How to fix pictures in Photoshop

There are quite a few ways to make a picture better. You can make it brighter, sharper and more vivid using a few useful Photoshop tricks.

Let's say you have a picture like mine. It's too dark, a bit unsharp and I want to make it to stand out more.

Let's fix the brightens first.

In the menu click Image, Adjustments and choose Levels... (Ctrl + L for a keyboard shortcut).

Depending on how dark your image is, use move the white slider to the left. Observe you image while doing so, as you don't want it to be too bright. In some cases you might need to combine it with moving the grey slider as well. 

Click OK when done.

My picture of wakeboarder is now significantly brighter.

Let's move on and make the picture more vivid.

If it didn't work out quite well for you, you can also try the Images, Adjustments and Highlight/Shadow option.

Press Ctrl + J to duplicate the layer/image.

Set the new layer blending mode to Overlay and reduce the Opacity as needed.

I had to reduce it to 25% as it looked to unnatural.

This is how it looks like at this point.

Let's make it a bit sharper.

Press Ctrl + E to merge the two layers into one layer and then press Ctrl + J to duplicate a layer.

You should have to same layers.

You can try and use the Smart Sharpen Tool, by clicking Filter, Sharpen and Smart Sharpen Tool, but I prefer the other way and it's a neat and useful little Photoshop trick for sharpening the images.

In the menu click Filter, Other and choose High Pass...

Set the Radius to about 1 pixels or less, to get the similar effect as I did.

Now set the layer's blending mode to Overlay (see picture).

Picture is now significantly sharper, but it looks a bit unnatural with its saturated colors.

Choose the original layer.

In the menu click Image, Adjustment and choose Hue/Saturation... (Ctrl + U for a keyboard shortcut).

And that's it, picture of a wakeboarder now looks pretty decent.

Especially if we compare it to the original image.