How To: Make A Photo Pop

Whether your photo’s final destination is Facebook or Forbes, making it “pop” can go a long way in grabbing your audience’s attention. For this tutorial, we’ll be using a simple variety of tools and settings nestled within the many menus of our friend Photoshop.

To get a quick idea of what we’ll be doing, I’ve attached a quick before and after preview:

There are a few different techniques you can use to give your photo the look we’re going for - I’ll go through a few of them in succession.

First, we’ll start by simply duplicating our image. Right click your image in the Layers toolbar and select “Duplicate Layer.”

Next, we’re going to set the duplicate image to “Overlay” to bring out its strongest features. 

Most of the time, your image will appear in an extreme state after this little procedure so be sure to adjust your Opacity of the duplicated image accordingly. In this case, I’ll change it to 30% to bring out some of the tones in the image without making it too dark.

When you’re through adjusting your duplicated image, select the original image again in the Layers toolbar. If you haven’t renamed your layers, your duplicate should be called something like “Layer 1 Copy” while your original image should be called “Layer 1.” After selecting your original image, click on “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Select “Adjustments” and then “Levels.” (Or, simply press Command-L if you’re a shortcut savvy Mac user)

Every image will need its levels tweaked differently. For this image, I’ve adjusted the left arrow to 12, the middle arrow to 1.44 and the right arrow to 222. The differences in the image are subtle here, but you can achieve more or less extreme effects on your image by tweaking these settings a bit further.

With your original image still selected (”Layer 1″), select “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen followed by “Adjustments” and then “Shadow/Highlight.”

I’ve adjusted Shadows to 70% and Highlights to 10%, but once again feel free to play around with your settings since every image is different.

You’re almost done. Make sure your original image (”Layer 1″) is still selected. Then, click on “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen followed by “Adjustments” and then “Curves” (Command-M).

As with our other settings, you’ll need to play with your image’s curve to achieve your desired effect. In this case, I’ve set my Input to 110 and my Output to 155. Curves is slightly more sensitive than the other tools we’ve used thus far, so minor changes in either direction can be all you need to bump your image up to perfection.

Congratulations! You’re image has been “Popped.” I’d upload the files so you could carry out the tutorial yourself, but it’s easier to simply link to the image I used. The photo, “Arriving Late At House” by Mario Magallanes is available here.