Guest Post - The Wonders of Photoshop

I am so happy to introduce to you Niki of Hey Niki.  She's based is a graphic design major and based in Toronto.  Has great style and today will be giving us a crash course to help make our photos look better!

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Hey there! My name is Niki and I’m from Hey Niki. I’m doing a guest post for Nina today and I thought hmm...what could I write about that would be interesting for such an awesome blog? Then it hit me: I’m going to school for graphic design and I run a fashion blog myself, so why not do a post about how to edit photos in Photoshop? 

I’m sure that all you fellow fashion bloggers out there have had those moments where you think that you’ve got the perfect picture when looking at it on the little camera screen, but when you bring it to the computer you realize that the lighting and colours are way off! The easy answer for that is Photoshop. I’m going to tell you what my basic editing process is when it comes to outfit photos (and sneakily share my style at the same time!).

1. Levels.

The Levels panel is the greatest and handiest panel when editing photos. It allows you to adjust the highlights and shadows, which is perfect for when you have photos that are too “flat,” too dark or too much contrast.

This is one of my photos from a shoot that I shot on a cloudy day. When I brought it into photoshop I realized that it was a bit dull and flat and I wanted to spice it up a bit!

First, open your photo in Photoshop.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels.
Making sure “Preview” is checked, slide the black triangle slider (the top one under the graph) to the right to darken the shadows in the photo. Slide the white slider to the left to brighten the highlights, and the grey to adjust the midtones. Play around with them until you have a nice contrast.

Here’s my finished photo. See how much of a difference it makes?

Levels are also great to use when your photos are too dark, too bright or there’s awkward shadows from the sun. Here’s what I’ve done with a couple of my photos:

2. Colour Balance
This is also a great tool to use especially if you were shooting in the evening, when the lighting is blue and gloomy.

Open your photo in Photoshop.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance.
Making sure “Preview” is checked, adjust the sliders, but very carefully! With this tool you can easily put too much of one colour in, making it look very unnatural.
If your photo is too warm (it has orange and red hints in it), move the sliders towards Cyan, Magenta and Blue, and vice versa for if your photo is too cool.

Here’s a great example of one of my photos that was too cool:

3. Vibrance

This is probably my favourite tool, even if it isn’t the most practical for every photo. What the Vibrance tool does is it takes the colours in the photo and makes them brighter, which can make your colourful outfits have an extra pop!

Open your photo in Photoshop.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Vibrance
While making sure “Preview” is checked, slide the slider for “Vibrance” to the right and watch your colours pop!

Here’s an example of one of my outfits that needed an oomph of vibrance:

 And there you have it! Those are the three Photoshop tools I swear by when editing my photos. It’s been a pleasure to be able to do a guest post today on such an amazing and inspirational blog!