Night scenes are often difficult to capture successfully. What you see is a magnificent floodlit square with facades lit up by warm, glowing lamps. You set the camera up on your tripod or a solid surface, switch off the flash and fire the shutter. What you get is a messy image full of flare, burnt-out patches of white and areas of black. What has gone wrong?
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| If the highlight areas in an overexposed photo don’t seem to contain much detail, then how does the Threshold command help to restore them? In the same way you can see a much wider tonal range, the tonal range of film or an image sensor is wider than your monitor. There’s usually a certain amount of highlight detail present that your monitor just can’t process. The Threshold command is able to isolate the highlight areas in your photo. Then, after you select, copy, and paste them into a new layer, you can adjust the highlight tonal level to add detail to the highlight areas in your photo. |
Let’s correct a slightly overexposed photo. If you want to go through this technique with one of your images, make sure you’re able to easily see the detail in the shadow areas of your image but not in the highlights.
Because the Threshold command changes a color image into a high-contrast black-and-white image, we must first duplicate the Background layer so we can work on it.
| 1. | Choose Window  Layers to open the Layers palette. |
| 2. | Click on the Layers palette’s pop-up menu and choose Duplicate Layer. |
| 3. | Enter Threshold in the As text box of the Duplicate Layer dialog box and then click OK. |
| 1. | Choose Image Adjustments Threshold from the main menu, and the Threshold dialog box opens. You’ll notice that the Threshold command has converted the Threshold layer into a high-contrast black-and-white image. The Threshold Level setting determines the tonal level breakpoint at which white areas become black. The higher the setting, the higher the breakpoint. |
| 2. | Move the slider to a higher value. (We used 205 for our example image.) As you do so, you’ll notice that more and more of the image area becomes black. Move the slider until only the highlight areas remain white. |
| 3. | Click OK. |
| 1. | Choose the Magic Wand tool  from the Toolbox to prepare to select the highlight areas in the Threshold layer. |
| 2. | Enter a Tolerance of 15 to limit the area you select in the Tolerance text box found on the left side of the tool options bar. |
| 3. | Select the Anti-aliased check box to keep the edges of your selection nice and smooth and deselect the Contiguous check box so the selection of values won’t be restricted to just the area you click on. |
| 4. | Select a white highlight area, and then choose Select Feather. |
| 5. | Enter 2 in the Feather Radius text box when the Feather Selection dialog box opens. |
| 6. | Click OK. |
| 1. | Click on the Eye icon  on the left side of the Threshold layer to deselect it, and then select the Background layer. |
| 2. | Press [Ctrl]C ( C on the Mac) to copy the highlight areas, and then press [Ctrl]V ( V on the Mac) to paste them into a new layer. |
| 3. | Double-click on the Layer 1 name in the Layers palette, and then enter Highlights in the Layer Name text box. |
| 1. | Choose Image Adjustments Brightness/Contrast. |
| 2. | Lower the Brightness tonal value by moving the Brightness slider to the left when the Brightness/Contrast dialog box opens. We used a value of -40 for our example. |
| 3. | Click OK, and you’ve restored the detail in the highlight areas, as shown in the Solution image. |
Even if you can’t avoid overexposed highlights, you can easily restore the image. The next time you’re tempted to give up on an overexposed image, remember the Threshold command.
Technorati Tags: Photoshop Tips, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography, Image Manipulation, Photo Editing, Image Editing
Using Photoshop features such as Curves and Levels to adjust the tonal values in your digital images is very effective, but often the comprehensive nature of these adjustments makes it hard to target specific areas of your image. You could apply these commands to a mask or layer style, but why go through a multi-step process when you can use the Dodge and Burn tools to make tonal adjustments in your images? These tools got their names from traditional print developing, so it might not be immediately evident what they do or how to best use them. Rest assured, the Dodge and Burn tools should be as much a part of your image-editing process as Levels or Curves, and we’re going to show you how to use them to edit your own images, just as we did to get the results shown in Figure A.
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Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with part of an image. Perhaps the sun was behind your modelthe background looks fine, but the subject is in shadow. Maybe the subject was in bright light or too close to the flash, resulting in an otherwise great picture with a few key details blown out. Whether the problem is unwanted light or shadow, there’s a way to fix it quickly.
For images that are well-lit in some places but need help in others, Photoshop offers the Shadow/Highlight adjustment command. While most of Photoshop’s adjustment tools can modify precise tonal ranges, even the mighty Curves and Levels commands are designed to adjust the entire image or a selected area. The Shadow/Highlight command, however, is a specialized tool that looks for discrepancies between light and dark areas of the image. You may not need it every day, but when you do, it can save you hours of frustration.
As we mentioned, an image is broken down into highlights, midtones, and shadows. The terms refer to relative luminance, or brightness, levels in a scene as well as in an image. Because of the limitations of a digital camera’s CCD, all the luminance levels can’t be rendered in an image as faithfully as they can be in the original scene.
Highlights that you can observe in a scene often appear as areas void of detail in an image. The same is true for shadows. Shadows, whose details you may easily see in a scene, often appear as very dark or black areas in an image. This isn’t a problem if the highlight and shadow areas are small and contain no or very little important detail, but sometimes you can’t afford to lose these details. This problem has plagued photographers since the beginning of photography. However, unlike the photographers of yore, you have the digital solution known as Photoshop at your fingertips to help restore poor quality detail in your digital images.
An old saying goes, “Light is the paintbrush of photography,” and it’s certainly true. Just as there are many types of paintbrushes, so are there many types of lightsoft light, hard light, directional light, and bounced light, to mention a few. Each influences the mood and quality of a photo.
Light also affects such things as color balance, saturation, and contrast. Many times we’re able to control these factors. Color balance and saturation are relatively easy to adjust with filters and exposure, but contrast control isn’t. One of Photoshop’s great strengths is its ability to adjust image properties, and adjusting contrast is a snap with the Auto Contrast command.
We’ve all had it happensomeone gives you a less-than-stellar image to use for a project you’re working on. When this occurs, you should immediately evaluate the image’s tonal quality. After all, you probably don’t want to spend countless hours trying to correct the image in Photoshop only to find out later that it isn’t salvageable. One of the ways you can determine if an image is of quality, or if it can be saved, is to view its histogram.
