Once you open you Jpg image the first thing you would typically do is Levels -> Adjustment Layer.

1. Once this pops up you would want to move the white and the black sliders to the corresponding tips of the histogram as shown here.

Then you adjust the centre slider so you will achieve a pleasant brightness level.

2. Next thing you want to adjust is the contrast. So you open the Curves Adjustment layer of your photoshop and increase the contrast to point out the main features of your image.

3. Following that is the colour balance. In a Jpg it is not uncommon the colours to be either too cold or too warm. In this case we want to even that out using the Colour Balance too slightly warm colours up. The best practise to warm colours is to add a bit of red and yellow by moving the corresponding sliders.

4. Next step is to add a bit of saturation to the image to avoid our colours from looking dull. This will have an effect to both the dress of our model and her skin tone.

5. Last thing you want to do is slightly “burn the edges”. For this you need the laso tool on your photoshop, for a rather small size image like this one a feather size of 50 should be sufficient.

The idea is to “laso” the parts of the image you want to draw attention to. In this case would be the face of our model. Once this is done you invert the selection and add an adjustment level of layers and using the middle slider you darken it. This essentially will darken all of the picture but the model’s face because we inverted our initial selection. Once all the post processing steps are completed the results should be rather visible.

And in these 5 simple steps we gave new life to our undervalued Jpg image!

First thing you want to do if you open a Jpeg in Camera Raw is to NOT open up the original Jpeg! So it is essential that you create a copy of your image by right clicking on your image on the Photoshop bridge preview and select Copy-Paste.

Now once you have your copied image ready what you want to do is open it on Camera Raw, so you do not want to double click on it as you would normally do as this will open it on Photoshop thus bypassing Camera Raw.

So what you want to do is again right click on your copied image and select the actual command named “Open in Camera Raw…” that will allow you to open your pictue on Camera for further processing.

One of the nice features specifically on CS3 is the fill light feature creating higher or lower exposure effects on the colouring of your image.

However we are going to focus on this tutorial on selectively colourizing. For this we will use the set of cool tools that Camera Raw has on the top of the right hand menu. You want to choose the little HSL zig-zag looking graphic icon as shown on the image below.

This will change the front panel to new settings that you can experiment with consisting of 3 new tabs.

From these 3 tabs choose the middle one named Saturation. If you take the Reds and Oranges sliders to the left what you get as result is knocking down the colours on the skin without any selections or masks or filters!

Similarly using the same panel if you want to emphasize the clothing of your model simply slide your Blues, Purples and Magentas sliders to the right!

Moving on the luminance tab if you move your reds slider to the right this turns your model’s lips whiter and brings forward the freckles and skin details. Playing around with the oranges you affect the dark of the skin as if you were playing around with the blacks and the whites using filters in a dark room.

What is really important when applying this tip is playing around and experimenting with all your available tabs and sliders. Turning back to the Normal view after playing around A bit what I have essentially done is collectively colourizing my image without applying any masking of filtering to it!

Once you are done with your settings you can choose either Open Image or Save Image from the bottom toolbar of your Camera Raw. Open Image will open it up on photoshop for further processing in more detail.

It is remarkable how time saving collective colourizing can be using this cool feature on your Photoshop!