How to Do Everything With Your Scanner- P42 pdf

Generally, these tools work on the mid-range areas of your photo, leaving the light and dark areas alone.. FIGURE 10-31 A photo before the light and dark areas are enhanced CHAPTER 10:

adjustment, enhancement tools, or histograms They vary in complexity depending on

your image-editing program

Generally, these tools work on the mid-range areas of your photo, leaving the light and dark areas alone These tools can be very effective for scanned photos

PhotoSuite 4 has an Enhance feature that allows you to perform this type of adjustment with a single mouse click Figures 10-31 and 10-32 illustrate the use of this tool

FIGURE 10-31 A photo before the light and dark areas are enhanced

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FIGURE 10-32 A photo after the light and dark areas have been enhanced using the

PhotoSuite 4 Enhance feature

Working on Light and Dark Areas of a Photo

There might be times when you want to apply a correction tool to specific areas of a photo to make that portion lighter or darker Image-editing tools that allow you to do

this are sometimes referred to as touchup brushes.

For example, if you’ve photographed a scene with a recessed area, it might work well simply to lighten the shadowed portion This process can be tricky Save the

photo before experimenting with the tool, so you can use the Undo button to restore

the photo to its original light and dark area In Figure 10-33, the brightness and contrast settings are set at an optimum level for displaying most of the photo;

however, more detail is apparent in the recessed areas of the motorcycle when a touchup brush is used selectively to lighten that area, as shown in Figure 10-34

FIGURE 10-33 Much of the detail in the dark areas of the photo is lost

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FIGURE 10-34 Lightening with the touchup tools brings out this detail.

To locate tools within your image-editing program that allow you to lighten or darken an area of your photo selectively, try consulting the Help menu using the keywords “lighten” or “darken.”

Colorizing and Tinting Images

Color tools allow you to both better capture images as they actually appear, and to artistically enhance photos to reflect your own interpretation of scenes and subjects

As with most of the other techniques discussed in this chapter, color correction and enhancement requires patient trial and error Just a few years ago, this technology was the exclusive purview of professional photographers with high-end equipment Now the tools contained with most mid-level software (such as PhotoSuite and

PhotoDeluxe) are amazingly simple to master

Using a Color Adjustment Filter

A color adjustment filter tool allows you to compensate for green or red tones on your subjects It can also compensate for a reddish cast that might appear on incorrectly processed photos You can even compensate for tonal differences that appear between

a scanned original and a copy you produce on your color printer

Correcting Color with the RGB Tool

If your original photo has an odd color cast—say a green tint from poor indoor lighting or a red tint from incorrect processing—you can correct it using an RGB filter Most image-editing programs include this tool Try searching the Help menu of your image-editing program under “RGB.”

A picture of the RGB color adjustment filter included with the PhotoSuite program appears in Figure 10-35 This filter has three slide bars allowing you to adjust the levels of the following hues:

■ Cyan-Red

■ Magenta-Green

■ Yellow-Blue

FIGURE 10-35 The color-adjustment tool found in the PhotoSuite 4 program

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