Tutorial to enhance dull photos

Original photo

Light correction

Let's take the tool at Layer / Colors / Levels. We see an histogram (logarithmic mode, not linear mode, the 2 buttons at the top right). We slide the small cursors (shown by red arrows) onto 20 and 172. Originally they were at 0 and 255.



This way we get a better contrast. Light (white) parts and dark (black) parts that didn't exist previously are now present on the photo.

Color saturation

Now we take the tool at Layer / Colors / Hue-Saturation and enter 30 for the saturation.

Green Grass

We select the areas containing grass with the wand tool (Select contiguous regions). Settings of the tool: Radius=4, Threshold=24. 7 separate areas with grass are present. Let's select the one at the bottom first. Then we keep the shift-key down and select the 6 remaining grass areas.


We take the tool at Layer / Colors / Curves choose the red channel and set 2 points like illustrated below.

Blue sky

We select the sky with the wand tool. Settings of the tool: Radius=4, Threshold=6. It is very easy with this photo since the sky is just one piece only and has very few nuances. On photos with trees where you can see the sky everywhere between the leaves it can be somehow more complicated !

With one click the sky area is not yet completely selected. 3 additional clicks should get us the complete sky selected (with the shift key pressed down). If using threshold 8 instead of 6, we would also select parts of the plane, we don't want that.


We take the tool at Layer / Colors / Curves again, choose the blue channel and set a point in the middle of the curve then drag the curve upwards to increase the blue component. Then we choose the red channel, set a point in the middle of the curve and drag the curve downwards to reduce the red component, like illustrated below.

Blurring the sky

At the upper border the sky show some visible pixelization that we will want to blur. We take the tool at Filters / Blur / Gaussian Blur and set the radius=12. The sky is still selected from last operation when we do that.

Sharpness

Now we will sharpen the whole picture a little bit. We take the tool at Filters / Enhance / Unsharp Mask . We enter 3.0, 0.30 and 0. These values can be increased to sharpen more.

This is the result: