Digital photo enhancement

Digital photo enhancement software helps you to improve your photos, often beyond what you thought possible.  Because original photos are rarely perfect. They may be too dark, have a lack of contrast, have a color cast or the horizon may be slanting. Most digital photo softwares offer some digital photo enhancement features to correct such deficiencies.  But some of these features are convenient to use, while others may need endless fiddling. This page aims to tell you how to get quick results and results of quality when you enhance your digital photos.

The most frequently needed enhancements:

  Brightness and contrast enhancement

Indeed I don't like the name "brightness and contrast",  because it suggest to use the brightness and contrast functions of most photo editors.  To achieve the needed correction, the "levels and gamma correction" seems to be an easier approach to me.  Meanwhile I did find an even faster method giving excellent results, the color washer.  More about these digital photo enhancement methods, below on this page at  Digital photo enhancement - Contrast

  Color cast correction

Color casts may not always be recognized when they are slight.  A manual correction is not intuitive when the cast is very slight.  But after an adequate correction the photo will surely look better.  The color washer I mentioned above lets you correct casts very conveniently at the same time as brightness and contrast.  More about digital photo enhancement methods to correct color casts, below on this page at  Digital photo enhancement - Color casts

  Angle correction of slanted pictures

Slanted horizon lines are very frequent and very easy to correct with an adequate tool.  But the tool MUST have antialiasing.  More about digital photo enhancement of slanted pictures at the page  Photo correction

  Barrel and pincushion correction

Barrel and pincushion effects occur with some zoom objectives used at their maximal tele position or at their minimal wide angle position. The effect is characterized by horizon lines being curved instead of being straight. More about digital photo enhancement of such photos at the page  Photo correction

  Sharpness enhancement

Nearly every photo editor has at least one sharpness function.  But most of them (even the very expensive ones!) are of bad quality.  I did find an easy to use sharpening tool that uses sophisticated algorithms (internally, don't worry),  and gives probably the best results you can expect.  More about digital photo enhancement of sharpness at the page  Sharper image

Digital photo enhancement - Contrast

  The color washer method

The Color Washer offers an "autodetect" exposure fix and 5 levels of auto-contrast.  A slight manual retouch away from the values determined by the auto mode is possible too.

Color Washer is a plugin.  More about it in the examples of digital photo enhancement software in the yellow frame below.

With this approach, you get best results in a very short time, because there is no guesswork.  At the most you may need to shift slightly away from the settings determined by the auto mode.  But this is rarely necessary.

It is possible to visualize the areas that would be overexposed (if you correct to much) by mean of a hatching.  A very useful feature.

Of course, Color Washer shows an histogram of your photo.  This helps to decide quickly which one of the 5 levels of auto-contrast is best.

  The levels approach

The levels approach with histogram assistance is the 2nd best method - after Color Washer -.  I did use it exclusively for a long time.  Unfortunately, very few photo editors implement it.

In short it implies to pull the lightest areas towards white,  the darkest areas towards black  and apply a gamma correction to lighten or darken the midrange colors.  A detailed description of digital photo enhancement via levels adjust combined with gamma correction is available at the page  gamma correction.

  The classic brightness / contrast method

This is the function that nearly every photo editor implements.  It is the less convenient and takes a lot of time because it is guesswork.  Moreover the results will often be unsatisfactory and the risk of going overexposed (or underexposed) is high.

Digital photo enhancement via the classic brightness / contrast functions is inconvenient and thus not recommendable.

Digital photo enhancement - Color casts

Color casts may be inherent to your digital camera,  may come from wrong white balance settings on the camera or bad light while taking the photo.  However it arose, you will want to correct it.

The functions you will need to correct a color cast may be called "color cast correction", "RGB adjust" or "white balance correction".

  The color washer method

The indubitable superiority of the color washer is due to the fact that this tool offers 5 different auto modes to correct color casts.  Thus it is the only tool I know that will reliably correct the color casts of most of my photos in a nearly automatic way.

Digital photo enhancement of color casts with Color Washer is fast.  No guesswork to determine how much red, blue and green shift you will need.  Just select one auto mode among the 5 available, the one that gives you the best results.

A slight manual retouch (red-shift, blue-shift or green-shift) away from the values determined by the auto mode is possible too.  This tool is really light years ahead of any built-in feature of any photo editor.  But you can use it with many photo editors, because it is a plugin.

  The automatic RGB correction

Some photo editors have a built-in automatic color cast function.  This auto mode should theoretically be able to handle any photo.  Indeed this is just not possible, because one single auto-mode cannot deal with any imaginable color cast problem.

Digital photo enhancement of color casts with a single automatic function can give good results,  but not often enough to use it systematically as the sole method.  An effect I did observe too, is that automatic RGB correction often produces an image with a too hard contrast.

  The manual RGB correction without assistance

Basically, the function needed to correct color casts is some kind of RGB adjust that most photo editors implement  (RGB means red green blue, the basic colors of active color synthesis).  But with a simple manual RGB adjust, you will try forth and back and hardly find the right setting.

Digital photo enhancement of color casts through a manual RGB correction without assistance is possible,  but it takes a long time and needs some experience.

  The manual RGB correction with histogram assistance

For the ease of use of a manual RGB adjust,  you need an indication telling you how much one (or two) of the basic colors must be shifted.  A small histogram of your photo will give you a good indication.  More about histograms and how the digital photo enhancement of color casts is made easy thanks to histograms at the page  Histogram.

Digital photo enhancement of color casts through a manual RGB correction with histogram assistance gave me very good results.  Nevertheless, Color Washer with its 5 auto modes and the possibility to retouch slightly manually is faster and more convenient.  It is faster because you will use its excellent contrast correction in the same walk.

Examples of digital photo enhancement software:

Digital photo enhancement through a batch process is a feature that very few softwares implement.  It would need some artificial intelligence to get a high percentage of success.  More about  Digital photo enhancement through a batch process.

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