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When you want to adjust the overall luminosity in a photo, one of the more
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basic ways to approach that is through the brightness/contrast adjustment.
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This adjustment, as the name implies, allows you to adjust the overall
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brightness and contrast in a photo very easily.
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Of course, brightness/contrast is not quite as fast as simply applying auto
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tone or auto contrast from the Image menu, for example.
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But those automatic adjustments are actually best suited to a color image, so
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that we have all that color information that can be used in processing the image
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in order to improve overall contrast and tonality.
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But for any image, whether black and white or color, the brightness/contrast
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adjustment provides a very good and very basic way to approach the luminance
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values in your photo. This photo, for example, is obviously a
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little bit flat. To be sure, there is some contrast,
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obviously we can make out texture and details.
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We have a very dark door in the background here, and some bright light
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coming through the windows, but overall the image looks a little bit flat.
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And so, I'm going to add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer in
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order to improve the appearance of the image.
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And by adding an adjustment layer, as opposed to applying an adjustment
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directly to the pixel values in the image, I'll be working non-destructively.
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And that means, I'm preserving the original pixel values, and I can always
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go back and refine my adjustment at any time.
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So, I've clicked on the Create New Adjustment Layer button, the half black,
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half white circle icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
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And then I'll choose Brightness/Contrast from the popup menu.
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That will add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, and you can see that on
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the Properties panel, I now have sliders for brightness and contrast.
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In applying this adjustment, I'll generally start with whichever slider I
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feel is going to have the most significant impact on the photo.
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In this case, I think that's contrast. The image overall is not too bright or
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too dark, but the contrast is certainly lacking.
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So I'll start off with contrast. I can drag to the left, if I want to
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reduce contrast. Or, as I want to in this case, I can drag
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to the right in order to increase contrast.
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Once I feel that I have the contrast adjusted as I like it, I'll go ahead and
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refine the brightness. Here, moving to the left will darken the
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photo, and moving to the right will brighten the image.
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I'll fine tune the effect here. I don't want it to be too bright.
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Right about there looks to be pretty good.
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And then I can go back and fine tune the contrast, if I feel that I need to.
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Bear in mind, there was no detail in the windows, and so I'm really not concerned
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about that bright light in the background, and I'm not too concerned
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about detail in the door. I just want the overall image to have a
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good feel. Good contrast and an appropriate
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brightness level. And again, because I was using an
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adjustment layer, I can always return to that adjustment layer later and fine tune
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the effect, adjusting brightness and contrast if I feel that perhaps my
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initial adjustment was less than ideal. So as you can see, working with
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brightness/contrast is quite simple. We just have two sliders, and the names
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tell us very clearly what those sliders are going to do to our image.
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And so, all we need to do