Shadows and Highlights-It’s Not about Makeup, It’s About Photoshop

There are many ways to adjust the Shadow and Highlights in your images.  Photoshop has a great shadow and highlight adjustment feature that works to fix the lighting in your images.  An over or underexposed area can be corrected in your images.  Shadow and Highlight adjustment works well with images photographed with the source of light coming from behind and creating a dark foreground.  This adjustment can also work to bring out the details hidden by dark shadow portions in images captured in bright overhead light.  The overall exposure is not corrected, but Shadows and Highlight adjustment brightens up or darkens pixels based on the brightness of the surrounding pixels.

Another great feature of the Shadow and Highlight command is that it has a Midtone Contrast slider, Black Clip and White Clip choices that allow you to change the complete contrast of the image.  To get used to the Shadow and Highlight Adjustment, open an image that needs improvement.  When the dialog box comes up, the correction is applied to the preview.  If you do not see the correction, be sure that the Preview box is checked. 

To change the amount of correction for your Shadows or Highlights, move the Amount slider.  For lighter shadows and darker highlights, you will want to choose a higher percentage.  If you like, you can enter a value in the percentage box.  Once you like the results click “OK” and you are all set.

If you should desire more control, go to the Show More Options check box in the dialog box.  A plethora of sliders will come up.  To increase or decrease the range of tones adjusted in the Shadows and Highlights drag to Tonal Width.  You can decrease the range of tones lower the percentage.  A really low percentage will fix the darkest parts of the shadow or the lightest parts of the Highlights.  A higher percentage will give you a big range of tones.  Midtone areas will be included.  Initially, you will want to start with the default setting of 50%.  You can figure out what percentage is best for you from that starting point.  If you don’t want midtones and highlights to be too light, take the Tonal Width percentage of the Shadows down.  If pesky artifacts begin to show up, reduce the percentage.

To decrease the amount of pixels, pull the Radius slider.  You will be illuminating the surrounding pixels for adjusting the shadows and highlights.  The right amount of pixels is based on the specific image.  You will need to adjust the slider to see the results.  A very small Radius will cause your subject to lack contrast.  On the other hand if your background is bright or dark the Radius may be too large.  Try setting your Radius to approximately half of the size of the most important image in your picture.

If you are dealing with a color image, use the Color Correction to fix the colors in the adjusted parts of your image.  By adjusting the Amount of Shadows to Highlights, you might discover colors you could not see before.  To de-saturate images vales need to be lower.  Saturation calls for higher Color Correction values.

When working with grayscale image you can adjust the brightness by moving the slider right to lighten the Shadows and Highlights.  Move the slider left to darken.  To adjust the Midtone Contrast of Shadows and Highlights, move the slider left to take away contrast of right to add more contrast.  Be careful when you are adjusting the Midtone Contrast because you may get some darken shadow areas and highlights that are too light.  There are many ways to adjust the Shadow and Highlights in your images.