I used to own a small magazine that publishes work done by various artists. We rely on artists to send us pictures of their work, and often we receive pictures that are dark or shadowed. We know how to edit the photos to make them look better, but when you are showing an artist’s work you want to be careful not to alter the original photo in a way that will damage the integrity of their work. I have a quick and easy method of brightening up dark photos in Photoshop that does not change the colour of the original photo, if you are not comfortable with curves or white balance.
There are many other ways to fix a dark photo, or to prevent it in the first place, but this is a method that works for people who are not experts at Photoshop or photography.
First, open your picture in photoshop. I am using Photoshop CS2.
In the layers menu (I keep my layers menu on the side all of the time), right click “Background” and choose “Duplicate Layer…”.
You will see this box pop up on the screen. You can leave everything as is, and click OK.
You will see a second layer in your Layers menu now. Make sure that the background copy is highlighted, and click the arrow to make the drop down menu appear in the layers menu. Choose “Screen”. You will see a change in your picture right away. Don’t fret if it is suddenly too bright…we can fix it!
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You can see the screening results from this picture below. In this case, I still wanted it to be brighter, so I merged the layers (Choose ‘layer’ from the top menu, then “merge visible”. I then repeated the steps above. If you feel your picture is still too dark, do the same. If you feel your picture is now too bright, move to the next step. If you are happy with your picture, choose “merge visible” and save!
Okay, I went through the steps again and redid the screen, and found my picture was brighter than I wanted it to be. In the Layers menu, you will see a box with the word ‘Opacity’ in front of it. Click on the box and use the slider to set the opacity of your screen to a place where the picture looks how you want it to look. I was happy with the opacity at 76%. I set it and then merged the visible layers as shown above.
I know have my picture as bright as it should be, but there is still a blue hue to the photo because it was a dark and cloudy day. Shadows often cause pictures to have a blue cast to them, just as some light bulbs will give a picture a yellow cast. If you understand your colour wheel (do a quick search online for the colour wheel, and watch here for a future post about it), there is a very quick and easy way to fix these problems.
On the top menu, choose the following:
Image –> Adjustments –> Photo Filter
A photo filter box will appear. In the drop down menu next to ‘filter’ you will find many choices. I know that yellow corrects blue, so I chose yellow and then played with the density scale until the picture reflected the true colours I was looking for. 25% is the default, and in this case it was perfect. You need to remember that all computer screen display colours differently too, so unless you are using calibration software, your screen may not be showing what someone else’s screen is showing. Once you have the colour you want, save your image.
Here is the before and after…
Sorry for using such a boring picture! All of my “cute” pictures had other people’s kids in them and I didn’t think I should post them.
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