143. Fix a Flash That's Too Far Away Before You Begin  136 About an Images Histogram
 137 Improve Brightness and Contrast
138 Improve a Dull, Flat Photo
See Also  139 Lighten a Subject on a Snowy Background
A typical on-camera flash does well to carry across a medium-sized roomsomething to remember when you see a stadium full of winking flashbulbs that can't possibly affect the players on the stage or on the field. Most cameras have light meters that read the reflected light from the flash unit and set the exposure accordingly. With older cameras, you had to set the exposure manually, and sometimes you set it wrong. Poorly exposed prints that have faded before you scan them in can make the problem more complex. Photoshop Elements can do what the photographer did not: bring a proper scale of lighting values to an otherwise incorrectly exposed shot. The Levels command enables you to adjust the darkness levels for distant objects and increase the gamma so that the progression curve from dark to bright favors the brights a bit more and compensates for localized regions of glare. But you wouldn't want to apply these same changes on top of other subject matter in the near foreground. You'll want to separate the foreground and background matter and apply the gamma changes to the background only. NOTE  | In this photo, my brother is fully illuminated, but not the other subject, the dartboard. So I'll lighten the background. You could use these steps to lighten just the foreground of your image. |
1. | Select Foreground Subject
Open the image you want to adjust in the Editor in Standard Edit mode and save it in Photoshop (*.psd) format. To display the Histogram palette if it is not already showing, select Window, Histogram. From the Channel drop-down list, choose RGB.
With the Background layers chosen in the Layers palette, click the Lasso tool on the Toolbox. Use this tool (primarily) to draw a marquee border around the foreground subject. Include all clothes and as much hair as possible.
 | 2. | Create Foreground Layer
With the selection marquee showing in the active image window, from the menu bar, select Layer, New, Layer via Copy. Name the new layer Foreground.
| 3. | Adjust Levels for Foreground Colors
With the Foreground layer chosen, select Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels from the menu bar. The Levels dialog box appears. Enable the Preview check box.
The problem with this layer should be obvious immediately through a check of the histogram: There's a great big hump on the left side. This confirms what you see: too many darks, relatively. On the other hand, the darks start at about a brightness level of 42 in this example, which is an indication of how much this scanned print has faded. You actually want the darkest tones darker than they are now, but when you're through, you want fewer of those dark tones overall.
To accomplish this goal, raise the black point of the histogram, and then compensate by lowering the gray pointer and increasing the gamma. For this example, I brought the black point to the cusp of the histogram at 41 and increased the gamma to a tremendous 2.66. See 138 Improve a Dull, Flat Photo for precise instructions for using the Levels dialog box. Click OK to finalize your changes.
TIP  | After restoring a wider spectrum of color to the subject matter in the Foreground layer, you might learn that your original selection wavered just a bit to include pixels that aren't part of your subject. In this example, I managed to include some ceiling tile when I selected Mike's hair. Luckily, because these adjustments are made to a separate layer, I can use the Eraser tool to trim off any unduly selected pixels. See 97 Erase Part of a Layer for details. |
| 4. | Adjust Background Layer
Unlike the case with 142 Fix a Flash That's Too Close, your background is already blurry enough. In this case, you want to restore it separately because the backgroundunlike your subject matterhas its own peculiar needs. As the Histogram palette confirms but you knew already, the Background layer is full of dark middle grays. Because their detail is critical only to set the scene for the subject matter, it's safe to use an easierif more crudecorrection tool to restore the background.
Select the Background layer in the Layers palette. From the menu bar, select Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Brightness/Contrast. In the Brightness/Contrast dialog box, increase the brightness by a fair amount (for this example, I entered +25) and increase contrast by a large amount to compensate (for this example, +77). If you look carefully at the Histogram palette, you'll see the "Golden Gate Bridge" effect caused by breaking up the one solid tower of dark middle grays (represented on this chart by the gray hump hiding beneath the vertical stacks). There are still only a few tonal grades in this part of the photo, but because they represent distant elements, that actually doesn't matter much. Photos shot with far-away flashes leave the background blurry and spotty anyway, so at least you don't have to worry about blurring them yourself.
When you've adjusted brightness and contrast to the point where you can at least distinguish where the photo was taken, click OK.
| 5. | View the Result
When you're satisfied with the result, make any other changes you want and save the PSD file. Then resave the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers intact so that you can return at a later time to make new adjustments.
Although these adjustments have made an improvement, this project is far from done. There are numerous scratches and specks yet to be removed, and permanent fingerprint damage to the lower-right corner. Manual color correction could still be applied to the center of the dartboard, which I happen to know has vivid reds and yellows. The glare effect to the lower-right of the dartboard could be reduced.
But the results thus far have been dramatic. Who would have dreamt there was a bright yellow door to Mike's left? Magnified sharply enough, you can make out gold-wing darts propped up in the dartboard's shuttersand for that matter, shutters themselves, which no one could possibly make out in the original. By making corrections to the foreground and background separately, I managed to re-create the illusion of depth and distance. The reds in the sweater stripes pull toward the viewer, while the neutrals in the wood paneling recede.
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