Adjusting Photos in Photoshop: Exposure Editing Tutorial for Beginners

In this video, we will begin making adjustments to photos. Let us start by opening a few photo files. We will go to File, Open, and next, let us open the folder titled “Lesson 2 Editing Photos.”

Let us first select our “plant overexposed.jpeg, ” and while holding CTRL on the keyboard, let us also click “plant underexposed.” We will click Open, and we can see that both files are now open within Photoshop. The first thing we will want to do when opening a photo within Photoshop is go and rename our background title.

We can do this by double-clicking on the layer, and let us title this layer “plant underexposed.” We will press ENTER, and now we have our new layer. When working with images, it is a good rule of thumb to keep one layer as the original image—unchanged. Therefore, the easiest way to do this is to simply copy this layer and make duplicates.

We can do this by pressing CTRL + C on our keyboard to copy the layer and then pressing CTRL + V to duplicate or paste the layer. Let us paste the layer one more time so that we have three layers titled “plant underexposed.” Next, let us change the title of these layers.

The first layer—we will double-click on the title to change it to “plant underexposed original” and press ENTER. Next, let us lock this original layer so that we do not accidentally click on it and make adjustments. We can lock the layer by going to the lock icon found above it.

Now, as you can see, we cannot make any adjustments to this layer. With our two additional layers, we are going to be making adjustments. For the first layer, we are going to be making adjustments that are destructive to the photo or stay within the photo.

Let us double-click this layer to change the title, and we will add “destructive” and press ENTER. Next, let us hide the layer above it so that we can only see the “plant underexposed destructive” layer. Looking at this image, we can see that it is a little dark.

We are going to want to brighten it up and increase the exposure of the image. If we open our Histogram panel, we can also see that this is evident. On the left-hand side of our histogram, it shows the dark parts of the image, and on the right, it shows the highlights and brightest parts of the image.

As we can see from our histogram and by looking at the photo, we can see that it is a mostly dark image, and therefore we will want to add some brightness to it to increase our colors throughout our histogram. The way to make this adjustment to our image is to go to Image > Adjustments, and we will select Brightness/Contrast. The first setting, brightness, essentially adds brightness to the entire image.

It does not differentiate between adding brightness to the dark parts of the image, the mid-tones, and the highlights of the image. It simply adds brightness to the entire image. If we drag our slider up, we will see that our image becomes lighter.

Let us drag it up to about 90. Next, our contrast setting essentially signifies the relationship between highlights and shadows. Therefore, if we drag our contrast to the right, adding more contrast or difference, we will see that there is a vast difference between the highlights and the darks.

If we look at our histogram, we will see it becomes more narrow. In addition, if we go to the left, adding less contrast to our image, we will see that it becomes a little more gray and there is less of a difference between the highlights and the dark parts of our image. We will click OK.

Looking at the image now in our histogram, you can see that we made improvements to it, but I want it to be a little more bright. If we go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast now, unfortunately, we can see that our brightness and contrast have been reset. But if we look at our image, we can see that it still holds the same adjustments we already made.

That is because making a destructive change such as this essentially keeps those settings within the image. Therefore, when we make additional Brightness/Contrast changes, it resets to zero, and we will make changes based on what is already within the image. Let us bump it up to about 24 or 25 to give it a little more brightness within our image, and then we will click OK.

In the future, we may be making adjustments like this—say we add more shapes to it, patterns, borders, etc.—and we want to go back and change the brightness or adjustment we made before. The only way that we would have to do that is to go back to our History panel and try to find where we made that adjustment. That can be a little bit difficult, and therefore we can see one of the ways that destructive adjustments may not be the most useful tool for our image.

Which brings us to the reason non-destructive adjustments may be helpful to our images. Let us hide this current layer and unhide the layer above. Next, let us rename this layer “plant underexposed, ” and we will simply add “non-destructive” to the title and press ENTER.

Next, let us go over how to make adjustments to our image that are non-destructive through masks. Essentially, what a mask is—a transparent layer on top of our image that we can make changes to without actually changing the image below. Let us show an example.

We can go to Adjustments, found on the bottom right-hand of the screen with the circle icon, and let us click Brightness/Contrast. As you can see in our Layers panel, we now have a layer that indicates we have a mask adjusting the brightness and contrast. If we go to the Properties of this layer, we can now make changes to this by dragging our Brightness and Contrast sliders.

Let us add a little bit less contrast and bump up the brightness to about 90 again. One advantage to adding this is that if we click outside of this layer and simply click on the image—say we added borders or other things to this image—to change the brightness and contrast again, we can click back on the Brightness/Contrast mask layer and make our changes.

They are still saved at 91 and -32. Therefore, we can continue adjusting this. The other benefit of making mask adjustments is that we can click on the visibility icon of this layer, and we can see what the image originally looked like before the adjustment.

It is a good way to compare whether you have made appropriate adjustments to the image. Let us now navigate over to our “plant overexposed.jpeg.” As you can see from this image, if we look at our histogram, this image is stacked heavily to the right, and we even have some colors that are clipped off on the high end and appear pure white.

Probably in the rope right here. Therefore, we will want to reduce the brightness of our image. Let us first change our layer name under Background, and we will type “plant overexposed” and click OK.

We will then duplicate this layer just one time by pressing CTRL + C on our keyboard and then CTRL + V. Let us rename this bottom layer “plant overexposed original” and press ENTER, and finally, we will lock this layer. Next, let us make adjustments to our “plant overexposed” layer. Previously, we made non-destructive adjustments by using the Adjustments icon found on the bottom right-hand of the screen.

However, we can also access this through the Adjustments panel. I will simply click on Brightness/Contrast, and we can see that this adds a mask just like before. For this image, we are going to reduce the brightness a bit so it has a more appropriate exposure, and let us bump up the contrast slightly.

Let us toggle the visibility. This looks much better. Therefore, let us save this file by going to File > Save As, and we will simply rename this file by adding “adjusted” to the end.

Let us click Save and click OK. In addition, let us save our “plant underexposed.jpeg” by going to File > Save As and again adding “adjusted” to our title. We will press ENTER to save and click OK. In the next video, we will continue working with exposure adjustments for images.

See you there!