Salvaging a Crappy Photo (Part 1)

Let's say, for example, that you went to a rock concert with your friends.  After the show, you waited in line for autographs, and you even got a picture with the band.  Unfortunately, when you go home to look at the pictures on your computer, you notice that the picture of you with the band is dark and slightly blurry.  The venue had bad lighting and your friend didn't use flash, so now your only picture with the band sucks.

I would be willing to bet that this scenario is fairly common.  You have one shot of a once-in-a-lifetime situation, and the photo ends up looking like crap. This always sucks, but there are a few simple things you can do to salvage the photo rather than deleting it.  For this post, I will use a picture I took of my dog over Christmas.  It was a cute shot that I tried to take, but the room where I was shooting it had only lamplight.  In my case, I purposely didn't use flash because I didn't want my dog's eyes to glow.  When I got the picture off of my camera, I liked the composition of the shot, but not the lighting/clarity.

Here are the steps I followed to salvage this photo and make it something a little more presentable.  I did not show the photos for each step because many of them are extremely subtle changes, and I didn't want to post near-identical photos for some of the later steps.

1) The original:

2) In either Picnik, iPhoto, or other basic photo-editing software, the first thing I would generally recommend trying is adjusting the Shadows setting.  Already, the picture is much better due to the fact that you can actually see my dog's face.  However, now the colors are a little washed out.

3) If you want to lighten the picture further, try increasing the exposure slightly.  I wouldn't recommend maxing out the "lighten shadows" option because it tends to make the photo grainy.

4)  Next, in iPhoto, I barely increased the contrast, definition, highlights, and sharpness to improve the clarity a little bit.  With any photo, you'll want to take it easy with definition/sharpness.  If you over-sharpen a photo, it honestly looks terrible.  Sometimes a little blur is actually preferable.

5) Finally, because I wasn't satisfied with the colors in the picture, I increased the saturation slightly (plus adjusted the exposure a tiny bit more).  I've found that with most photos that I edit, you actually make the picture look clearer by messing with the colors rather than definition/sharpness.

So, the picture is still not spectacular, but it's greatly improved compared to the original.  If the color still doesn't satisfy you, you can use black&white or sepia effects to mask the bad color.  In general, if you want to save a photo, using heavy effects can somewhat hide the fact that the photo is not very high quality.  Here's an example of the result if I use "Faded Daguerrotype" from Curves on Picnik:

In conclusion, to briefly summarize my main points:

If your photo too dark: Mess around with Shadows or Exposure for the bulk of the lightening process.  If the photo begins to look extremely grainy, back off of the effect a little bit.

If you photo is too blurry: Experiment with contrast, saturation, highlights and other color effects first.  Often, you can solve the problem without even touching the sharpness or definition levels.  If you do need to use sharpen or define, DO NOT overdo it.  A little blur is actually more attractive (in my opinion) than an unnaturally over-sharpened shot.

As you can see from the blog title, I plan to have more posts on this topic.  I'll round up some more subpar photos and get those posts up as soon as possible!