GIMP Tutorial: Fix Dark Photos the RIGHT Way (Photo Editing Basics)

[Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and today I'm gonna be showing you how to lighten a very dark photo using something called a contrast mask but we're also gonna be using a couple other techniques on top of that to get the best possible final result and this is the final result here from the photo I did this is a photo of myself it was taken in a studio the lighting was very dark in the studio I think the camera person the photographer had the wrong settings on their camera not to mention the fact that this was a dark background a black background and the lighting wasn't the best lighting setup in the studio either so I'm gonna show you how to recover this image without it looking too noisy in the final result and so that it's also the best version for print but before I get into that I just want to direct you guys over to my website of course Davey's media design.com slash tutorials you'll see video and text tutorials on here and you can also visit our you dummy course photo editing from beginner to pro photo retoucher I'll put a link to that in the description as well as the links to our social media and also a link to the photo that you'll be using today since this is my photo I'll put a link on my website and you guys can download that photo directly and follow along or you can use your own photos so to start once you've downloaded your photo you're gonna want to go ahead and open it into so you can just go to file open and go ahead and this will pop up the open image dialog box find your photo on here this is my photo here mic studio photo dark and once you've found your photo go ahead and click open I'm gonna hit cancel actually cuz I already have this open but this is where it'll open it's gonna ask you if you want to convert this to giimpse basically native srgb format go ahead and hit convert on that before bringing it in and that'll bring it in as you see it here so now what I want to do once I brought it in here is scale this because this is a pretty large image as you can see 393 megabytes down here on the status bar and that's without any effects applied to this so what I'll do is go ahead and go to image scale image and I don't necessarily need this for anything specific but if you guys need this as a specific size you can go ahead and change it here but I'm just gonna change this to 1920 by 12 82 that's automatically adjusting to that because I have this chain linked right here which means this is scaling proportionately I also have the X&Y resolution set to 300 this is better for print if you're going to just be using this for the web you can go ahead and change this to 72 pixels per inch and here's the unit's right here so for demonstration purposes I'm gonna set - 72 but feel free to keep yours at 300 if you're using yours for print then hit scale okay so you can either grab the zoom tool from your toolbox or hit Z on your keyboard and then you can click and drag around this frame here the canvas to go ahead and bring this back into focus here to just zoom in on it and you'll notice now that my file size is 192 so that's decreased pretty significantly now what I'm gonna do is grab my crop tool and I want to crop this kind of like a portrait photo and so I'm going to make sure that this is set to thick so you can check this box here and I'm just going to set this to 1 to 1 then I'm going to click and drag and you'll see that this is creating a square because I do have this set to fixed and then you can go ahead and Center this up here on your subject and then double click to apply the crop and then you can just grab your move tool again now that we've done that we're going to go ahead and start our Corrections on the image so go ahead and click on your main image layer and you can change this to main photo if you want by double clicking on the name there otherwise you can just keep it as the default I'm gonna come over here to colors exposure and I've got my exposure turned up all the way to 2.75 and these are stops so this is 2.75 stops that's pretty high usually you don't need to go that high in this case it was pretty bad so I am going to just keep it at this pretty intense exposure increase but you can slide this slider to increase or decrease the amount of exposure you want to change it by and then you can hit the split view checkmark box if you're using 2 point nine point eight which by the way that's the version I'm using it's the development version of and it is going to be what 2.10 is going to be except they're working on bug fixes right now but you can go ahead and click and drag this split view preview area so this is the before this is the after and as you can see it's a lot brighter right now and I'll click OK and by the way if you are using an older version of you probably won't find the gaggle operations that I'm using in the same section so by gaggle operations I mean anything with the G next to it and I just use the gaggle operation for exposure however you can go to tools gaggle operation and that's going to bring up this drop down and you can scroll through here until you find the gaggle operation that you need to use and you should have all the gaggle operations you need in there but in the newer version again kind of integrated the gaggle operations within the older operations here so it's a little bit more seamless to use those gaggle operations now once I've applied that exposure the next thing I'm going to do is go to colors levels and I'm going to adjust the levels of this image and the reason I'm doing this is to add a little bit of contrast to the image and as you can tell this is already way too bright and so we do need to adjust the levels a little bit make this a little bit less bright and so I'm just going you slide this preview the split view area so I can see it before and after and that looks pretty decent to me we don't want to overdo the effect but I'll go ahead and click OK and that will go ahead and add a little bit of contrast it'll fix some of the levels on the image so it won't be so blown out looking so the next thing I'm gonna do is change the color temperature here and I'm going to do that by going to colors color temperature and again you can access this by going to the tools gaggle operation and choosing from the drop-down menu but what you want to do is choose your original temperatures so whatever this original photograph was set to by the photographer and then you also want to choose your intended temperature so that's maybe what the photographer was trying to achieve but maybe they missed the mark a little bit it does help if you know what kind of lamps were used at the time of your photo shoot and you can come over here and choose from some pre-selected color temperatures and these are a variety of different types of lamps