Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

your program's owner's manual for more information.

Adjusting contrast in the scene using Curves Layers

You can't always place your subject in the area with the most contrast in a scene. Perhaps you're photographing a man with a gray jacket who's positioned in front of a gray wall in a room with black and white furniture. The black and white furniture contrasts against the gray background more than the subject — the man in the gray jacket.

You can fix this issue in postproduction with the Photoshop tool called Curves Layers. It allows you to make precise changes in tonality to specific areas of an image. When using Curves Layers, you have several options for fixing the contrast issue in the preceding example. Here are three options you may consider:

You can lighten or darken the furniture to bring it closer to the tone of the background.

You can lighten or darken the background in the areas near the furniture to achieve the same affect.

You can make changes to the subject himself.

You can use a combination of all three of these options to maximize the effect of your changes.

Try to make your changes appear as natural as possible. Adding contrast at high levels in postproduction can cause the quality of your image to deteriorate. Use your artistic judgment to know the difference between enhancing an image and taking things too far.

When working with a Curves Layer, you'll notice a white box called a Layer Mask. It's attached to the Curves Layer in your layers palette, and it determines what is affected (white shaded areas) and what isn't affected (black shaded areas).

Follow these steps to use a Curves Layer and its mask to adjust the contrast in specific areas of your frame:

1. Create a Curves Layer.

You create a Curves Layer by clicking on Layer, clicking New Adjustment Layer, and then finally clicking Curves.

2. Use the Curves Layer to lighten or darken the tones in your image as you see fit.

Play around with the curve, and notice how it affects your image's tones. Your middle tones are affected by the midsection of the curve, highlights by the top of the curve, and shadows by the bottom of the curve. As you raise a certain area on the curve, those tones are brightened. As you lower a certain area, those tones are darkened.

3. Shade in your Layer Mask according to how you want the image to be affected.

You can click on the mask at any time and paint over your image with the Brush tool that's set to white or black. This controls how the Curve Layer's adjustment affects your image based on your brush strokes. You can make an adjustment in your Curves Layer and then paint it into the exact areas you want it to affect.

Figure 18-5 shows an image that needed adjustments in contrast in order to draw viewers to the subject. I also include its edited version. Notice how muddy the original image looks without the contrast. In the newer version, the subject's white shirt and black tie stand out as having the highest contrast, whereas in the original image the building in the background had the most contrast against the white sky. This newer version of the image helps to draw your eyes to the subject rather than the building in the background.

Enhancing an image's tight

If you end up with a photograph that's underexposed or has bad lighting, don't worry! You can enhance the image digitally with your photo-editing software. I prefer these methods in Photoshop for doing so:

• Use multiple Curves Layers, and then dodge and burn your way to an image with beautiful shapes and tones. This method gives you the most control over the final outcome, but it's also a time-consuming task. I provide more information on Curves Layers and dodging and burning earlier in this chapter.

50mm, 1/1000 sec, f/4, 200

Figure 18-5: Adjusting contrast to draw viewers' eyes to the subject.

Experiment with the Shadows/Highlights tool. If you don't have the time to spend on getting into specific detail in an image and you want to make quick adjustments, you may want to use this tool. It enables you to adjust the brightness of your highlights and shadows and to control the contrast in your midtones by using sliders. Simply position the slider in the area that makes your image look the best.

Keep in mind that the adjustments you make with this tool are generic and may work better for some images than for others. If you play with the tool for a while and don't get the results you want, you may want to make more specific adjustments with Curves Layers.

Never make adjustments directly to your background layer. This layer should be preserved in its original form in case you decide that you want to go back and start over again. Instead, create a duplicate layer to work on.

Sharpening your photos

Sometimes a photo you have taken turns out to have some focus problems after reviewing it on the computer. Certain areas may be blurrier than you'd like. Fortunately, you often can rely on photo-editing software to improve your image.

Digital editing gives you the ability to sharpen images, but don't let that stop you from achieving sharp focus on your subject or selecting the appropriate depth of field (see Chapter 7) when you shoot. The tools in your editing program work best when applied to high-quality images. The sharpening tool should be used to tweak sharpness for optimization but not to salvage an image that was completely out of focus to begin with. Too much sharpening becomes apparent to viewers as shown in Figure 18-6.

In order to sharpen an image, a program like Photoshop adds more contrast to what it perceives as edges. Wherever contrast already exists, a sharpening filter adds more by creating a thin strip of highlight on the darker side and a thin strip of shadow on the brighter side. This causes edges to become more apparent, and when used in the right amount, the filter gives the appearance of sharp focus.

You have a few different sharpening filters to choose from if you're using Photoshop. To find out about the differences among them, check out one of the books in the Photoshop For Dummies series (Wiley). When it comes to actually enhancing focus in a photograph, the filters basically all do the same thing but give you different amounts of control.

I suggest the filter referred to as the Unsharp Mask. This sharpening filter gives you an ideal amount of control and makes it simple to apply sharpness to the areas you want sharpened without affecting those you don't want sharpened. Here's how you use it:

1. Duplicate your working layer, and then create a Layer Mask for your new layer.

Doing so enables you to make changes and then use the Layer Mask to determine what areas of your image are affected. (I discuss the Layer Mask more in the earlier section 'Adjusting contrast in the scene using Curves Layers.')

2. Go to Filters and select Sharpen. Click on Unsharp Mask to open the filter.

A window with a preview box and three sliders appears.

3. Use the sliders to control the amount of sharpness to be applied, the radius of pixels that are affected, and the threshold (which determines which pixels shouldn't be affected within the selected radius).