Final - How to adjust the forground when it is too dark

So you've taken this picture and you get home and it's great...but you can't see you and your handsome husband. All is not lost, with a few steps you can brighten everyone's smile.



Although the actual numbers may vary for each photograph,the process can work for a wide range of photographs. After you have opened the photo you want to work on, do the following:
1. Click on magic wand (W). Looks like a wand with a star burst around it. You should now have a magic wand icon in the top left of the screen, under "file"

At the top of the screen there are several setting you will need to decide on

-This first is a series of boxes, it should default to single box, "new selection"

-Next is the "tolerance", 50% is a good place to start and depending on your photo, you will need to set this differently. The higher the percentage the higher it's sensitivity to the shades it will have. I like to think of it as 1% is general and 99% is specific.

-Anti-alias and contiguous should be checked or on, sample all layers should not be checked or off.

About now you are probably thinking to yourself that there has got to be an easier way...in some cases there are. For this photo I found by using the Brightness/contrast, it was washing out the background with the very bright glacier. I adjusted the Contrast down and the brightness up. Even with some tweaks with Curves and Hue/saturation it was hard to get a good result...let me show you another way to bring the foreground into view. Picture below shows my attempt to adjust the fore mentioned way.



-Now with the magic wand selected click on the object you want to highlight, you will get marching ants around the object. You may get luck, unlike me and have ONLY your object get captured. My photo also found the trees in the foreground...the look was horrible after doing some adjustment. See the photo below for what happened, the little bit of frost on the trees near by were brightened up too much.



2. Let's try another approach of grabbing what we want. Click on the Magnetic Lasso Tool (L). Looks like a metal hanger with a horseshoe shaped magnet.

-Now follow the outline of your object, in this case my husband and I. I find clicking to force a anchor point is useful to ensure that the magic wand doesn't get away from you. Make sure to have your last anchor point meet up with your first to end the magic wand action.

-Go to: Images...adjustments...curves. Once in curves I set the output to 40 and the input to 10. You can adjust by typing in values, or the more fun way is the grab the line on the graph and move it around up...down...left...right.

-Then I went to: Images...adjustments...hue/saturation. I set hue to +14 and saturation to +10. This helped bring back the color in the photo.

At this point we are only editing the lassoed object.

-Depending on the border area around your selected area and the background there may be some obvious places that got changed that shouldn't have. Here is a way to fix this problem.

3.Click on the Clone stamp tool (S). Looks like a stamp. You will need to set some parameters for your stamp tool depending on your photo. For mine, I had some fairly detailed stuff around us and I only needed to fix a thin area around our lassoed area.

-Select your brush size, you can also use the quick keys by using the ] to increase and [ to decrease.

-I left mode as "normal"

-Opacity I had set to 42%. This is set to how dense you want the clone stamp tool to be. It's like water colors being the low numbers and the higher percentages being the latex paint that you can't see through.

-I left flow on 100% and the aligned checked or on.

-Taking the cursor and hovering over an area that I want to clone. While holding down the ALT key and left clicking on the mouse, you have now cloned that area and can stamp the area you want to fix. You can click to your hearts content or hold down the left click button on the mouse and move it around. I find the Clone stamp tool will only hold it's clone for a short time and then you will need to reset your clone stamp again. After all cloning is done, your photo should be done...at least for this process. I strongly recommend zooming in (C++) to do your cloning, as this will help you stay more in control of where you are stamping. Below is the finished photo.



You may also notice that I removed my husbands hobo looking ripped pouch and the water bottle he was holding. I also for fun got rid of my waist strap from my pack...couldn't let him have a the fun!