How to Adjust Brightness and Contrast in Adobe Photoshop
Many images can be changed easily by simply adjusting the contrast and brightness of the image. Professionals will typically perform many steps during image correction. For the hobbyist, simple adjustments to contrast and brightness will correct many image problems.
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Things You'll Need
- Adobe Photoshop 6.0 or later running on a MAC or PC
- A copy of an image for correction.
Instructions
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Open Photoshop and then click OPEN and browse for your image. Click OK when you have selected your image.
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The original is too dark in both the highlights and shadow areas. In order to make the cat more visible, it is necessary to lighten the image. From the top menu tabs, select IMAGE/ADJUST/BRIGHTNESS-CONTRAST
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Use the sliders to adjust the brightness. You will notice, as you make the image brighter you also lose some punch in the image. After you have the brightness where you think you want it, adjust the contrast slightly in the same direction. The contrast adjustment will punch up the image more, but too much will leave the shadows too full. For this image we adjusted the BRIGHTNESS +25 and the CONTRAST +8
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Tips & Warnings
This will not work for all images. The more professional way is to find and set the highlight and shadow values and adjust the curves accordingly.
Too much contrast will plug up the shadows
Too much brightness will wash out the highlights.
Remember to work with an image copy. When you save in Photoshop you will render the image again and lose the old version.
Resources
- Photo Credit Richard Burke
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Comments
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Richard Burke
Nov 12, 2007
I know what you mean, but there was still something magic about making those images appear while rocking those trays. Thanks for the nice comment!
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professordon
Nov 11, 2007
This is one of the main points I make when teaching newcomers to digital photography and digital photo enhancement. Almost all digital images can be dramatically improved with Mr. Burke's method. For us old film photographers... well, we would have given anything to have a brightness/contrast control over the negative-paper paradigm as we now do with our digital images. Ach! I was born 30 years too early.
