Learn how to adjust overexposed photos in this comprehensive guide that covers methods such as using brightness contrast, levels adjustment, curves, and exposure alterations. Discover how each method impacts different elements of an image and why it's crucial to capture the best possible images in-camera to maintain the quality during editing.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates the process of adjusting an overexposed photo using various methods, including: altering brightness and contrast, levels adjustment, manipulating curves, and changing the exposure, offset, and gamma correction.
- While all these methods can significantly improve the exposure of an overexposed image, the results may not be perfect, particularly in preserving highlighted details. Hence, it's always recommended to capture the image as accurately as possible in-camera.
- The article emphasizes the importance of having good exposure values in camera to retain all the necessary details in a photo. The inability to recover lost details, such as clouds in an overexposed sky, highlights the limitations of post-photo adjustments.
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In this video, we will be continuing working with exposure adjustments on photos. Let's begin by opening up a photo.
We'll go to File > Open**, and then in our Lesson 2 – Editing Photos folder, we'll select Buildings Overexposed**, and click Open**. As you can tell from this image, it is extremely overexposed. We’ve lost all definition in our sky, and even our white building here is beginning to fade into the white sky behind it.
Therefore, we're going to have to do some drastic adjustments to this image to get it looking right. Let's begin by changing our background and titling it as the Photo Original**. We'll double-click and type in Building Overexposed Original**, and hit ENTER**.
Next, we'll copy this layer using CTRL + C and paste it using CTRL + V**, and let's lock Building Overexposed Original with the Lock icon. Next, let's change the title of our layer to Building Overexposed Adjusted**, and hit ENTER**. Similar to the previous video, we'll be changing this exposure with Brightness/Contrast**.
Therefore, we can go to our Adjustments Panel and select Brightness/Contrast**. I'll lower the brightness a little bit until things look more properly exposed, and I'll add a little bit more contrast in our image. This is now starting to look a little bit more normal, but I still lost a lot of the definition of the sky that I can't recover from this image.
Next, let's try adjusting the brightness and exposure of this image with a different type of adjustment. Let's first hide our Brightness/Contrast layer by clicking on the eye icon, and next let's click back to Building Overexposed Adjusted layer, and we'll add a different adjustment. This time, let's add the adjustment for Levels**, found by the second icon.
We essentially get a histogram where we can slide our desired levels of black and shadows on the left all the way to whites and highlights on the right. So by making these adjustments, we can properly expose our photo. The first thing we want to do is drag our shadows up towards the bottom of the line so that our shadows aren't too blown out.
Ideally, we would want to raise our highlights even higher so that we capture some of the clipped-off white, but we don't have the ability to go any higher than 255, meaning that information is lost in the image. That being said, we can drag our midtones up a little bit higher so that we bring our midtones down a little bit and they're a little darker. The final thing that we can do is adjust our highlights and bring them down a little bit with this slider below, and we'll just darken the image a little.
Therefore, this is how we might adjust this photo for being overexposed using the Levels adjustment. Let's now hide the Levels adjustment and review another one. We'll click back on Building Overexposed Adjusted**, and we'll again go to Adjustments**, and this time we'll select Curves**.
**Curves works in a similar way where again you have shadows on the left, highlights on the right. However, with this we can add points to the curve of our exposure and give them different values. I'll add points on the bottom quarter and the top quarter, and if we click and drag these around—dragging down will decrease the exposure and dragging up will increase the exposure. Working with Curves can be a little tricky and takes a little bit of practice.
Let's add one more midpoint here and drag it down a little to darken some of our midtones and shadows, and finally I'm just going to drag the top point, signifying our whites and our brightest parts, down just a little bit. Feel free to play with these points and adjust them as needed. With the Curves adjustment, we have lots of different opportunities to make changes to our image and really drag around and play as it's appropriate.
Let's now hide this adjustment layer and again click on our Building Overexposed Adjusted to do another adjustment. The final adjustment we'll be doing on our photo—found again in the Adjustments Panel**—is Exposure**, shown with the plus and minus box. We'll click on this, and again we see that another layer with a mask has been added. The way that this adjustment works is by changing the Exposure**, Offset**, and Gamma Correction**, corresponding mostly to our highlights in the Exposure, our shadows in the Offset, and our midtones in the Gamma Correction.
While adjusting each of these does affect the other parts of our image, they mostly correlate to those. Therefore, starting on our Exposure**, if we move the exposure down, we'll see the entire image—but mostly the highlights—decrease. In addition, as you'll notice, if we drag our slider, we very quickly lose or gain exposure.
Dragging it only a third of the way to the left, I've lost a lot of exposure in my image. Therefore, let's set this back to zero by double-clicking, typing zero, and pressing Enter**. Rather than dragging the slider left and right to adjust exposure, another way is by typing the desired number, or if I hover over the title of the adjustment I'm making, I'll see the icon with the hand and two arrows. This lets me adjust more specifically using a longer slider.
Therefore, if I drag to the left, it moves more slowly to the left, or to the right. In this instance, I'll drag a little bit to the left. For our Offset**, I want to decrease those shadows a little bit more. And finally, for our Gamma Correction**—since it corresponds to our midtones—moving it left actually increases the exposure of them.
Therefore, I'll want to move it to the right a little bit. While it's not perfect, it does give you an example of how you might use Exposure for an image. Let's now click on the eye icon to see our original image, and while it's not perfect, it does look better.
I think, of all these adjustments, Brightness/Contrast probably gave us the best look for our image—although we do have the capacity to stack multiple adjustment layers on top of each other and work with all of them to get the image we desire. The last thing we want to go over is proper exposure. If we go to File > Open**, we'll see that we have a Buildings Properly Exposed.jpg in our folder.
Let's open this. While it's not the exact same photo, it was taken at the same time with better exposure values in camera. The benefit of this is that we get all the information needed for this photo.
When photos are overexposed, we can lose a lot of the detail in the highlights of the image. Unfortunately, adjusting our exposure levels and making other changes doesn’t allow us to get some of that highlight information back—such as these clouds. For example, if we go to the last file, we'll see that no matter what we do, we can't add clouds here simply by adjusting the adjustments.
Therefore, it is important if you're out taking photos to get the image as perfect as you can within the camera so that you have more opportunity to adjust the image after and perfect it. Finally, let's save our file. Go to File > Save As**, and we'll change the name to Buildings Overexposed Adjusted**, and click Save or press ENTER**. And again, press ENTER to confirm.
In the next video, we'll be working with highlights and shadows. See you there!