By David Rosenthal.


Often a very good photo (and this ISN'T a very good one) is ruined because it lacks "pop". This is a way of saying that the image looks flat and boring.

I'm going to use this image to show how to quickly add pop to your flat images. Yes, there are many ways to do this, but we're going to go over a very simple and basic first step. Setting your black point. Nearly every picture should have a black point.

As you can see in this image, the blacks are all gray and milky looking. This is because there is no true black point. Fixing this is a simple operation, that we'll outline below.

The first thing to do is to select the Color Sample Tool.

This tool allows you to select points (up to 4) and to tell you what the numbers say for that point. For this example we'll be working in RGB, but these points can yield numbers in any color mode.

You'll find the Color Sampler Tool in your tools palette, as one of the options for the eyedropper, as seen here. Select it, we'll use it in a moment.

Now you need to add a curves adjustment layer.

Adjustment layers are a great way to change the look of an image without setting them in stone in the original image layer. This means you can go back and change your adjustments later. For now, just select it by clicking in your Layer palette where I've marked "1", and then selecting Curves at "2".

What we need to do now is find the darkest part of the image, so that we can set our black point properly.

To find the darkest part of the image you need to pull the highlights most of the way to the shadows. The green arrow indicates how I pulled them over. You can see the curve is now a very steep dotted line (in the red circle).

Each image will be different, but what you want to do is to pull the curves down so that your image is almost all white. The parts of the image that are left are the darkest points.

Hover your Color Sampler Tool over the point you want to sample (for me it was in the blue circle), and shift-click. This will place a Color Sampler Tool marker on your image.

Once you've set that point, drag your white point in your curves dialog back to where it was, so that the line makes a nice 45° angle.

Here you can see the sample point that I've set circled in blue, and the values that it is currently showing circled in red.

In RGB true black would read R0G0B0, but in this case we have R11G17B10.

In actual practice you don't always need to have your blacks set to 0's all the way across, and often it is not desirable. If you set this point a touch above black (but give it even numbers), then you give yourself a little wiggle room and avoid losing any detail. For now we'll just accept the black point as it's set in the default settings, just know that you could change it if you wanted to.

Here comes the magic.

Click on the black point button (#1).

Then click on your Color Sampler Tool point that you've marked (#2).

That's pretty much it! You can get rid of that Color Sampler Tool marker by using the Color Sampler Tool and option-clicking on that point(alt-clicking for PC).

And here's an animation showing the difference between the two versions. (Make sure you have animation turned on in your browser!)

Deeper blacks mean that the image has more pop, more contrast, more interest rather than a washed out and wimpy look.

Here's another example, image courtesy of Andy. As you can see the whole image is very blue, and really lacks the range to make it very interesting (as is).

I have ciricled in red the part of the image that I marked as the darkest point, that should be black.

And here's the result. One thing you'll notice is that the color was changed much more dramatically in this image than the first one.

This is because as Photoshop is making that one point black it is also neutralizing color at that point, and that change removes much of the blue cast that this image had.

This animation shows the difference between the Before and After. Make sure you have animation enabled in your browser!

Want more? Move on to Making Your Image "Pop", Part 2.

Also check out the thread on dgrin.com, and show us your pop or ask questions...