Sue July 12th, 2007

If you aren’t a very good photographer (like me) and only have a point-and-shoot camera (like me again) - you often get this sort of thing happening in your photos…

Most of the time I used to just delete them. Then David Hooper, ACD’s resident genius, developed the Shadows and Highlights tool . It made that photo look like this…

The great thing about this tool is that you can brighten dark areas without loosing the existing bits that are ok, like the sky and clouds.

In ACDSee Pro 2, the Shadows and Highlights tool now has two new tabs that make it really easy to get good results. My favorite is the Advanced tab. Here are my settings:

You start by dragging the Brighten Compression slider to the right to create a Custom curve. You will see the orange curve come up as the dark areas in your photo get brighter. You can then click and drag the actual curve around. I find that if you match your orange curve closely to the gray one, it is almost perfect. If you go over the gray, it shows bright pink and this is a warning that you are clipping some pixels.

To make sure that the light areas of your photo don’t loose richness or color, you can then drag the Darken Compression slider, which affects the bottom half of the graph, to the right.

Sue

P.S. I’m the technical writer at ACD.

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• ACDSee Pro 2 , ACDSee Tutorials , Photo Editing