Improving picture quality
Difficulty: Easy/Medium. Have at least a little knowledge on PS.
Step one:
Get an image that is of quite bad quality. I'm using this one of Nicki Minaj:
Step two:
First of all, duplicate your image and set the mode of the duplicated layer to Soft Light. Then merge (ctrl+e).Now duplicate your image again. On the duplicated layer, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to around 2. Click OK.
Then go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set the amount to 0.6 and make the Distribution Gaussian. Uncheck the monochromatic box. Click OK. Then go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All.
Now select a small round white brush with a hardness of 0 and go over all of the skin, but don't go over the edges of the nose or the eyes etc JUST the skin. Then Merge.
Step three:
Now it's time for some re-touching.Grab your burn tool and make the Exposure of it 20%. Make the size small enough to go over the eyebrows. Go over them once or twice, but don't make the eyebrows look like they belong to a drag queen.
Now make the Exposure around 50% and go around the eyes. Don't go inside the eye, just around where her makeup is. Also go over the eyelashes, making the size of the burn brush smaller if needed.
Now change your burn tool to the dodge tool. This makes things lighter. Make the size of the dodge brush small enough to go over her bottom lip. Make the exposure around 30%. Then go over the middle of her bottom lip about 2 or 3 times. Merge. This is what I have:
Step Four:
Duplicate your image.Go to Filter > Other > High Pass and make the amount 1.0. Click OK and set the mode of that duplicated layer to Soft Light. This makes the image sharper. Merge this layer onto your base layer.
Now duplicate the layer again and set the mode of the duplicated layer to Screen and make the opacity about 10%. Merge. After that, get your sharpen tool and go over the things you want to stand out from the picture. (Hair, eyes, lips, necklace, studs on dress)
This is what I now have:
The final step:
The final step is to go to Layer > New adjustment layer > Hue/Saturation and make the saturation +10. Do not change the hue or lightness. Click OK. Merge all layers.And that's it, you're done. You can see that the quality of the image is much better now. If you want, you can go to Filter > Sharpen to make it even clearer but do not over sharpen because that looks stupid.
Here is my final product:
If this tutorial helped in any way, please let me know! Don't redistribute this tutorial, copy my writing of it to make your own, or jock any images from it, thanks.