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You may want to fix the brightness and contrast components of your digital photos with your image editing software. You can lose detail when an image is overexposed, faded, or just too bright. You may also lose detail when an image is too dark because of a failed flash or simply a very dark subject. A day that you think looks perfect for picture taking can result in washed out faces, shiny foreheads, light-eating shadows, and an overall lack of definition. You can eliminate many of these problems by adding and removing light in your image with the help of the brightness and contrast controls that you can find in just about any worthy image editing package.
With most image editors, you have several choices for fixing these problems:
- Quick Fix: Many image editors have a quick fix command, with a variety of tools for tweaking just about any aspect of an image. You can adjust brightness, color, focus, contrast, flash, and backlighting. You can also rotate the image. And you can preview a Before and an After version of your image. Previewing versions lets you see whether the adjustments are having the effect that you want before you commit them to the image.
- Auto Contrast: This choice is an easy one. Many image editors, including Paint Shop Pro and the Adobe products, have an Auto Contrast or Automatic Contrast Enhancement command. Choose this command, and voilà! Your image is adjusted, using existing color and brightness levels to determine a happy medium.
- Auto Levels: This choice automatically adjusts the relationship of the tones for you.
- Adjust Lighting: You can also find special commands to adjust for backlighting (images that are illuminated primarily from behind) or fill flash (to provide additional front illumination).
- Adjust Brightness and Contrast: Use your image editor's manual Brightness/Contrast dialog box. You can enter values, or move sliders or other controls, to change these two integral levels in the image. Some image editors, such as Photoshop and Elements, show you the original image at all times so that you can preview the effect. Other image editors may have a Preview option that you have to use to see your changes before committing to them by clicking OK.
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