune these settings to your liking and hit OK.

Flatten the images next Layers>Flatten Image.

Now let’s sharpen the image a bit to add a little clarity. Choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. A good place to start with sharpening a photo is Amount - 120%; Radius - 1.5 pixels; Threshold - 10 levels. Every photo is different so feel free to adjust these settings to your liking for your photo.

And finally, it’s time to sample different color variations. Go Image>Adjustments>Variations. The resulting window will show you several different color variations of your image, from here just pick the one that you think is best.