here different types of lighting basically so you've got moonlight here you've got Verizon daylight you've got cool white daylight compact fluorescent lamps which is the option I chose and so that might be you know what the photographer originally set their camera to but maybe they made a mistake in the actual color of the lamps were 5,500 K in this case a d50 5 or a vertical daylight electronic flash it could also just be that you don't like the colors in the photo and you just want to maybe add some warmer colors to the photo or make the photo cooler and so you can see that this is the before and this is after and this really warms up my overall colors in my photo so go ahead and click OK to apply that and now we do have a slightly warmer color temperature on our photo so the next thing I'm going to do is go to colors color balance and I'm just going to click reset range that's gonna bring everything back to zero and I'm going to adjust my mid-tones my shadows and my highlights in my photo here and this is gonna be a pretty subtle effect just because I do want to just slightly adjust the colors of my photo here and I'm just doing this by eye until the photo looks a little bit better in my opinion and then I'll shift over to shadows and again if these have values already you can hit reset range and then I'll bring everything to zero and I don't want to overdo this and again you can use that split view to see you before and after and part of the reason I don't want to add too much changes too many changes here is because I don't want to revert back to how my image looked before we apply that color temperature but as you can see this photo on the right has a little bit more yellow just throughout the entire thing whereas this one on the left kind of subdues that extra yellow color and it's sort of normalizes the rest of the image and the colors do look a little better in my opinion so go ahead and click OK and that went ahead and applied a color balance adjustment to our image now what I want to do is make sure I'm clicked on my main photo layer go to filters enhance unsharp mask and this is just going to sharpen the look of our image a little bit and I've already got the settings to where I want them so I'll just go ahead and click OK but you can copy these if you want the same settings feel free to play with those sliders to get the settings you want though and so now our image is a little bit more sharpened here and the next thing I want to do is I want to get rid of this background because it's not evenly lit and the colors aren't even throughout and you could see some wrinkles in the backdrop here and so it just looks kind of amateur and so what I'm gonna do is right-click on this and go to add layer mask and I'm going to set initialize layer mask to two white full opacity and click add and then I'm going to grab my paintbrush tool and you can resize your paintbrush using the size slider or the brackets on your keyboard left and right brackets make sure your foreground color is set to black here and go ahead and just paint over everything you want to erase from this backdrop here now right now you'll notice that my brush is pretty large and the hardness is set 2 to 5 right here zero to 5 so that just means I have a pretty soft brush selected and it's going to give fuzzy borders to everything I erase you can see there's a fuzzy border right here where the transparency meets the background and by the way if you're not seeing transparency on the other side of this image you might need to right click on your image before you start and go to add alpha Channel and that'll go ahead and add transparency to your image but I'm going to increase the hardness of my brush and then also decrease the size of my brush once I'm ready to start erasing some of the details of the background here to make sure that this final result looks as good as possible so I'm just decreasing my brush using the brackets on my keyboard while I work so now what I'm gonna do is change my brush to a hard brush and go ahead and grab my zoom tool and click the zoom in and then you can grab your brush again and as I've mentioned in previous videos using a layer mask is considered non-destructive editing which means that you can actually paint back some of this if you screw it up by switching over to white and painting on the layer mask so for instance I erased a lot of that sleeve just now I can switch over change my color to white and if I paint that white on this layer mask you can see that shirt starts to come back that I accidentally erased too much of go ahead and switch this back to black and continue painting on my layer mask you alright once you've finished painting go ahead and grab your zoom tool by hitting Z on your keyboard then hold ctrl while you click to zoom out and now you can see the background has been erased here and I did take my time on the details just because in later steps here if you have any part of the background showing it will kind of screw it up and I I will grab my brush one last time and this is a huge brush obviously and I'm just making sure I didn't skip anything on the layer mask here alright and once we finished that step I just grab the move tool here go ahead and click on your main image layer here and duplicate it and then you can go ahead and right click on this and if you're confident that you are finished with the layer mask go ahead and click on apply a layer mask and that's just going to basically merge that layer mask with the original image on this layer so that now the image background has disappeared on this layer now the next thing I'm gonna do is create a contrast mask with this duplicated layer and so you can actually double click on this and just put contrast mask to change the name of this so to get started I'll go ahead and make sure I'm on this contrast mask layer and click on the layer mode and change it to overlay and then I'm going to come over here to colors desaturate desaturate and this mode is set to luminance here you can add the split view here as well if you want to see it before and after click OK and then go to colours invert and this really doesn't look that great but we're gonna go ahead and fix this in a second go to filters blur Gaussian blur and I have this set to about 15 for the X and Y and go ahead and click OK and that still doesn't look great and actually looks like I have a sunburn here so we do have to fix that so I'm gonna come over here to my contrast mask right click on it and go to add layer mask and then change this to grayscale copy of layer and click add and now you can see that's fixed add a little bit and now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and duplicate this main layer again I'm gonna duplicate it twice and for both of these layers I'm going to apply the layer mask and then I'm going to move this contrast