Freelance Photographer
Seeing things differently
A taker of Photographs - A creator of images

Photoshop and the Photographer...

Photoshop should not be used as a crutch, but there are situations where it would be impossible to get it right in the camera... This tutorial will show you one way of making the most out of one of those situations

I was confronted with this tricky interior, but in my mind I saw it had potential, even though I knew there was no way I could get a satisfactory image straight from the camera...

The problems, as you will see, are mixed lighting of various strengths, heavy shadow areas, and an overall coldness... I visualised a more ancient version of an ideal home type image, so that is what I'm aiming to produce in this tutorial... This will be done with adjustment layers only, so it should be achievable in all versions of Photoshop or Elements, and indeed any other digital imaging software that allows adjustment layers...

Please feel free to download the image below to practice on...

The Original Scene as the Camera Saw It...

First we will identify the mixed lighting problem, which may help you spot these situations... Our eyes and brain have a way of evening this kind of mixed lighting out so we don't notice the difference in the colour temperature of the light, but the camera does...

You will notice the warm area just above the old stove where this was lit by a halogen spotlight, and the cold area on the back wall where the daylight has come in through the window, which is just out of view on the bottom left... The first job will to be to try and even this lighting out for a more uniform look...

We use the marquee selection tool to select the areas that need adjusting, then feather those selections so we have no hard edges... This goes for all selections on all of the layers below, only the amount of feathering will be adjusted to suit the area that is being adjusted... Trial and error is the best for the feathering as the amount depends on, not only the size of the image in pixels but also the images resolution...

The feather tool can be found in CS3 by choosing Select... Modify... and Feather from the menu bar... For other programs you will have to find them on your own I´m afraid...

Once you have the areas selected and feathered as in the next two images below, you then click on the adjustment layer icon move the sliders to try and get the selected areas to match the rest of the image... I have shown the settings I used for the tutorial, but you may decide on something different...

Now the colour balance has been evened out a bit it´s time to sort out the exposure... We need to bring a little more detail into some of those darker areas of the image... Again we use the selction tool and feathering method used above for the levels and curves layers shown below (Next three images)...

In the image below the dark area in the corner has been selected and lightened using levels... You could just have easily chosen a curves layer to do the same job...

These are the layers you should end up with if you have downloaded the original image and followed the instructions in this tutorial...

• The background layer is of course the original imge...

• The layer Color Balance 1 was used to adjust the large cold looking area on the right of the original image to match the main part of the image...

• The layer Color Balance 2 was used to adjust the smaller warm looking area in the middle of the original image to match the main part of the image...

• The layer Levels 1 was used to lighten the large area on left of the original image...

• The layer Levels 2 was used to lighten the small dark area in the middle of the original image...

• The layer Curves 1 was used to lighten the raftered ceiling...

• The Hue/Saturation was used to lighted the colour of the pat of butter on the table

Finished Image

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