another photo thread – need help

[XDC MadHippy]

OK, I got some photos that are a bit dark. can anybody advise on how to brighten them up in photoshop? I turned up the brightness and contrast but it leaves the pic all grainy (if grainy is a word 😕 )

I have photoshop CS version 8

cheers

[Seedubs]

What you need to do is as follows, I have CS2 mind you so not sure if it will be the same,

Simply go to ‘Image’ ‘Adjustments’ and click ‘auto levels’ or if you are feeling confident choose ‘levels’ and manually adjust them.

Then to reduce the noise (grain) you need this little program (neat Image):

http://www.neatimage.com/download.html

Its fairly easy to use, open the picture, use the default settings, it looks at your picture and reduces the noise and saves it under a different name.

Also always save your pictures under a new name, so if you mess up you have the original still.

(One more thing, if your camera has it (which I doubt) shoot in RAW mode as you can adjust the exposure and settings better afterwards)

Hope this helps!

[Lensman]

RAW mode rocks. I’ve had my EOS 350 for a few months and not really bothered with RAW at all until over Christmas. I needed to take a photo of our house Christmas lights. Shooting in straight JPEG, irrespective of exposure, gave a distinct red/yellow tint to the underexposed parts of image(house, garage door etc). Shooting in RAW , however, let me sort this out really well. I’ll probably do everything RAW from now on.

[XDCsPUNKer]

only prob with RAW is ;it eats up your hard drive space 😕

[Lensman]

Yeah that’s true – worse it eats up your memory card (~8Mb/image vs 2-3Mb).

I’ve got a 160Gb primary disk and a 250Gb USB2/Firewire external for backups so should be alright. I’m considering whether to simply ditch the raw files once I’ve processed them and turned into something nice.

[Seedubs]

True, but its not such a problem as it once was, most people have pretty big drives these days and SD Memory etc is pretty cheap. I have 2 Gig of SD for the camera and about 400 Gig of space and I have plenty of space left.

Besides, I only use RAW when I think I am going to need to adjust the picture quite alot, low light environments etc, or for images that I am actually trying to capture, rather than just out pointing and shooting.

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