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Basic Techniques for Balancing Shadows and Details Copyright 2003 - JMA - All Rights Reserved |
Photo enhancement, is a process that adjusts the colors or gray tones in a photograph to bring back a balance between highlights and shadows. Perhaps you have put aside some photographs because the colors were washed out or some of the detail in the photograph was lost. Or, maybe you're satisfied with the photographs because you know that you can never attain the perfect exposure inherent in those very expensive cameras. Well, that's not so and in this tutorial, we will discuss how to use PSP's basic tools to repair and enhance your photographs and give them a look that will rival those taken by experienced photographers. Keep in mind that these tools should be used to enhance photographs and not as a substitute for taking good pictures. For best results, learn how to use your camera correctly. Read the camera manual until you know the controls by heart. |
Figure 1. The Raw Image Here is a classic example of how a camera meter can be fooled by a complex lighting situation. The bright afternoon sun caused the sky to be nearly washed. There is very little detail in the trees and shrubs as they almost disappear in the background, and the shadows created by the archway has hidden all the detail in the columns and the walkway. |
Figure 2. Making the First Selection The first thing we need to do is to establish a starting point. We want to darken the scenic area and we want to lighten the archway. Making changes at the global level would not work well since we need to go in opposite direction. Instead, we will separate the light and dark areas and adjust them independently. The best way to do that is to make a selection of either the light or dark areas of the image. Here we have made a selection of the washed out scenic area using the Lasso tool set to Smart Edge. The selection was then Feathered by 3 pixels to make the transitional changes from light to dark blend more smoothly. |
Figure 3. Enhancing the Scenic The Levels command will let you adjust the brightness level of the selection up or down. To use the Level command go to the Main Menu bar and select Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Levels. |
In the Levels dialog window the center diamond slider was moved to the right until the selected area of the image reached the desired level. When adjusting brightness up or down, watch the main light and try to keep the colors natural. |
Figure 5. Enhancing the Shadow Areas Once again, the Levels command was used to enhance the area inside the selection. This time the center diamond slider was moved to the left until the details in the archway were brought out. |
Figure 4. Inverting the Selection Once the scenic area was adjusted, we needed to brighten the foreground in the archway. With our original selection in place, we use Selections > Invert. Inverting the original selection will cause PSP to select the shadow areas in the foreground. |
Figure 6. Adding Highlights Adding color pixels in the background will create the illusion of additional flowers. Notice that we are not trying to overpower the image with a lot of color, we are only adding accents. The Red and Yellow color was selected by clicking the Foreground color box and sampling the colors from existing flowers in the shrub. With the Paint Brush tool set to 5 pixels or less we can then spot paint additional flowers in the shrub. |
Figure 7. Selecting Areas for Color Saturation To make the frontmost shrub stand out a little more we saturated the colors. Since we did not want to apply the effect to the entire image, the area of interest, that being the frontmost shrub, was selected using the Lasso tool set to Freehand. The colors in the shrb were then saturated using Automatic Saturation Enhancement feature found in the Photo Toolbar. In the Auto Saturation dialog window, the Bias was set to More Colorful and the Strength was set to Strong. The Skintones present box was left unchecked for maximum saturation. |
Figure 8. Improving Focus and Image Clarity As a final step, we can improve the crispness of the image by applying the Clarify filter to the entire image. The CLarify filter is applied by selecting Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Clarify on the Main Menu bar. The Strength of Effect for this image was set to 3. |
Figure 9. Before and After Looking at the before and after images, we can clearly see that with just a few basic tools we transformed an otherwise dull photo into an image we can proudly display. |
Before |
After |
