You can try to lighten a photo that is underexposed for a number of reasons with the tools of Photoshop. By masking the highlights, mid-tones, and dark tones on different layers, you will be able to control the degree of change in certain areas of the picture.
Necessary
- - Photoshop program;
- - Photo.
Instructions
Step 1
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + O to load a dark photo into Photoshop. Use the Ctrl + J combination to copy the picture to a new layer and select the desired item from the list in the upper left area of the layers palette, overlay the duplicate layer on the background in Screen mode ("Lightening"). This may be sufficient to brighten a shot with even lighting.
Step 2
If the result of changing the blending mode of the layers is far from ideal, lighten the photo by adding an adjustment layer to the file. Create it using the Levels option in the New Adjustment Layer group of the Layer menu. In the settings window, move the white marker to the left.
Step 3
When correcting shots with a brightly lit background, you may find that as a result of the brightening, the details in the illuminated areas have already disappeared, while the darkened object on the front board remains dark. To see the details in this part of the image, move the gray marker to the left.
Step 4
By lightening the foreground in an unevenly lit photo, bring back the details in the highlights. To do this, turn off the adjustment layer, go to the background image and select the illuminated areas on it using the Color Range option of the Select menu.
Step 5
Turn on the layer with the Levels filter, click on its mask and fill the selected area with black using the Paint Bucket Tool. Press Ctrl + I to invert the mask. You have a layer at your disposal that only changes the light areas of the picture.
Step 6
Duplicate the adjustment layer and fill the duplicate mask with white. Use Color Range to select the midtones in the image and change the mask of the new copy of the layer so that the filter affects only the selected area. In the same way add a layer to the file to lighten only the shadows.
Step 7
Adjust the opacity of each copy of the filter layer. Change the value of the parameter Opacity ("Opacity"). To see detail again in areas of the image that were lighter before processing, lower the Opacity of the adjustment layer affecting those areas to ten or fifteen percent.
Step 8
As a result of strong lightening, noise will be noticeable that did not catch the eye before. To cope with this scourge, go to the topmost layer and apply the Alt + Ctrl + Shift + E combination to create a composite image containing the visible parts of all layers in the file. Remove noise from the resulting image using the Reduce Noise option in the Noise group in the Filter menu.
Step 9
Save the lightened image using the Shift + Ctrl + S combination.
