Level 2 Plus

Lesson 12

Shadow / Highlight

This lesson provides an alternative method of correcting exposure. The first method was covered in Lesson #11.

Introduction

In this lesson, we will cover another method of correcting images that are either overexposed or underexposed. We will use the “Lighten Shadows” and the “Darken Highlights” functions to accomplish this. We will also discuss the “Brightness/Contrast” tool to fine-tune the adjustments.

Here is our underexposed flower image again.

We fixed this image in the last lesson using “Levels”.

Here, we will attempt to make the correction using a function called:

“Lighten Shadows”

[ Enhance ]

From the next menu, select:

[ Adjust Lighting ]

From the final menu, select:

[ Shadows/Highlights ]

[ Lighten Shadows ]

Watch the image for the desired effect:

Here, we set the slider at 50%

Here is the result of “Lighten Shadows”.

The left pane shows the image before we lightened the shadows.

The right pane shows the results. We feel that this function did a very good job on this image.

Here is our overexposed flower image again.

We fixed this image in the last lesson using “Levels”.

Here, we will attempt to make the correction using a function called:

“Darken Highlights”

[ Enhance ]

From the next menu, select:

[ Adjust Lighting ]

From the final menu, select:

[ Shadows/Highlights ]

[ Darken Highlights ]

Watch the image for the desired effect:

Here, we set the slider at 66%

Here is the result of “Darken Highlights”.

The results are not as good as the correction of the underexposed image.

This is because the highlights were badly blown out.

Let’s try to improve it a little more.

[ Enhance ]

From the next menu, select:

[ Adjust Lighting ]

From the final menu, select:

[ Brightness/Contrast ]

We experimented with various adjustments while we watched the effects of the adjustments on our image.

We set the “Brightness” to: -87

Here is the result of our adjustments to “Brightness” and “Contrast”.

The results are still not as good as the correction of the underexposed image.

However, the results are somewhat better than they were before the adjustments to “Brightness” and “Contrast”.

Here is the comparison of our overexposed image before and after correction.

Summary

In this lesson, we covered another method of correcting images that are over or underexposed. We used the “Lighten Shadows” and the “Darken Highlights” functions to accomplish this. We also showed how to use the “Brightness/Contrast” Tool to fine-tune adjustments.