2b Brightness

The photograph below includes a lot of sky and therefore the Buddhist statue (at Repulse Bay, Hong Kong) has come out rather dark. You might be tempted to use the Brightness/Contrast panel to improve the picture. Don't! When you increase the brightness in this way, light is added to every part of the picture, so you will find that parts of the picture that should be pure black have become gray - pure black is no longer available. Similarly, using the Brightness control to make an overly-bright picture darker would also be a mistake, for pure white would no longer be present anywhere in your picture. In other words, the Brightness control is always to be avoided!

There are other, better and more sophisticated alternatives for changing brightness. As usual, Paint Shop Pro offers automated adjustments which you can try but then undo since we want to learn how to do this manually, for a perfect result(?):

One Step Photo Fix will attempt to optimize brightness as well as other variables such as contrast.

One reason that the One Step Photo Fix does not do a great job for this photo is that we want to lighten ONLY THE STATUE. We don't want to lighten the whole picture since this would make the sky into a boring uniform white. To lighten only the statue (the darker part of the picture) we have these options:

	Choose Adjust > Photo Fix > Fill Flash. The Fill Flash filter allows you to lighten the darker, underexposed areas of a photo. This is a very useful feature for it fixes a very common problem. Try using Fill Flash and then undo the adjustment so that you can try the next one.
	Choose Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Curves.

This will display a dialogue containing a graph like the one at right (except that the sloping line is initially straight). The right side of the graph corresponds to the light parts of the original picture and vice versa. Dragging any part of the slanting line on the graph up or down causes the picture to lighten on darken, respectively. It's possible to lift one part of the line and pull down another part, causing part of the picture to lighten and part to darken. In our case causes we want to lighten the dark part of the picture but not change the light part (the sky). Therefore you should first click near the centre of the line to fix that point, then lift the left side of the line (the part that corresponds to the darker parts of the picture). Don't overdo the adjustment or the picture will look unnatural. Your line should now look something like this (at right). Notice that the right side of the line has not been moved.

Unless you are an expert, I recommend you never add more than 2 or 3 points to the line, since otherwise it will become difficult to control what is happening. If you wish to delete points that you have added then just drag them off the graph.

If you're like me, you'll probably find the colours of the statue are rather pale. To make them more intense or increase their 'saturation', choose Adjust > Hue and Saturation > Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Slide the saturation slider (the one on the left) upwards to increase the saturation (the intensity of the colours). As usual, make sure the autoproof option is turned on. Don't be tempted to adjust the lightness here, for the reasons we have already discussed. This photo doesn't need a 'hue' (tint) adjustment, but try it anyway to see what it does.

Save the adjusted photo into your folder in JPEG format.

Notice that we could have also used the curves control to solve the problem of excessive contrast in the picture of the fountain in lesson 1 (I'm not expecting you to actually do this though). To reduce the contrast within losing our blacks and whites we would have made a curve like this by adding two points:

The darker parts (but not the black parts) have been lightened slightly and the lighter parts (but not the white parts) have been darkened. The central part of the curve is less steep than before, and it is this that indicates reduced contrast.

It should be clear from this lesson that the curves control and histogram adjustment control are powerful tools that are sometimes hard too use. If all you want to do is just lighten or darken a picture, be aware that lifting or pulling down the 'curve' explained above is equivalent to correcting the 'gamma' of the image, which you can do with Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Gamma Correction or Shift-G (make sure the three primary colours are linked).

When you reach the Adjustment Layer lesson I will show you how you can use these controls in such a way that you can easily return to them later to make adjustments.