Simone Maranzana personal portfolio

We don’t have the possibility to choose the frame and the best position for every picture, the result: an overexposed or underexposed picture.
In this tutorial we’ll try to understand how to correct an underexposed picture using the shadow/highlights tool.

basic correction:

• Open the example picture. (click here for an hi-res version)
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• Firstly, try to fix black and white point following this tutorial, then change the color mode to lab as shown here.
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shadow/highlight:

From Adobe Photoshop CS3 Guide:

The Shadow/Highlight command is suitable for correcting photos with silhouetted images due to strong backlighting or correcting subjects that have been slightly washed out because they were too close to the camera flash. The adjustment is also useful for brightening areas of shadow in an otherwise well-lit image

For a more accurate shadow/highlight tool description go to Adobe online docs.

• Right click next to the name of our layer and choose convert to smart object, in order to apply in a non-destructive way the tool shadow/highlight.
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• Let’s go to image > adjustment > shadow/highlight and set the values as shown in the following image.
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finishing:

• Let’s go now to improve the image colors and add a slight “glow effect” as shown here.
• Create a new adjustment layer levels and set the values as shown in the following image.
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• Boost shadows contrast.
  Let’s go to channels tab and click on lightness to make it active; by pressing command key (on mac, or ctrl key on win), we click in the thumbnail area and go on select > inverse; by doing this we have created a new selection of image shadows.
  With the active selection go on edit > copy (command+c on Mac or Ctrl+C on Win) and paste on a new level.
  With the level selected go on filters > glow > gaussian blur and set a value between 1 and 2.
  set at this point the blending mode of our level as soft light with an opacity value of 30.
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• add a slight “glow effect” as shown here.
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• Here the final result.
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