Subtitles of the Movie

Now, as we saw in our last movie, this image of Yosemite Valley after a winter storm is a perfectly exposed image in reality as well as what's represented by the histogram. We've see that already. We're not blowing out the highlights and we're not blowing out the dark areas and so it looks very, very good. So we don't need to dwell on this image anymore. Let's go to the next image, however, and take a look at what's a classic underexposure in an image. This is a portrait of Courtney and we can see the eye tells us that it's very dark. So we don't need the histogram to tell us that it's underexposed, but in analyzing how unexposed it really is, we can see that there's quite a gap here in the lighter areas of the image and we need to fill that in. We need to bring this histogram over to the right more, again, without crashing into the right border, but we still need to bring that over. The quickest, easiest way to do that is just to bring the Curves Dialog Box to bear and I'm not going to do this with an adjustment layer, just very quickly to demonstrate how we correct underexposure. The great thing about CS3 is that in the Curves Dialog Box we now how the histogram that's superimposed over our curves graph and that makes things much, much easier to adjust. So what we do in portraiture is we want good contrast and good dynamic range and the way we build dynamic range in underexposed images, just to grab the top of the diagonal line and just drag it over. But not so far as to go into the graph so that we start clipping. Read ok and we can see an obvious change. Now, let's look at the before and after. Before her eye tells us it's underexposed and our histogram tells us that it's underexposed as well. After we make the adjustment, we can obviously see the change in the histogram and the change in our eye tells us everything is good. On the dark area, however, we do see where we are clipping, but that's ok because the clipping is represented by this part of the image right here. It's a secondary portion of the image. It's what we call dead space. We don't care about it because it's not part of the subject matter. Obviously the subject matter is the face of the girl and that looks like it's in very good shape right now. In fact, we can segregate a portion of this image by taking the lasso tool and just, you know, very quickly taking a look at this area here and we've got a very good exposure, very balanced exposure on the face, which is the main part of this image. We've got a little bit of clipping right here and I think that if we look closely, we can see that in the eyelash in this part of the eye right here we care clipping in that area on the dark end, but again it's a small area and it doesn't matter because it doesn't detract from the overall appeal of the image. But that's an underexposed image and how to correct it. Now we come to an image that presents a more complex problem and this is very common in sport photography. And now, just briefly, in NCAA basketball, the visiting team always wears colored jerseys. You're always represented by the colors of the school. The home team, however, always wears white so what you have is that in NCAA basketball, you have African-American players with sometimes very dark complexions wearing bleached white jerseys and photographers go, well, do I expose for the jersey and we end up with absolutely no detail in the face, in the skin or do we expose for the skin and blow out the highlights on the jersey? It's something that all photographers wrestle with. But as we shoot this particular image and look at the histogram, it's perfectly exposed. But in reality, we have a situation where the face is very dark and it detracts from the appeal of the image and we can't see the face of the player. Now, the very quick way to adjust that is to bring up the Curves Dialog Box and again, we do the same thing here that we did in the previous image. We just drag over and you're saying to yourself yes, but you're clipping and yes indeed, we are clipping. But actually we don't care about that because the main area here of the uniform is not the main part of the subject of the image. The main part of the image is the face, the ball, the fact that she's up off of the court, you know, she's suspended in mid-air and she's looking this way towards the action. She's getting ready to do something. So we can live with the clipping this uniform, but why should we do that if we don't have to? Let's go back and start again and do this another way. And I'm going to show you more about this particular process later, but just very quickly let's just establish that we can deal with that image without clipping the uniform. We go to the shadows and highlights dialog box and we bring this up and then we increase the radius, we return our contrast and there we have it. And then maybe the second thing you would do is to go in and maybe adjust for the contrast very quickly, which is what I'm going to do so you can see that we've got to bring the darks down to return or contrast. And there we have a basic adjustment where we didn't have to blow out the whites but yes, we returned luminosity and detail and focus to the player's face. And we did that with the help of the histogram. Learn to use the histogram; both in Photoshop and in the field when you're using your camera.