Read this part before beginning the tutorial!  It is important for this tutorial that you first read over the entire tutorial before beginning it.  The first part of the tutorial will explain briefly what each section listed under Effects/Enhance Photo will do.  There are 11 different features.

Once you have gone over the 11 features, the tutorial will begin.  For those people taking the PSP Classes, there will be bad photos supplied for your lessons if you do not have any.  Do not use any of the fixed examples for your lessons.  You must use one that hasn't been fixed or supply your own bad photo.  Send in both the before and the after photo for lesson credit.

Size note:  Do not resize your image until you have made all the enhancements.  Why?  After you have made your enhancements, resize by using Bi-cubic Resample.  This often fixes little nagging problems that might be left over.
 

Auto Color Balance:
Different types of lighting affect your photo such as; sunlight, flash and indoor lighting.  Restoring the color balance gives a more natural look to your colors in your image.

Automatic Contrast:
Automatic Contrast adjusts the balance of the highlights, midtones, and shadows and the overall light and intensity of the image.  Lack of contrast can lead to a flat and muddy looking image.

Automatic Saturation:
Adjusts the saturation, or intensity, of colors in a photograph. The saturation of a color determines its vividness.  This can boost those reds, blues and greens that seem to look washed out by either bad lighting or age.


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Deinterlace:
Use the Deinterlace command to clean up the scan lines from frames of video images. When a television sends a video signal, the signal updates alternates scan lines in each video frame. When you capture a frame, every second set of lines can either be missing or be out of alignment with the rest of the scan lines. The filter removes the odd or even lines and then reconstructs the missing information.  (from the PSP Help Files).  We do a lot of captures from favorite television shows, and we have always had these problems.

Removing JPEG Artifacts:
This feature removes artifacts caused by excessive JPEG compression. An artifact can be a checkerboard pattern that is visible in smooth areas, color leakage beyond the edges of objects, blocky-looking areas, and the like.

Moiré Patterns:
Moiré Pattern Removal can remove undesirable patterns from scanning, or patterns from photographs printed on textured paper.  If you want to use this feature on a black and white photo, remember to increase the image to 16 million colors.  For those of you who haved scanned many black and white photos, you may have wondered sometimes where those distracting patterns have come from when they didn't show up on the photo.  It is from the texture of the paper they are printed on.


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Scratch:
This should be used carefully by testing the strength of the settings.  It can be great to remove small scratches, but it can also remove other details.

Clarify:
Clarify can make an image look mucn more crisp and focused so that objects stand out and the whole image takes on a clearer look.

Fade Correction:
This can help to restore color and contrast to photographs that have faded. The dyes used in photographic prints fade over time, and much faster when prints are exposed to light.   As a photographer, I keep my good prints stored to prevent this problem.  But most of us do want to have special family prints around for others to see.  Try to place them in an area that doesn't receive any direct sunlight.

Color Correction:
Makes color changes to an image based on the hue, saturation and lightness.

Red Eye:
Removes red eye caused by flash, or changes eye color for affect.

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Now that you have a better understanding of the 11 features, it's time to start putting them into practice.  I have done custom photo editing for many years, and I am personally very excited about this new addition to PSP7!  You may be surprised at how easy it is going to be to make some fantastic edits to photos that just aren't good enough to use.  But be warned that you can't fix everything, and if a photo is too far gone you may not be able to restore it enough to use it.  Two cases of this would be a photo that is far too overexposed and a photo that is far too underexposed.

The following will feature a lot of full size screen captures because I feel it's important to show you the features fully.  To cut down on load time, the lesson will take several pages to take you through all 11 steps.

I'm going to use three different photos or captures that show off the features.  First I'm going to start with a snowy day photo.  Normally I would have to work really hard to make something of this photo taken under very cloudy lighting.  Everything seemed to run together for a muddy look.

Do you see what I mean?  Where would you start normally to fix this?  To brighten the photo would help, but everything would still look the same with no contrast or color changes to liven up the image.  And if you are like me, you have struggled in the past to juggle changes such as brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.  Now let's try the new Enhance Photo features.