109. Apply a Quick Fix Before You Begin  45 About Editing Images
See Also  137 Improve Brightness and Contrast
146 Adjust Hue, Saturation, and Brightness Manually 149 Sharpen an Image
In many cases, the strategies for making a particular image more pleasing to the eye are the same for most images. Using the Editor's Quick Fix tools, you can make the most common image corrections easily, without messing around with a lot of separate dialog boxes. In the Quick Fix pane, you can rotate an image, improve its contrast, reduce color bias in an image (remove a bluish color cast, for example), reduce an over-saturated image or increase saturation when needed, or sharpen a fuzzy image. Quick Fix is not guaranteed to work with every photo, but it can save you from engaging the Standard Edit mode in the Editor in an attempt at a more complex solution. Two of the Quick Fix tools are similar in purpose: Auto Levels and Auto Contrast. With both Auto Levels and Auto Contrast, the darkest darks and the lightest lights are adjusted while the medium tones are not affected. Because of the way Auto Levels goes about this process, however, its result might introduce a color cast in some images. Each image is made up of pixels blended from separate red, green, and blue color channels. A well-balanced digital image contains a full range of light to dark pixels in each of the three channels. To adjust each of these three color channels separately, use Auto Levels. With Auto Contrast, a full range of light to dark pixels is achieved by darkening the darks and lightening the lights in the final image rather than within each color channel. If you're not sure which option to pick, try one, undo it, and then try the other and pick the result that works best for the image you are attempting to fix. NOTE  | The automatic commands discussed in this task can also be activated by selecting that command from the Enhance menu. For example, selecting Enhance, Auto Levels is the same as clicking the Auto button in the Levels area on the Quick Fix pane. |
1. | Open Image in Quick Fix
In the Organizer, click the thumbnail of the image you want to change. Then click the Edit button on the Shortcuts bar, and from the menu, select Go to Quick Fix to send the image to the Editor. Save the image in Photoshop (*.psd) format.
If the image you want to change is already open in the Editor (in Standard Edit mode), I hope you've already saved it in Photoshop (*.psd) format before you made any changes. If your image has multiple layers, click the layer you want to edit in the Layers palette, or select Layer, Flatten Image from the menu bar to reduce your image to a single layer. You might flatten the layers if you're done making the more complicated edits in Standard Edit mode, and you're ready to simply make some adjustments to the final result. Click the Edit button on the Shortcuts bar and select Quick Fix to change to Quick Fix mode.
NOTE | On the left side of the Quick Fix window are tools you can use to make changes to your image or your view of it. For help in using the Zoom tool, see 55 Zoom In and Out with the Zoom Tool; for help with the Hand tool, see 57 Scroll a Large Image; for help with the Crop tool, see 108 Crop a Portion of an Image; for help with the Red-Eye Removal tool, see 130 Correct Red Eye. |
The normal editing tools disappear, and the image is displayed on the left in its original state and on the right with your changes applied (as you make them). The Quick Fix pane appears on the right side of the window. The Quick Fix pane displays four categories of options: General Fixes, Lighting, Color, and Sharpen. You can apply any or all of these options as you see fit.
| 2. | Rotate Image if Necessary
If needed, in the General Fixes section of the Quick Fix pane, click either the Rotate photo 90° degrees clockwise (right) or Rotate photo 90° degrees counterclockwise (left) button to rotate the image.
TIPS  | Instead of applying individual changes to an image's color, contrast, and sharpness, apply a Smart Fix. To apply an automatic Smart Fix, click the Auto button next to the Smart Fix option. To adjust how obvious or how drastic you want the Smart Fix change to be, drag the Amount slider to the right to give Smart Fix more leeway, or to the left to keep it conservative. (The normal amount is located at the midpoint along the slider.) To undo your last change, click the Undo button on the Shortcuts bar; to undo all changes to the image, click the Reset button above the right preview pane. |
| 3. | Repair Contrast
You can adjust the contrast of an image using the controls in the Lighting section of the Quick Fix pane. To have the Editor automatically adjust the contrast within each color channel individually, click the Auto button next to Levels. If you prefer to automatically adjust the image's total contrast (rather than the contrast within each color channel), click the Auto button next to Contrast instead. In a moment, Quick Fix adjusts the image's contrast. Skip to step 4.
You should not apply both the Auto Levels and Auto Contrast adjustments to the same image. Doing so can introduce a color cast or ruin the perfect contrast you were trying to achieve.
You can make manual adjustments to an image's contrast if you prefer. To lighten the darkest pixels, drag the Lighten Shadows slider to the right. To darken the lightest pixels, drag the Darken Highlights slider to the right. Finally, if you want to lighten the midtones, drag the Midtone Contrast slider to the left. To darken the midtones, drag the slider to the right instead.
| 4. | Restore Color Balance
To normalize the colors throughout the image so that any unnatural color cast is removed or so that any over- or under-saturation is compensated for, click the Auto button located in the Color section of the Quick Fix pane. In a moment, Quick Fix applies color corrections to the image. Skip to step 5.
You can make manual adjustments to color if you like. To desaturate the image, drag the Saturation slider to the left; to add more saturation, drag it to the right. To shift the colors along the color wheel, drag the Hue slider to the left (toward teal) or to the right (toward green). To make an image cooler (more bluish), drag the Temperature slider to the left; to make the image warmer (more reddish), drag the slider to the right. To add more green to an image (and possibly remove a color cast), drag the Tint slider to the left; to add magenta instead, drag the slider to the right.
| 5. | Sharpen Edges
To sharpen the image automatically, click the Auto button located in the Sharpen section of the Quick Fix pane. In a moment, notice that blurrier zones in between light and dark regions are eliminated. You might also notice, especially in large areas of primarily one shade, an increase in graininess and the possible inclusion of spots. You can click the Auto button more than once to increase the contrast along the edges of objects in a photo.
To adjust the amount of change that Auto makes to the image, drag the Amount slider to the right to strengthen it, or to the left to reduce it.
NOTE | To sharpen an image, Quick Fix increases the contrast along the edges of objects in a photo. To determine where the edges are, Quick Fix looks for significant differences in lightness between adjacent pixels and then makes those differences greater. The Sharpen option cannot fix a photo that is really fuzzy or out of focus. |
| 6. | View the Result
When you're satisfied with the image, save the PSD file. Then merge the layers (if any) together by selecting Layer, Flatten Image and resave the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image unflattened so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want.
For this photo I took of my brother while visiting a local university, I lightened the shadows and the midtones so that I could see his face more clearly. The shade he was standing in caused a slight bluish color cast, so I adjusted the Temperature and the Tint to compensate. You can see the changes Quick Fix made to my image in color in the Color Gallery.
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