This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Lighting
These Quick Fixes concentrate on adjusting the overall lightness of each image. You're presented with different tools for fixing different problems; you can adjust highlights, the image's brightest areas; shadows, the image's darkest areas; or midtones, the areas that are in between. With the Lighting Quick Fixes, you can choose to work with one of these or all three at the same time.
Light and Shadows
The Quick Fixes found in the Lighting category are the same commands you'll find in the Enhance menu's Adjust Lighting submenu: Levels, Brightness/Contrast, and Shadows/Highlights. These three tools attempt to accomplish the same thing in three different ways.
- Levels remaps the darkest pixel in the image to true black and the lightest one to true white, spreading out all the ones in between. It can affect the picture's overall color, so it's useful primarily when the image has a color cast.
- Contrast does the same thing, only without affecting color. Use it when the picture's color is just the way you want it, but you want to bump up the contrast between light and dark areas.
- Shadows/Highlights controls enable you to adjust a photo's highlights, shadows, or midtones independently of each other. Lighten Shadows pulls more detail out of shadowed areas but leaves solid black areas alone; Darken Highlights adds more depth to bright areas but leaves solid white areas alone. Drag the Midtone Contrast slider to reduce or increase the contrast in medium areas.
Try it Yourself: Fix a Dark Photo
For this task, we use a photo that I took recently, one that really embodies the phrase "should have known better." I wanted to capture the graceful Art Deco shape of the greyhound atop this standing ashtray, but I should have moved the whole thing away from the window before taking the shot. As it was, the bright backlighting really confused my camera's flash; the area around the window is way too dark. Let's see what we can do with this photo; it's called ashtray.jpg, and you can download it from the book's website at www.informit.com/title/9780672330179.
- Locate the file in the Organizer or on your hard drive and open it.
- In the View menu, choose Before & After: Horizontal or Before & After Vertical (see Figure 6.3). (If you have a widescreen monitor, the Horizontal view works particularly well.)
Figure 6.3 Widescreen monitors really lend themselves to this kind of side-by-side image editing.
- Let's experiment. First, click the Auto Levels button. Clearly, that's not the right tool to fix this image because it makes almost no change. Moving on....
- Now let's try clicking the Auto Contrast button. Still no improvement—there's already plenty of contrast in this picture, just not the kind we want.
- Next, let's pull out my favorite tools in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements: Shadows/Highlights. We know the shadows in this picture are too dark, so start by dragging the Lighten Shadows slider to the right. Not too far; you don't want to mess with the dark colors in the window frame and the ashtray base. The ideal amount of adjustment for this picture is about a third of the slider's total length.
- Now let's see what happens if you pull the Darken Highlights slider about halfway to the right. You should see the tree outside the window solidify as some of its lightest leaves are darkened.
- Finally, drag the Midtone Contrast slider just a bit to the left—not quite to the first tick mark on the line. Now you should be able to see more detail on the window frame and the ashtray base.
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This photo's still far from perfect, but at least you can see the greyhound pretty well now (see Figure 6.4). I took the photo with the idea of re-creating the greyhound as line art for a T-shirt, so these fixes help a lot; now I'll be able to redraw details such as the ribs and the mouth that weren't visible before.
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Figure 6.4 A couple Smart Fixes really pull out the greyhound from the dark background so you can see its details.