Using images and photo’s on your website is vital for showing people the quality of the products or services you have to offer.

A website without images is dull, colourless and pointless. Readers on your site will get bored if there is nothing to see but words there, and are almost guaranteed to leave. So adding photos is important, but adding high-quality ones is a must. That’s why, I always enhance photos of my own and my clients for their websites to ensure the highest clarity and the most eye-capturing colour.

By having sharp and clear photo’s, you can capture visitors and keep them looking through your site. so how do you enhance photos and images?

Here’s how I do it:

Firstly, I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 which is a professional image editing tool and a must for any graphical or illustrative design (amongst other tools), but for enhancing photo’s and images, all you need in photoshop.  Just a quick mention, that earlier editions of Photoshop will do just as fine as almost all features are fully available in previous editions of photoshop, from series 7, through to the latest CS4.

Step 1. – Choose your image or photo.

For the purposes of this example, I’m using a photo of a bird I took last year in Hawaii.  It’s a good example as you have a nice, bright photo with plenty of detail in it.  Consequently, this was taken with a Nokia N96 smartphone which has a 5.2 megapixel camera.

2. Step 2 -  Sharpen the image.

Now some people choose different ways in photoshop to do this.  Personally, the first thing I do is use:

‘Filter’ –> ‘Sharpen’ –> ‘Sharpen’

This immediately sharpens every line in the image and is similar to doubling the megapixel processing of the original.   Sometimes this is too overkill and you need to opt for ‘Sharpen Edges’ only.  You’ll know, because the sharpness makes everything look too grainy and chaotic.  The Sharpen tool has worked great on this image though.

Step 3 – Enhance the colour and the contrast

From closer inspection of the image above, you can see that the dark areas (in the building behind for example) are washed out grays instead of blacks, so we’re going to fix this with some correction.

To do this, I adjust the hues and saturation of the colours, found in:

‘Image’ –> ‘Adjustments’ –>’Colour Balance’

This takes some playing around with and every image will be different, but try to remove any sepia / yellow washes which are quite common in digital photos.  If you want, you can try ‘Auto colour’ which can emulate it for you, but sometimes you can lose colour during the correction.

Then, open:

‘Image’ –> ‘Adjustments’ –>’Brighness/Contrast’,

Here, I always slightly reduce the Brightness (by 4 or 5), and slightly increase the contrast (again by 4 or 5).  This is normally small enough to not negatively affect the image by making it too dark, nor is it to too little that the blacks in the image could still be darker.

And that’s it!

Keep it simple and the photo’s won’t look to ‘overworked’ but still look vibrant and clear.  See a finished article below:

If you’re looking to get your hands on Photoshop, please see below: