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Bring light in the darkness
Catherine Lucas, Digital ScrapperEditorial Deck Crewmember
We start off with opening a picture we want to work on. A sad picture indeed, way too dark. Lets see if there is something more.
As you can see the whole picture is dark because it was taken in low light conditions in a forest. Just as in the old darkroom days we can try to fix this picture and bring out the light of the darkness. We will go to the Edit menu, and choose fill.
The fill dialogue box has several options. We will fill the whole picture with 50% gray. That will put a layer on our picture, and with the right blending it will brighten up the picture. So choose 50% gray and click OK. Blending sits under the Mode menu. 
Choosing 50% gray alone is not enough. If you would fill your layer with gray you would see just a gray layer. Instead we need to "blend" the color with the layer. You can see an option Color Dodge in the Mode scroll pane. That means that the gray will be applied and worked in with the existing colors in your picture. It will not just fill the whole layer with gray, but blend darker and lighter spots differently. You can try the difference by choosing fill and "normal", you will see your picture as a gray field. Hit control-z or apple-z to undo, and choose color dodge. You will see the difference. 
We choose mode "color dodge", and then start playing. I rarely use the full 100%. I usually try in small steps, if the picture is severely under lighted, I will start off at 50%, hit OK and see what it does to the picture. If it is still too dark, add in steps of 10 till you think your picture is satisfying. When some of the highlighted (pale) areas in your picture start to become too white and overexposed you cannot go further. 
You can see in my picture that some of the white spots in between the leaves start to go off too white, so I have to stop here. I made this picture a lot lighter. Remember, you cannot always make a bad picture good. If your starting picture is lousy, you can alter it a bit, but it stays an altered picture. It depends on how badly you want the picture and what its value is in your scrapbook. If you take a picture of Paul McCartney in a pub and it is under lighted, you will try to alter it. It will stay under lighted, but you will want to keep the picture anyway. 
You can also use this technique on pictures that are partially under lighted, due to shadows. We will use the same base but add a selection to choose which part of the picture we want to change.
We will take our picture and under the layer menu choose Layer from Background. That will make a duplicate of our background layer. If you look in your layers palette, you now have two layers.
We will take out the color of the copied background layer, to make it easy for us to make simple selection. Check whether the copied layer is selected (blue) in the palette. Under the Image menu go to adjustments - Desaturate. You will see that your top layer becomes black and white.
To make an easy selection possible we will go (with the gray top layer still selected) to the Filter Menu and choose Blur-Gaussian Blur
Enter a high value in the preview pane, like 85 or 90, so you only will see black and grey in your picture, very vaguely. Click OK and select the darkest parts of your gray layer with the magic wand tool. Value can be set on 32.
When most of the darkest parts are selected we will feather the selection under the Selection
We will choose a feather value of 50, so there is a big transition zone.
The next step after feathering our selection is to remove the gray layer. Don't worry about the selection made, it will stay in the picture until you hit the deselect menu. We will not deselect, we will just drag the background copy to the little trashcan in the layers palette. 
Click and hold the thumbnail in the palette and drag it until the trash can lights up, let go of the mouse and you should have removed the top layer. 
What you have now is the colored background layer, with a selection that is feathered. We will now do the fill procedure with gray 50% until the result is looking good in your eyes. Don't overdo it or you will get a very unnatural result. Go in small steps. If you don't like the result at all or your picture cannot be turned into a good one, you can undo several steps in the history palette. The higher in the history palette you click, the more steps you go back. So we have now brought out some light in the before totally dark ceiling of the garden shed.
The final word on this is that you still have to try to take good pictures. You can alter some things in your image programs, but not everything. This simple technique is used frequently, though, because in the digital world, lots of pictures are partially under lighted and have hidden features in the dark shadows of your pictures.
Don't hesitate to ask me questions if you need more explanation - there are no stupid questions!
Catherine Lucas
editor@ssreflections.com
Digital Scrapping
Editorial Deck Crewmember
S.S. Reflections, Inc.
