Level 1 Basic

Lesson 6

Fixing Photos
General Repairs

When images are captured by a digital camera, the quality of the image often suffers in the digitalization process.

Introduction

In this lesson we will use Adobe Album Starter to make automated image repairs.

We will cover General Repairs.

You can fix color, tonal range, contrast and sharpness easily and automatically.

To fix a photo, you have to select the photo that you want to work on from the “Photo Well”.

This is done by clicking on the photo.

A yellow box will appear around the photo to indicate that it has been selected

The next step is to use the “Icon Menu” & click on:

[ Fix ]

You will now come to the “Fix Screen”.

You should set up the “Before & After Views” and rotate the image if necessary.

Often when images are captured by a digital camera, the quality of the image suffers in the digitalization process.

This section performs:

“General Corrections”

This will fix the following:

Color
Tone
Contrast
Sharpness

Click on the button labeled:

[ General ]

“Auto Colors” is an imaging software trick used to reclaim some of the losses to color values.

Click on the button labeled:

[ Auto Color ]

You will notice two things happen:

1. The “Auto Color” button will grey out, indicating that you have performed this step.

2. The “After” view will change to reflect the effect of applying “Auto Color”.

“Levels” is an imaging software trick used to reclaim some of the losses to tonal values.


Click on the button labeled:

[ Auto Levels ]

You will notice two things happen:

1. The “Auto Levels” button will grey out, indicating that you have performed this step.

2. The “After” view will change to reflect the effect of applying “Auto Levels”.

“Auto Contrast” is an imaging software trick used to reclaim some contrast.

Click on the button labeled:

[ Auto Contrast ]

You will notice two things happen:

1. The “Auto Contrast” button will grey out, indicating that you have performed this step.

2. The “After” view will change to reflect the application of “Auto Contrast”.

“Sharpen” is an imaging software trick used to reclaim some sharpness.

Click on the button labeled:

[ Sharpen ]

Sharpening works differently than the other fixing functions.

1. The “Sharpening” button will not gray out, so there is no indication that you have performed this step.

2. The “After” view will usually not change enough to see the effect of applying “Sharpen”.

You can apply sharpening several times if you wish.

We recommend restraint with sharpening. Over-sharpening can degrade your image.

Click on the button

There are two buttons on the screen that allow you to undo & redo any of these steps.

They are aptly labeled:

1. 1. Undo

2. 2. Redo

The important thing to note is that they move you back & forward one step at the time.

You can see below that the operator has used “Undo” after having used “Auto Contrast”.

This is evident since the “Auto Contrast” is grayed out in the Step #11 photo and not in the Step #12 photo.

At this point we can still use the “Undo” and “Redo” buttons to go back and forth through our fixes.

When you are happy with everything click:

[ OK ]

You will receive one last reminder that the changes have been made on a copy of your original – your original image remains unchanged

Click on:

[ OK ]

The new edited version of your photo will now appear in your “Photo Well”.

Summary

In this lesson we used Adobe Album Starter to make automated image repairs.

We covered General Repairs.

We fixed color, tonal range, contrast and sharpness easily and automatically.