Topic awaiting preservation: Control highlights (Page 1 of 1)

Hello Collegs,

I have a picture that´s much too bright (highlights are completly white).
I want to get the highlights darker but I want to keep the shadows.

If I fix this by levels ( push the gamma level) the shadows get darker too.
But I just want darker hightlights.
Are there any tricks?

thanks a lot
mike

With Curves, you have much more control over what brightness values get mapped to. You can make bright areas darker and leave dark areas the same.

And if you want to learn everything there is to know about 'curves'...here's the bible from Steve.
http://www.gurusnetwork.com/tutorials/photoshop/curves1.html

"highlights are completly white"

Well - that's a problem with a digital image. You can make the highlights darker with either levels or curves


but you can't retrieve the detail that would have been there if the exposure had been better, so you're left with an image in which a gray is the lightest tone in the image - not often desirable. With a negative in the analog days of film you could have "burned" the highlights in during printing and the film would probably have retained at least some detail. In the digital world, once you hit 255 in RGB it clips - no detail.

Try this: create a curves or levels adjustment layer. Don't modify the curves or levels at all - just click okay. Set the blend mode to multiply. Sometimes it's magic, sometimes it doesn't do anything.

[This message has been edited by Steve (edited 11-22-2003).]

^ Always a pleasure. =)