layer the contrast mask layer below it and then I'm going to click on the first one and change it to saturation and that's going to keep the original saturation of this image overlaid on top of the contrast mask that we created which is going to help maintain some of the original colors and then we're also going to come over here and change this to hue and same thing we just said about the saturation layer whereas this maintains some of the saturation of the original layer this new layer will maintain some of the original hues so both of these kind of work together to maintain the original colors of this layer here and if I hide all the layers you can kind of see it before and after so we aren't quite done yet and the next thing I'm going to do is come over here and create a new layer and I'm going to name this black background and make sure this fill width is set to transparency and click OK move that below our main image layer here so it's the very bottom layer and I'm just going to fill this with my bucket fill tool make sure your color here is set to black and click OK and by the way if you do intend to print this make sure your black is created by coming over to CMYK and turning the CM and Y down all the way and then turning the K all the way up to 100 then click OK and go ahead and fill that black in here but the next thing I want to do is come back to my main photo here and go ahead and apply another color balance but this time I'm going to reset the range again I will be a little bit more intense with this one because given the effects the three other layers on top here the color balance has a slightly different effect for the final image here so basically what I've discovered is that the sort of more intense you get with this background with this color balance adjustment the more it shows up on the final image here and it does it does give it a cool effect and you can kind of see what I'm talking about as I'm applying this new color balance and you can click the preview button to see it before and after and what you'll notice is that the more blues I apply to this the more it makes things like my hair and pretty much all the shadowy areas kind of pop out a bit more and also anything with blue in it so my eyes are blue here and it's just hoping that to pop out and the same with green when I add a bit of green you can see kind of darkens some of the purples here and it just brings out some of the colors that are in this image and to me it just adds a bit more contrast but it also adds a little bit more of a dynamic look to some of the colors so here's before and here's after and you can see it has added some more contrast to the image here and in my opinion it's enhanced some of the colors from the image so go ahead and click OK and if you hide these other three layers you can see that my original layer is now really blue but when I apply these other effects to it we have maintained that original color from our image ok so the next thing I'm going to do is go to colors hue/saturation and I'm just going to turn down the saturation a little bit on here and this is just going to decrease some of the colors that we added to this layer here it's going to decrease some of the intensity of those colors which in turn is actually going to make this stand out a little bit more against the background here so you'll see that when I turn this up it gets a little bit more washed out looking but when I turn it down it creates a little bit more contrast we don't want to overdo this though so I'm just going to put this to around 17 and then click OK alright so the last thing I'm going to do is create a new layer and I'm gonna name this dampen over exposure and go ahead and set this fill with 2 transparency and click OK move this to the very top and my goal with this layer is I've got a little bit too much light coming from the left side here of this image or the right side of the person in the photo and so it's basically creating an uneven amount of light on this side and it's causing a little bit of overexposure on this side of the face and so what I'm going to do is grab my tool and make sure that this is set to foreground to transparent and that my foreground is set to black and my shape is set to linear and then on the stampin over exposure layer I'm going to click and drag and hold the control key to make sure this drags in a straight line and drag this gradient so that it just overlaps a little bit with this side of the face here so it's going to come all the way from the left and stop a little bit past the halfway point on the image and then I'll grab my move tool if I'm using two point nine point eight to solidify that gradient and then come over here to mode and change this to grain merge and that's a little bit too intense you can see this sides a little bit too saturated here versus this side so I'm going to go ahead and turn the opacity down on that and just until it's about even but I can do it before and after and you can see that this side had a ton of light on it and I know that with photography you do want one side to be a little brighter than the other but you don't want one side to be blown out so I've kind of used this as a way to just adjust how intense that other side is that that main fill light all right so now as you can see our photo is a lot brighter than the original and also our background looks a lot better here so this is a lot better studio portrait so once you finish here go to file export as or file export if you haven't exported this already and change this to whatever you want your file name to be go ahead and select your file type by extension down here there's all sorts of different file types I'll just save mine as a JPEG and hit export and if you're gonna print this you can keep the quality up at a hundred if you're gonna use this on the web you may want to reduce the quality to save some room on your website or whatever your hosting this image then go ahead and click export and there you have it so thanks for watching this tutorial if you liked it please subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design you can also visit us on our website at Davey's media designed.com slash tutorials and of course I'll include the links to enroll in our udemy course and also our social media links in the description so thanks for watching this tutorial and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 88,086

Keywords: gimp, gimp 2.9.8, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, fix dark images, lighten dark images, dark image fix, brighten dark image, photo editing basics, edit portrait photo, portrait photo lighting, light portrait photo, how to edit portrait photo, beginner photo editing, photo manipulation gimp, photoshop, contrast mask, studio lighting

Id: EFJ3AGreT4I

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018