Using Presets to Enhance Your Photos in PhotoDirector

PhotoDirector comes with a wide range of presets that can help you quickly enhance photos. In this tutorial I will demonstrate a photo which was taken during sun set. The skies are too bright and the goal is to bring back the blue skies and the vibrant sunset colors.

Here I applied the Blue Sky effect and immediately, you can see the big improvement.

Though presets helped improving the photo, but sometimes, you don’t necessarily have to stop here. I highly encourage you to take a good look at the results and see what you can do to make the photo even better. Afterall, PhotoDirector works in a non-destructive environment, so your photos are kept in its original form.

The boat is what I want to be the center of focus, somehow, there seems to be a cast over the whole picture. So, I used the White Balance tube to absorb the brightest the brightest color of the boat. And the sky is even much blue.

The water seems too dark to my liking, so the gradient tool is applied to lighten it up by increasing the exposure and brightness values.

And here is the result.

Then increase the warm colors to bring out golden sunset. Just subtle changes and not over saturating the red, orange and yellow colors.

We can make the ship more vibrant by using the paint brush tool. The image below shows the areas I brushed (in blue).

And after applying regional adjustment, here is the result.

There are some spots in the skies that can be easily removed with the clone/heal tool.

The final step, I added a vignette to draw more focus to the boat.

The final image after applying noise removal to add more clarity to the sky.

Now, that I am satisfied with the adjustment, I can save the adjustments I’ve made into a new preset, so I can use it in the future. This photo is taken from Fisherman’s Wharf in Vancouver, just 5 minutes drive from where I live and I go there very often. The preset I made today will be very handy for the photos I take in the future.

To save a preset, click on the “Preset” tab and add new preset icon. Make sure all the adjustments you wanted to be saved are clicked and press the “save” button to save it to your local PC, or press “share” to save the preset on Directorzone.