1.0K Shares Yesterday, we and looked at examples of high and low contrast photos. Today is the good stuff. How to adjust this key setting in either Photoshop Elements or Lightroom. First off, just a couple of notes. There are a bazillion ways to adjust contrast in post-processing. Photoshop allows you record and save an action then apply this to a batch of images. Do all the editing you want to record such as adjusting the contrast of the. Similar to other photo editing apps, you can also adjust contrast, color, saturation level, definition, and so much more. It's another great alternative to Photoshop, at least according to our managing editor Lory Gil. Pixelmator Pro Review: An image-first experience for photo editing on Mac. $29.99 - Download now; GIMP. I’m going to show you my favorites. But if you have a process that you’re happy with, there is no need to change it. Also, keep in mind what happens when you increase contrast. The darks get darker and the brights get brighter. Brightening the bights puts us at risk of blowing our highlights. So these methods that I’m going to show you allow you to guard against making the highlights too bright. ![]() I’m not as concerned, by the way, about blowing the darks. Having a few completely black areas in a photo can add dimension and depth. Blowing highlights, on the other hand, can make your exposure look bad – especially since skin is usually in the highlights. How to Adjust Contrast in Photoshop Elements Sure, there is a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer that you can add in PSE, but that doesn’t let you protect those highlights. I like to use the Levels adjustment layer instead. ![]() I mentioned this method briefly yesterday, but I’ll go into it more deeply today. The Levels adjustment allows you to spread out the darks and lights. The white slider on the right side controls the lights, and the black slider controls the darks. By dragging the sliders in towards the center, you are identifying for Elements where you want the brightest and darkest areas of your photo and increasing contrast. For instance, the darkest pixel in your photo might not have been pure black before the adjustment, but it will be after an adjustment like the one above. When adjusting using this method, a good rule of thumb is to bring the sliders under the base of the “pixel mountain” in the histogram above the sliders. That’s easy in the example above on the dark side, but on the bright side, the pixels are already touching the slider. You can move it in a bit anyway to add brightness, as I did above. Or, if you want to protect those highlights, you can forego moving the whites slider, or move it a smaller amount. How do you know if an image has blown highlights? Well, they’ll look completely white, with no detail in them. You can also use your info panel to measure the brightness more precisely. Go to the Window menu and select Info. Then move your cursor over areas of your photo that you suspect to be over-exposed. See the RGB numbers above? Seeing 255 after the / is definitely blown out. In fact, anything above 245 or so would be blown-out. (The number before the / is the number before your adjustment.) If it’s not important detail, it doesn’t matter if it’s blown out, but you don’t want to see this on skin for sure. In the photo above, it doesn’t matter that the window is blown out. But I was careful to not make the hot spots on her face worse. And I also used this method for for the final edit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2019
Categories |