PCPhoto

Must-Know Image Enhancements

How to change, improve and rescue exposures

By Rick Sammon

Page 3 of 3

Exposure
(Image > Adjustments > Exposure)
Photoshop offers Exposure as another option to darken or lighten your pictures. In the Exposure dialog box, you can control the Exposure (brightness of the picture), the Offset (which lets us darken the shadows and midtones while only slightly affecting the highlights) and the Gamma (which shows you how dark or light a picture looks on your monitor). You also can use the Eyedropper tools as you do in Levels. Here, I used the Exposure slider to darken my photograph of a giant tortoise that I took at the Charles Darwin Research Station.

Burn And Dodge Tools
(Toolbar)
The Burn tool lets us darken individual areas of a picture, and the Dodge tool lets us lighten individual areas of a picture. I used both of these tools to enhance my picture of a short-ear owl moments after it killed a small dove. Compare the light and dark areas of the first picture to the second to see my enhancements.

Camera RAW
Camera Raw is part of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Elements 4.0. When you shoot a RAW file, it opens in Camera Raw. I shoot RAW files exclusively because Camera Raw offers the ultimate in exposure and image control. If you’re serious about your photography, shoot RAW files and process them in Camera Raw. After that, you’ll open them in Photoshop, where you can add additional enhancements to your pictures. Here, I used Camera Raw to maintain detail in the bright areas of the picture (the masked booby’s white feathers) and the shadow areas (the background).