It’s hard being a photographer – you always strive for perfection in ever shot, even your snap shots. Sometimes you just want to tidy up a photo quickly – especially those imperfect snap shots. Usually my snap shots right out of camera tend to be really dull, lifeless and lacking in contrast. I’ve always wanted a way to quickly and easily fix them up – now I’ve created just the action to do so!

Reading up over at DPS.com I came across this article that was the answer to my contrast-less prayers: A Quick and Effective Way to Enhance Contrast in Photoshop. From this killer lesson I created a quick and easy, non destructive Photoshop action; I call it my Advanced Auto Levels action. It seems to work best for landscapes or still life. Portraits tend to need a softer touch but you can always play – that’s what my non destructive actions are for!

See this Action in Action

It’s easy to remove distractions like gaffers tape and paper tears from a background of your photograph using Adobe Photoshop. In this video I use Photoshop’s patch tool to remove distracting gaffers tape from a seamless background to enhance the photograph in less than 5 minutes. I’ll walk you through all the steps and help you see how quick an easy it is to enhance your shots!

See below the video for the before & after shots!

Removing Gaffer Tape from a Seamless Background Photo Video

Removed Background Distractions using Photoshop’s Patch Tool

The Before & After Shots

Equipment Used

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Sunday morning I downloaded the trial of Photomatix went into the basement and took a few photos of the creepy, poorly lit door, the corner with some light shining in through a window unseen, as well as an old rusty chair. I ran my little bottom back upstairs, loaded up my RAW’s and got to processing.

Now I made an attempt at HDR way back when using Photoshop CS2 but just didn’t get why people thought it was so awesome, and found it frustrating that I couldn’t get the results I desired. It was all about the tone mapping that Photomatix has that gives HDR’s I had seen their magic touch.

The Exposures I Used:

(click to enlarge)

To Create:

Fantastic!

And then there was the Coffee Hop, I spotted it on a drive down RT12 in Oxford, MA.

The Exposures:

(click to enlarge)

The Result:

Mmmmmm… HDR is delicious! Needless to say after running the demo only three times I bought the program. Only $85 with discount promo codes. Just do a search for Photomatix discount or Photomatix promo to see what you can find. And don’t settle on the first discount, I saw discounts of 5%, 10% and 15%. Guess which one I went with?