I have some photos that were taken in a church with not very great lighting. The camera’s built in flash was used producing a decent amount of light on the subjects, but the walls 20 ft behind them are quite dark. If I increase brightness for the whole picture, the subjects will start to wash out. What is the best method of bumping up the brightness in just the background areas?
BTW, that feature is only available in Photoshop CS, so if you have an earlier version you might try using a contrast mask or just isolating the subject and mess with it for hours 🙂
BTW, that feature is only available in Photoshop CS
Hilight & Shadow adjustment, that is. The Levels method has been around for years. Usually you can play with Levels and just bring up the shadows, without making the whole thing too flat.
You can also do an ADJUSTMENT LAYER, in PS 7 anyway, (dont own the upgrade) do a levels or curves adjustment layer, (you access this by clicking on the ADJUSTMENT LAYER icon on bottom of layers palette, adjust the levels or curves to bring up the background, this is done on the ADJUSTMENT LAYER itself, the adjustment layer includes a MASK, you can then INVERT the mask, CTRL-I or COMMAND-I for mac, then using a soft medium size brush, with WHITE in your foreground color box in your toolbar, simply brush in the areas of the image you want to lighten.Make sure you have the MASK selected to do this, (just click on the mask in the layers palette. When you are done you can flatten the two layers or save the image with both layers for future possible changes.Let me know if this is helpful
channels pallet > choose channel with greatest contrast > dup. > invert >G. blurr about 5 or 6 > load selection > return to RGB > fill with 50% gray and set blend to color dodge > fade fill if you want. After the invert step you may want to paint out any white areas you don’t want affected with black.
– Make a copy layer of the background – Invert the copy layer (dark areas will become light and vice-versa). – Blur the copylayer slightly – Set the copy layer to overlay or lighten or something else that suits your needs and toggle the opacity of the layer a bit to get the best results.
Brightness/contrast should be eliminated from photoshop. Just blasts the entire file. No control.
Curves gives you the ability to set the Highlight limit and the black limit. Once set they don’t move. This allow you to keep dots (grays) in the highlights so they don’t look blown out. Then adjust from the middle of the arc to get your background to fill in.
Check the preview box inside the curves palette and play with it. Very powerful tool.
