Some people aren’t in to using twenty steps in Photoshop to acquire a look they want. Sometimes it’s due to the daunting task of learning how to use this intimidating application, other times it’s just being plain lazy. Either way, there are many times in your life where laziness is OK and this happens to be one of them.

Mid-day is rarely a good time for photo taking outdoors unless you’re shooting black and white, but life doesn’t always occur during the magic hour either so there has to be some type of compromise. Everybody has photos like these in their collection whether they use a $50 point-and-shoot or a 5k DSLR: images with a lot of haze and no punch to them at all. I decided today to browse through some images that would normally not be included on my site just to show you how to add a little more life to them.

As you can see, there’s a lot to be desired in this image. Bad light, haze, boring. I’m not going to go as far as to say there’s really any true rescue for this image. It’s never going to be worthy of much, but it can look better than this quickly and easily and I’ll show you how.

The first thing, and what will make a dramatic impact on this image is one click away. Click Image>Adjustment>Auto Contrast and it will add a lot more punch and clarity. It builds a histogram of the image and spreads the values out so the broader tonal-range is being used. This is very helpful for photos that have been taken in bad lightning conditions. This quickly makes images look more crisp with one click.

It made my image a little dark so I then opened up the Levels dialog Image>Adjustments>Levels and dragged the white arrow to the left.

My image is now looking better, but my sky is washed out and I want to balance out the overall photo so I’m going to add a faux neutral density filter to the top section to slightly darken the sky. This is an optional step and you could skip this if you want. Create a new layer for your gradient layer. I then start by making sure black is my foreground color, then I click on the Gradient Tool (G). and make sure the gradient is set to Foreground to Transparent as shown here.

Now using the gradient tool I click and drag down from the top of the image to just past the horizon.

This makes the top half of my image look like night time with the sun only shining on land. Only LSD or Armageddon could produce an environment like this so lets take this down a notch.

Simply reduce the opacity on the gradient layer to your liking and you have a better image than you started with. Could you do more with Photoshop? Yes. Could it be better? Yes, but this image isn’t worth spending a lot of time on anyway. I just wanted to show you a quick and easy way to improve images where you have no choice of the conditions you are shooting in.

This took two minutes to complete so now you can get back to watching Hoarders.