Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

from out of the shadows

While color-correcting some photos from the wedding, I stumbled across a feature in Photoshop that I didn’t even know existed: Shadow/Highlight. It’s kind of miraculous, actually. I’m not a Levels and Curves whiz, so I know I haven’t been making my photos look as good as they could. Shadow/Highlight takes a lot of the work out of breathing life into photos that are too dark or too bright (say, taken on a bright, sunny day). It’ll let you tone down the extreme shadows and highlights to reveal what might be a wonderful photo.

The example at right is a photo I took last month of Sather Gate at the University of California at Berkeley. It was taken on a really bright, hazy day, so the subject in the resulting photo came out really dark. I ran it through Shadow/Highlight and was able to pull out some great copper detail. If I worked with it some more, I might be about to pull out the “Sather Gate” lettering at the bottom some more, but I decided just to leave it at that.

Shadow/Highlight doesn’t work all the time. If you’re dealing with a really dark photo, the result can be rather grainy. As a rule, though, it’s often easier to work with photos that are too dark than too light. With dark photos, at least there’s information there to work with. If the highlights are blown out, then the detail in those highlight areas is just gone.

Another thing I’ve learned to look out for: color. If I’m not careful, the filter can make the oranges and greens in a photo look really unnatural — almost chalky, for lack of a better word. It’s not horrible, but something to keep an eye on.

There are a few other sites I ran across with interesting demos/explanations of the Shadow/Highlight feature:

• NatureScapes.net: Digital Editing Tip: Shadow/Highlight Tool in Photoshop CS
• Brainstorms & Raves: Amazing New Shadow/Highlight Tool in Photoshop CS
• DigitalProducer.com: Tutorial: Inside Photoshop CS: Shadow/Highlight
• Cari Jansen: Photoshop cs - Shadow/Highlight command vs. Selections/Curves technique
• Technical Perspectives on Digital Photography: Shadow/Highlight… Oh the pain….
• Adobe.com: Compensate for flash and backlighting