Quick Fixes

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If you don't know a lot about digital photographyor sometimes even if you doyou'll find some of Paint Shop Pro's automatic photo correction tools quite useful. For a really quick fix, try zapping your photo with One Step Photo Fix, available on the Photo toolbar or the Script palette. In most cases, your photo will be improved.

For a little more control, try this sequence of commands (all available from the Photo toolbar or the Adjust menu):

Automatic Color Balance
Automatic Contrast Enhancement
Clarify
Automatic Saturation Enhancement
Edge Preserving Smooth
Unsharp Mask

Automatic Color Balance, available under A djust > C olor Balance, corrects the color of your photo. Automatic Contrast Enhancement and Clarify, both available under A djust > B rightness and Contrast, correct contrast, with Clarify oftentimes bringing out the detail in shadow and highlight areas. After correcting the contrast, you'll usually find that the colors have become washed out. Automatic Saturation Enhancement, available under A djust > H ue and Saturation, will put some verve back in those colors.

Digital photos usually have some noise (that is, tiny specks of random color). To get rid of excess noise, you can use a smoothing command. Edge Preserving Smooth, available under A djust > Add/Remove N oise, is an excellent choice here, because it smoothes out the noise without blurring edges. Still, smoothing of any kind will probably require you to sharpen the photo a bit. The best choice for sharpening is Unsharp Mask, available under A djust > S harpness.

If you use these commands in the order just listed and with their default settings, the results will be pretty much what you'd get with One Step Photo Fix. The reason you'd want to use the commands separately is so you can tweak the settings to best suit your specific photo. For example, if you have a low-resolution image, you might want to turn down the strength of Edge Preserving Smooth so you don't get too much smoothing. Or you might want to increase the strength of Clarify or apply it two or three times in a row to bring out hidden detail in your photo. Or if your photo is a portrait, you'll want to check the Skintones present check box in Automatic Saturation Enhancement.

But what if you want something other than what the automatic correction tools can offer? For that, let's turn to Paint Shop Pro's more advanced and more specialized photo correction tools.

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