Brightness and contrast
Even with the best digital cameras available today, sometimes the image from the camera needs to be 'cleaned up' before we can use it. In this tutorial we'll build upon our cropping images tutorial to get our image of the Mackinac Bridge ready for the client.
Take a look at our cropped image below. It's OK, but it lacks 'punch'. Let's look at some ways we can improve our final product.
The quickest way
The quickest way to fix your image is to select Enhance>Auto Smart Fix from the main toolbar. This process uses preset algorithms to analyze the image and improve brightness and contrast. You can "smart fix" you image more than once. Three "smart fixes" gives us the image below.
Note how the image has instantly become much more vibrant! Let's see if we can get similar results 'manually'.
Manual adjustments
This time, bring up the Brightness/ Contrast menu as shown on the right.
Click on the sliders and drag them left or right (while holding the mouse button). See how the image changes? (You can check and uncheck the Preview box to compare before and after images. Your settings will be different with each image.
Our new image lacks some of the contrast of the previous one, but is a bit more natural, and more reflective of the actual scene.
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