Many times when shooting, especially outdoors, I will get an
over exposed image that I want to salvage. This image of the
beautiful Gabriela, was a great shot, but was way overexposed.
Had I shot this in RAW, I might have been able to tweak it, but
I had shot this as a .JPG, so this was going to take a bit more effort.
Before I learned this little trick, I used to just hit the Auto Level
option or Auto Contrast to see if I would be able to darken up
an image. That was until I found the beauty of using Threshold.
First step is really quite easy, create another layer, so you are not
working on your originial. Just choose Layer>Duplicate. This should
be on everyone’s list of the first thing you do, before working
on an image.
Next choose, Image>Adjustments>Threshold.
When you start the Threshold option, your image will turn black and white and look like a cutout.
Notice the slider underneath the threshold levels graph? Go ahead
and play with slide it back and forth and see where the whites and
blacks are. It almost acts as a Histogram in your digital camera,
telling me the black are not very prominate in this photo.
The idea now is to use the dropper tool to mark the blackest of the blacks by sliding the slider to the far left until you can only see a very small amount of black. Position your dropper over this spot and hit Shift - Enter. I am using a Mac, so the command may be different on a PC, but I believe they are the same. Then slide the cursor over as far as you can, so you can see the whitest of the white. In this case, the sky is blown out, so you can use the dropper anywhere in the sky area.
Once you are done, make sure you hit cancel, instead of OK as all we want to do is mark the spots and not create a cutout.
Now we open up the Curves option by choosing Image>Adjustments>Curves. You’ll see in the dialog box, we have three droppers. The one of the far left that is grayed out here, is a dropper that looks like it is full of black ink. This we will use to choose the blackest point on the image, In this case, you’ll see it’s right in the middle of her shirt opening, with a crosshair symbol.
Just point the dropper onto this symbol, marked #1, you will see an immediate change in the image. We then do the same with the third dropper on the Curves dialog box, the white dropper. #2 is located in the sky, and we could pretty much put the dropper anywhere up there and it would have the same effect.
The last thing I like to do is adjust the images a bit with the Curves tool. Just click on the line and push and pull until the image looks right to you. You can see the three points where I adjusted the curves. Also take a look at the Histogram on both slides above, see how the bottom one goes to both edges now? This is ideally how you want an image to be.
Though this image is not completely finished for me as I will need to sharpen and work with the skin to smooth it out, at least it was one I can start to work with. Ideally the best images to work with are ones that are properly exposed, you will see a dramatic impact on these. It takes awhile to play with this, but I think you’ll be very happy with the results and bring your images up another level.
You can also find a .JPG version of this tutorial that I am sharing under Creative Commons. Please do not hotlink, but use on your own webhost.
I am sharing this knowledge under the Creative Commns License. Feel free to post this tutorial on any non commercial website. Please link the image back to www.pixebian.com as well as a text link, to same in your post. All content is © Terry Divyak
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:28 PM
Thanks for the very helpful tutorial. I always wondered how everyone gets colors like those in their pics.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Yo, cheers for the informative tutorial. It helped me improving my skills a lot. It’s ever gorgeous to get some motivating inspiration and I hope to find more of such posts here in future because no one will ever stop learning new things. Go ahead