If you are like many photographers, a whole bunch of your pictures are too dark, too light, or too blurry. Now, in the magic age of digital editing programs, we can do something about the too light and too dark, and not much about the too blurry (more on that later).
Photography is based upon the exposure of an image sensor (digital) or film (traditional) to light reflected from the subject. The control of the amount of light that hits the sensor or film is an exacting science, and if you ever want to be a serious photographer, you will have to learn about it *and* understand it. However, we think we’ll make more progress if we first tell you what to do about the mistakes already made, and next time, we’ll tell you how not to make them.
We use PhotoShop and PhotoShop Elements for our demonstrations. If you use some other image editing software, you will need to find similar operations.
PhotoShop has lots of ways to affect the values in a digital photo, but using many of them, you can do more harm than good if you don’t know what you're doing. PhotoShop Elements has made some of those procedures into one button commands - but they are based on operations that may not be appropriate to your particular photo. We think, and lots of professional image editors agree, that the best way to correct for under and overexposed pictures is to use the Blending Mode in the Layers Palette.
We will first correct the overall exposure in an underexposed (too dark) photo using PhotoShop, and then an overexposed (too light) one in PhotoShop Elements, and finally, lighten just part of a photo because only that part was underexposed. Ready? Let’ go . . .
Menu and Key Commands will be in bold, and a forward slash indicates a Submenu. Also, please note that when I use the Command Key on my Mac, it translates to the Control Key on PC machines.
The first step when you open a photo from your camera in PhotoShop is to go under Image/Image Size, uncheck the Resample button, change the Resolution to 300, hit OK. Then Save As the photo as a TIFF file.
You now have a high resolution file we can edit and save changes with no image quality loss. Keep the original jpg file from the camera as a source file, in case you ever have to start over.
This photo was taken when there was just not enough light. It was evening and I had only the onboard flash which would not have helped. I did get an exposure I liked by using a tripod and bracketing exposures, but if I had not been able to do that, I would have been stuck with this result. It needs fixing for sure.
Open the photo in PhotoShop and Select/Select All. You will see “marching ants” all around the border.
Hold down the Command (PC-Control) key and type J. This takes your selection to a new copy layer of its own. There are other ways to do this, but Command-J is the fastest and simplest.
Notice in the Layer Menu that you now have Layer 1 as well as the Background Layer you had to begin with, and it is highlighted in blue - which means it is active.
