Photography Techniques 2 -- Photoshop Adjustments

* Color Adjustments to Screenshots in Photoshop
Now you have pasted a new image into Photoshop and then Flattened the image from the Layers menu. The best way to improve the quality of dark images is by using the Image/Adjust/Levels commands from the top menu. Let's look at some examples.

This is an image grabbed from the neighborhood, which are always notoriously dark.

When you open the Levels window you will see a graph of the intensity distribution from dark on the far left to midtones in the middle and the lighter tones on the far right.

By sliding the arrows you can adjust these three values. In our example you can see that the dark areas are saturated while the light areas are almost a flat line. You can see that I have moved the midrange to the darker side to lighten the image and moved the dark area arrow over a bit to the right to compensate for the midrange adjustment. The midrange areas of the photo now stand out.

The greens seemed a little bright. I selected Image/Adjust/Hue-Saturation to bring down the green just a touch. You can do this for any color that looks too bright or to dim.

I have used the Brightness/Contrast function before, but it burns out the bright areas such as the lamps spread throughout the cavern. The Levels command keeps them in good shape.

Some areas only require minor adjustments or no adjustment at all.

This example shows minor midlevel adjustment to bring out floor and shirt highlights.

Link back to Photography Techniques 1