Five Minute Photo Edit

Let's start with a selfie. Pictures can often look dark and hazy but can be fixed in a few easy steps.

 First, create a new adjustment layer under either the "Layer" menu or the Adjustments section, and select "Levels." Below are the settings I used. These will be different depending on the picture. You want to drag the slider on the white end so that it is at the end of the curve. Then, you want to drag the middle slider slightly towards the white end of the curve.

Next, create another adjustment layer. This time, you want a "color balance" layer. Adjust the top and bottom sliders under the highlights to fix any skin tone issues.

Next, duplicate your background layer and drag it to the top of your layers. In the filter menu, hover over sharpen, and select unsharp mask. The following are the settings I used, but these will have to be changed if you are using a smaller or larger image size (mine was about 1000px wide).

Finally, set the sharpened layer to soft light at and opacity of 30%. 

Here is the final product:

If you'd like to fix any skin imperfections, you can view a tutorial for that here. You'll want to make any corrections before duplicating your background layer.