Photoshop Contrast Settings Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Alright, so on this tutorial I'm going to touch base on contrast. My contrast is something I like to do to always every one of my photos and this is probably the last thing I do when I'm done with my curves and saturation and color balance. I usually go to the contrast button and there is no shortcut for contrast, so you just have to go into your image - mode, and then adjustments and then this little dialog box will come up. Now, contrast is something that every photograph, especially digital needs. Because every digital file is basically flat right out of the camera and it always needs just a little tad bit of contrast. Now the image that I have here is already is already a finished image. I've already completely added my saturation and messed with my curves and messed with my contrast. But, for this little tutorial I'm going to just use the image. You got two different options in the brightness and contrast dialog box. You have first one which is brightness, which I never ever use and I don't ever recommend it for anything. If you want to brighten your image use curves or use the levels, but do not use brightness. It's just for some reason, it's just funky. It brings noise and it makes your picture look horrible. So, just do not do it. One thing I do like to use though is contrast. So, what you do is just slide your contrast over and as you can see my picture just got a lot more contrasted. If I hit the preview button you can see there, you can see the before and after. It just pops out just a little bit more than what it was. And I actually like the look of contrasty colors in a picture. It just makes it pop a whole bunch more and when you get a print back it just looks so much better. Usually that is the problem with most photographs. They don't have enough contrast to make the blacks look black and the whites look white. In contrast usually you have to do more with the blacks than whites, but as you can see here contrast is a fairly easy tool to use. Although, it is a very helpful tool to use and it's very effective and it's very important that you do use the contrast tool on every one of your photographs. Now there is another way to get to contrast and to saturation and that's through this button down over here where I'm at. If you click on that you can actually individually work on the layer that has curves. An individual layer that has contrast and that's something that I can touch base on later, but for now I'm just going to stick with what I've shown you. Thanks."