This is a group picture I took of the softball team in 2010. I ended up using a different picture in the end, because this one had some nasty shadows cast across two of the players faces. Here’s a tip: hats off.

Anyhow, what if you don’t have the luxury of using a different picture? Well, you can do some work in Lightroom to help selectively brighten areas of an image. In this case, you can brighten up a shadow cast on a face by a hat.

The Tool – Adjustment Brush

The tool we want to use is the adjustment brush (shortcut K). This allows you to paint over a small portion of an image and then selectively apply an adjustment (like Exposure or Brightness) to that area only.

Looking at this image, there were two regions of shadow on #3′s face. The top of her face has a deep shadow cast by her visor, and the right side of her face and her neck has a more shallow shadow.

With this first adjustment brush, I painted only over the darker shadow and then applied a little bit of brightness and positive exposure.

Next, I painted over the second shadow. I applied a more gentle brightness modification here, just to raise the shadow a little bit.

Why both shadows? Based on the lighting, you’re going to have shadows – you can’t avoid that. What we’re trying to do here, though, is make them less harsh.

For the image to look “normal” and make sense, we still need the shadows and we need to have a relationship between the shadows and the non-shaded parts. So we want to keep a relative contrast between the dark shadow, the light shadow, and the non-shaded part. We don’t want to brighten up the dark shadow and make it look the same as the light shadow, because that would then look a bit strange.

Before and After

Here’s our final result.

Drastic? Nope. But there’s a distinct brightening of the top of the face, and there’s a little more detail present in the eyes.

You may notice that there’s also an increased level of noise in the area – that’s an unfortunate side effect of brightening deep shadows. That’s also another reason why we don’t want to overbrighten the shadow, because the brighter it gets the more noise you’ll see.

Some Tips

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Color within the lines. When you use the adjustment brush to color the shadowy area, make sure that you completely cover the shadow but don’t move onto the brighter area. You don’t want to inadvertently brighten an unshadowed area, because it certainly won’t look right.

Don’t overdo it. Again, you’re not trying to eliminate the shadow. You’re just trying to lighten it a bit so you can see some more detail.

Fix these things in-camera if you can. You’ll rarely be 100% satisfied with this kind of fix. It’s better if you can do things in camera to help eliminate and lessen these shadows. The next picture I took I used a fill flash to help lessen the shadows. It also helps to have people tilt their caps/visors up a bit or lift their head up. This prevents the shadow from going so far down their face.

Here we’ve got the same, old underexposed image. After one more post, we just might be done with it for good.

But I felt that to really see the unique aspects of each brightening tool in Lightroom, we should work with the same image throughout. If you jumped in here and you want to go back and read through the entire tutorial, start with the front page: Three Ways to Brighten Images in Lightroom: Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness.

By the end of this tutorial, though, one thing is clear: each brightening tool has advantages and each one has drawbacks. In some cases, a little tweak from one slider will yield a great image. But if your image is a little more underexposed (like this one), you’ll probably get the best results from a combination of the three tools.

Keep reading…

If you’ve been following along with our tutorial about brightening images in Lightroom, you may no longer think this is a nice picture. You may be sick and tired of looking at it. Well… too bad!

So far, we’ve looked at how the Exposure slider and the Fill Light settings can brighten an image in Lightroom. The final tool to look at is Brightness. So let’s take a look at a few examples and then see what we can deduce about Brightness.

You can download the the original image in DNG format if you’d like to play along.

Keep reading…

We’ve got a decent image here. Nice posing and facial expressions. I love the two guys clasping hands on the right-hand side.

There’s just one problem. The picture is a tad dark. Sure could use a little fill light. Hey, wait a minute… doesn’t Lightroom have a setting called “Fill Light”? Wonder if that would do.

Using this image as an example (download the original to play along), we’ll take a look at how the Fill Light setting operates and what makes it different from the Exposure slider and the Brightness setting.

First, let’s look at a few example settings. Then, let’s think about what general points we can derive from them about using the Fill Light tool. Keep reading…

This picture is nice, but we’ve got a little problem. It’s a tad dark. Not severely underexposed, but the curtains are thoroughly blacked out and the subjects are a little underexposed – maybe one to two stops. How do we fix it?

The first tool we’ll look at is the Exposure slider. You can download the original image if you’d like to play along. Also, check the table of contents of this tutorial for links to the other tools that you can use to brighten an image.

First, let’s walk through a couple example settings and see what happens. Then, we’ll think a little bit about what makes the Exposure slider a unique tool distinct from Fill Light and Brightness. Keep reading…

It happens to the best of us. You snap a bunch of pictures, you take them home and put them on your computer, and you notice that they’re all a tad… dark. Doh!

Now many people would just upload them to Facebook or Flickr anyway. That’s just the way it is… right? Nope! This is one of the simplest, but probably the most important, “retouching” that you can do with image processing software like Adobe Lightroom. There are six settings that you can adjust which together Lightroom calls “Basic Tone,” and three of these (Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness) all go about brightening an image in slightly different ways. Keep reading…