Transcription
How to Change Exposure in Photoshop
Hey everyone. In this video, I want us to show you how you could change the exposure or brightness of an image right into Photoshop. So if you took a picture or if you have a picture that's underexposed, meaning is a little bit dark. Like this one, I'll show you how to bring it up and if you have a. Image that's overexposed it is too bright.
I'll show you how to bring it down. There are a few options in Photoshop that let you do that. I'm going to show you my favorite one, which is the easiest and fastest one and I'll show you a few more that give you a little bit more control. So as you can see in this image, it's a little bit too dark. So I want to bring this up a little bit.
So with this image open here in Photoshop. I'll go to image up here and I'll go to adjustment. And as you could see up here, you have four options for adjusting brightness. One is just brightness and contrast, which is the first one I'm going to show you, but levels curves, and exposure all will change the brightness of an image and I'll show you a little bit of how those work as well, but let's start with this one, brightness and contrast. So with that layer selected, I have brightness and contrast open, and here is pretty basic. Brightness starts at zero. If you go up, it makes it brighter. If you go down, it makes it darker. So if you start with a bright image, you'll have to bring it down.
If you start with the documents as we have here, I want to bring it up and I'm just eyeballing it here. But it looks like if I go to the seventies a little too much, so about 50 is about right and contrast. If you go up with the contrast, the blacks get a lot darker and this just makes it a lot flatter.
So again, somewhere in between the start at zero, if I want to go up, maybe make the blacks a little bit darker here, and then I could press, okay. You could also press auto, but I really never had good results with auto. Let me try it right here. This is the auto that Photoshop gets you, but I still liked it a little more bright and alert a little bit more contrast.
So I'm just going to manually duck that and press okay. So that's the easy way to change brightness and contrast. It's a really quick way. I'm just going to press command Z here on my Mac, just to undo that and show you another option. The other option is to go to adjustment and levels. That's your next option?
So on levels is pretty basic also. So you got this triangle well here, if you grab it and you come up, everything turns black on this side. If you grab it and go down, everything turns white. So this is basically making the image darker. This is making the image brighter, so you can make the adjustment for brightness this way and you couldn't bring the blacks up this way. So basically it's almost doing the same thing that the exposure was doing with brightness and contrast and you have the middle icon here that works in the middle. So playing with these gets you a really nice value here and again, you could preview it on and off that's before that's after it's looking good.
I'll press okay, so that's the second option of changing your exposure. You Photoshop again command Z I'll show you another option adjustment curves. Now with curves. When I have more time with an image and I want a lot more control curves is a really good way to do it, and I'm not going to dive into it right now too much.
But if you grab curves and go off. You make your image brighter and depending on what point of the curve you do the sin, it changes divestments differently. So if I grab it right in the middle and go up, it just makes it brighter, just like that and you could create different points in the curve and really start shaping the different parts of your image.
Again, depending on your white and black valleys here on the curve. But again, I don't want to go too much into it curve is probably the most complicated option for expo exposure, but brightness and contrast are easy. One level is pretty good. Let's go to exposure to the fourth one here and if you click that one.
This has almost the same settings that we had on the first one, exposure, like a brighter or darker. It looks like I didn't do my last set. So it's already pretty good on the exposure, but if I want it to come up, I can, you have options on your gamma correction. If you play with that, you could see what it's doing to your image.
This way it's making it a little wider. This way is bringing the Blackstone and so on. So press okay. But I suggest if you're just going for a quick fix to your image, go to adjustment. Brightness and contrast that will get you pretty much where you need to be and if he starts looking a little bit doll, if your image was too dark to start with, I recommend going to adjustment, go to vibrance and just add a little bit more vibrance to your picture, and that'll just make all the colors pop.
If it starts getting a little bit dog, this doesn't affect skin tone. As much as saturation could create this yellow hue to the skin. So don't play with saturation if you don't have to, but you could play with vibrance and I just press okay on that. I hope this video helped you and brought your exposure right to where it needed to be on your image. Please give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel, and I hope to see you on the next video. Thanks for watching.