Step 1: Take the picture. In my case, hit downtown and capture an image of our most iconic structure; San Mateo county museum - formerly the old Redwood City city hall.
As you can see, this image needs a little bit of help. The building looks murky, the sky is flat, and there's not much life in this image, at all; making it hard to convey any sort of story or presence. To fix this we first need to isolate the building.
Step 2: Here I've used the Quick Selection Tool to isolate the building. Depending on the circumstances of your image you'll probably need to do some trimming of this here and there. It's going to take a little work, so don't be put off that it doesn't just get properly selected on the first pass.
Step 3: Open up Levels under the Image option in the tool bar. It'll be a side bar off Adjustments. From here you can drag the pointers on the histogram around to get the best balance. In my case, I brought up the white from 255 to 233 and the mid-range to 1.16. On the output levels I lowered black to 4 from 0.
Step 4: Under the same pull down I went to Vibrance and and knocked it up to 3 and the Saturation to 7. This was to help more with the color and tone of the bricking while maintaining the over all value of the highlights and shadows.
Step 5: Okay, it's getting there, but it's still not enough. We need to do something about the sky. So, grabbing my Quick Selection Tool, again, I selected the sky. As before, depending on the particulars of your own photo, you'll probably have to do some trimming and adding here or there. Don't skip it, though; pockets of unaffected area can really mess with the over all effect.
Step 6: To give the sky some real color and depth, I went up to Image, and opened Hue/Saturation in the Image Adjustment side menu. The sky was already the right lightness and the hue was already pretty good, so all I needed to do, here, was bump the Saturation up to 40.
Step 7: You know, it's started to look good, but the glare on this window throws the symmetry off a lot. And a photo out of balance, like this, can be distracting some. At first I tried to use the clone tool to fill in the windows from the adjacent matching window. But that proved to be too messy and didn't give me a good, tight, finish.
So, my work around was to just use the Square Marquee tool to select that adjacent window and make a copy on another layer. Then I took that copy and moved it on top of the original window. Pulling down the Edit menu, I went into Transform and did a Horizontal flip and then rotated it to get the bricks to line up. When I was done I highlighted the copy layer and the window slice layer and merged them. It's not required, of course, but I like to keep my layers neat and tidy. Plus it helps to prevent accidents like sliding, and such.
Step 8: It's almost done. But, that center window, because of the way it was shadowed by the morning storm weather light, is coming out dark; making it stand out and look out of place.
Here I took the Square Marquee tool and highlighted the affected area. I got lucky in that it was such an easy area to grab. Sometimes you'll have to use other selection tools, depending on the subject, area, and other needs. Here, under Image and Image Adjustment, I opened the brightness feature and just bumped up both Brightness and Contrast to get a better match to the two surrounding windows.
Step 8: Ta-da!
And here it is, the exact same picture with all the above edits. Here we have a really nice and vibrant image with good tones and an over all more lively feel to it. Just take a look...
Of course this is just an example for this particular photograph. However, no matter what you snap a picture of, the fundamentals are pretty much the same; to really breath life into any picture don't be afraid to play with the tools. Practice isolating different parts of your image and see how they effect the over all composition. Sometimes the smallest of changes can make the biggest of differences.
Happy shooting!
