One thing that happens to a lot of people when taking photos is that they will get photos that are too dark. For example, say you are shooting an outdoor scene and you accidentally meter on the sky and so everyone in the photo is dark. Or, say you're at a basketball game shooting full manual and you accidentally move yourself to f/3.5 or something. Your photos will end up being perhaps a half stop or a full stop too dark.

How do you fix this? Most people would immediately rush to curves and levels and bring up the whites. This method is problematic as it blows out parts of the photo that may have been exposed correctly. It also introduces incredible amounts of noise into the photo, depending on how much gain you add. Remember, you are effectively increasing the electronic gain of the photo, and gain increase results in random distributions of noise.

So curves and levels won't cut it for large changes in the brightness of a photo. What other ways are there to effectively increase the brightness of a photo without destroying information about the photo? As it turns out, there is at least one other effective method available in Photoshop to brighten your photo. It involves layers and blending options.

Let's take a look at this example photo I shot at a basketball game between Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech. I shot this with a Nikon D1x at ISO 800. My shutter speed was 1/400th of a second and my aperture was f/2.8. It's about half a stop underexposed as a result of the lighting in Cassell Coliseum.


If I open the levels tool on this original image, I see that the curve is very much skewed to the left, leaving no white colors.


Pushing this around to meet the start of the curve, and thus the start of the colors may look alright here, but it really results in a grainy/noisy photo. It also blows out the whites in their shirts and makes it hard to define edges, as you can see quite clearly in photos shown at the end of this journal entry.


So what is this better way to do things? Let's take it step by step. First, we want to duplicate our image so that we can overlay it on the other image and merge the two. To do this, we go to the layer menu and select Duplicate Layer.... Select all the defaults, because we're going to merge it back to a flat image immediately anyway. Now you should have two layers in your image, one called Background and another called Background copy.

Once you've created the copy, we want to blend the two layers. On the layers window, there is a drop down window that by default says Normal. If you click on it, as shown below, and select Screen, you will immediately notice a difference in your photo.


Right next to the merge style drop down is another drop down that is labeled Opacity. This is where you can specify how much brighter you want the photo to be. 100% makes the photo a lot brighter and 0% makes it not any brighter at all. Push the slider around to get what you want. For this image, I selected 100%. You might not notice in the final resulting image shown below that the whites aren't blown out on his headband and his shirt as they are when we use levels. The edges are also defined slightly better.


To save the changes, you have to flatten the image. Choose from the Layers menu Flatten Image. Then, do any other modifications you were going to do, such as curves and color balance, and save the image again as a JPEG or whatever format you are using. To see just exactly how much better this method is, I've done a 100% crop of the two players' heads. You can see the results for yourself.

First, we have our 100% crop from the levels tool:


Now we have our 100% crop from the layers tool:


Apply some noise reduction to those pictures, such as Noise Ninja, and then apply some contrast curves and your photo will look beautiful, even if you did expose it a stop under.