Hey all 🙂
I’ve just bought photoshop, and i’ve used PS4.x previously and cropped and resized pictures, but mostly i created text logo’s (simple ones) for my website. Now when it comes to pictures, i’m at a loss. The photo’s i take are either slightly too dark, or slightly over exposed – i need help specifically with a) brightening dark images (brightness/contrast dont do anything except make it look worse) and b) how to darken overexposed
images.
Thanks for any help you can give!
Kai
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The very first thing you should do with a photo which wasn’t perfectly lighted and taken with painstaking setting of the camera is to adjust the levels.(Image –>Adjustments –>Levels) Many times you will find areas on both the white and black areas of the histogram that are flat-lined. Simply pulling these end points in to where the actual histogram begins will do much to improve your image. Then use the middle slider to refine you correction. A far more adjustable, albeit much more complicated procedure is to use "curves" (Image – ->Adjustments –>Curves). With "Curves", you can select specific areas of the photo for adjustment, while with "Levels". The entire image is effected. The appropriate use of curves could take a small book to teach,. Of course, there’s much more to all of this then I’ve mentioned, and Photoshop has many redundant features. Some prefer one while others prefer another.
If your image is for printing, rather than the screen, you will note that what you see is not what you get. This is becasuse you are use an RGB color system in Photoshop, or with ANY computer monitor (even when you switch to CMYK, you are still getting RGB output which is attempting to SIMULATE CMYK). CMYK is the color system that your printer, home or professional uses. The gamut (range of saturation and brightness) is greater in RGB than CMYK and so, what you see on the monitor cannot always be reproduced on paper. Professionals do what is called, "color correction" so that the colors both look appropriate and stay within the CMYK gamut. Skin tone is frequently used for a baseline for color reproduction since it is quite obvious to even the untrained eye when skin tone is unnatural. Color correction can be quite involved and is only really mandated in professional work, where the aim is to please as many of your target audience as possible. For personal use, as long as you are happy with the output, color correction may be irrevelant.
Bernie