https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - Often, when traveling, one doesn’t have the option of time, or perfect weather for that matter, to capture an image. It’s on these particular occasions that Photoshop can come in quite handy. If photographing in the middle of a bright, sunny day, or at nighttime when lighting conditions aren’t optimal, and the dynamic range is quite high, photos can present as extremely contrasty, where the highlights are blown out, and the shadows are bogged down with little or no visible detail.
When faced with an image of this description, you can’t really go past using using the ‘Shadows and Highlights’ adjustment in Photoshop to balance out the difference in tonal relationships. ‘Shadows and Highlights’ is located under the main navigational menu underneath “Image / Adjustments / Shadows and Highlights”. Now, you’ll also notice that there isn’t currently layers option for “Shadows and highlights”, you actually be applying the ‘Shadows and Highlights’ adjustment directly to an image there.
Now, if you’ve spent quite a bit of time using Adobe’s Camera Raw, you’ll notice that “Shadows and Highlights” looks very similar to the “Recovery and Fill” sliders. When you first open this adjustment, you’ll find a slider for the shadows, and a slider for the highlights which are the basic options that are available to you. Now, as you increase the percentage of the shadows slider, you’ll start to notice that the actual shadows begin to lighten. This is very evident when I just turn off the preview check-box, as you can see from the original photograph.
Now, when you actually start to increase the amount of the “Shadows and Highlights”, you want to be cautious about how much you actually apply, because a certain amount will look fine, but after a certain point the images can look very strange, as if you’ve over worked them a little bit too much. So you just want to take that into account when you’re actually using the “Shadows and Highlights” adjustment. But, as you can see here, just by making a slight adjustment to the shadows, with regards to the amount, adds that additional bit of detail that was missing before. It’s the same for highlights, you take what is essentially this lovely, sort of white little dinghy here, and start to increase the amount, and you’ll notice that the highlights values actually start to get pulled back, and end up being being sort of lighter grays, as you increase the value of the amount slider.
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