How To Fix an UnderExposed Photo Like a Pro

this is day 21 of 30 tutorials and today's editing challenge is all about fixing underexposed images and as always i have some pro tips for achieving awesome results so here's the image i'm going to show how to demonstrate fixing underexposed images in and then i want to show you how i would edit the original raw file so you can see the editing challenges between jpeg and raw because they will both give you different challenges and one the raw file intent will give you a better quality image in the long run because we're kind of limited what we can do in as far as fixing an underexposed image because one of the main challenges of underexposed images is the loss of detail in the shadows and when you shoot with jpeg it tends to lose more detail in the shadows versus a raw file not only that but when you go to correct the under exposure by making the image brighter you bring out the digital noise in the image and you tend to add more digital noise in the process as well as digital artifacts which creates another editing challenge because we really don't have a true denoise tool in we have one but it's not that great so in with my jpeg image here the first thing i would do to fix this underexposed image is i would duplicate the layer and make an exposure adjustment so i'm going to go ahead and double click on the layer name here and rename it exposure now before we do that i just want to show you the histogram for this image here and i'm going to go ahead and click and pull this tab out and enlarge it so we can actually see this histogram so this is what a typical underexposed image looks like as far as the histogram goes so the histogram is a graph of the tonal range of your image so we have our shadows and our black points on the left midtones in the middle highlights and white points on the right and we have a huge gap right here so in most images you want a full range of detail from left to right but as you can see there's a gap here so that means there's information or detail missing in the image so we need to fill in that gap to fix the under exposure and when we do we're going to be stretching this histogram from left to right to fill in that gap but then we will have additional gaps in between the other points of the tonal range so long story short this means you're going to end up degrading the image and having a lower quality image versus an image where you nailed the exposure in camera so i always recommend trying to get the exposure as close to perfect in camera as possible so you can have a higher quality file and you'll have less editing to do because there's a lot of things we need to do to fix this underexposed image i'm going to go ahead and put this tab back inside of here so we can access that after so the tool that i want to use for adjusting the exposure is the levels tool and we have a lot of different tools that we can use to adjust the exposure but for underexposed images i like to use levels and let me show you why i'm going to come up here to colors and select levels so we have the histogram here as well and we see the gap over here on the right now the histogram does look different because we are using a different algorithm at least i was the last time i used levels so if yours looks like this and it looks different than this histogram just click on this icon here and then you'll get the histogram that looks like the one that was in your camera as well at the time that you took the photo so to fill in the gap we need to adjust the white point which is represented by this little marker right here the other thing we want to do is increase the overall exposure which i'm going to do first by grabbing this midpoint here and dragging it to the left as i do that's going to brighten up the image but it also lowers the contrast so when i grab my white point marker here and move it to the left to reset the white point and in case you're wondering the white point is the part of the image that is pure white so i'm going to bring that all the way over to the histogram the edge of it right here to fill in that gap and now we have a better exposed image the other thing that happened when i adjusted the white point is it helped the contrast so it's not as flat as it was before if you want to add a little bit more contrast you can adjust your black point you just want to keep in mind that any time you move the black or the white point into or inside the histogram like i did here for the black point you begin clipping detail so you don't want to go too far otherwise you're going to degrade your image even more so for example if i move the white point over here to the right all the information to the right of this has just been clipped and i lost all that detail so that's why i like to place this near or close to the edge of the histogram you don't always have to close it sometimes you may need to bring it a little bit further out if the white points are becoming too bright or parts of the image are becoming over exposed so i'm going to go ahead and click ok i'm going to grab my zoom tool so we can take a look at this image a little closer and we can now see the digital noise that was there under the dark shadows so now we need to try and remove that digital noise because it's kind of apparent now and it's kind of distracting from the overall image so let's duplicate this layer again and call it the noise we're going to go under filters enhance and select d speckle not sure why they called it d speckle instead of d noise but anyways this is the last settings that i used right here so the default is probably somewhere in here so i've increased the white level all the way to the right and the black level all the way to the left if we take a look at this box here we can see the before so that's the digital noise there and then the after so it's kind of removed it but in essence what it's done is it's taken that noise and merged or blended them together and kind of smoothed it out a little bit so it's not as sharp as it was before so i'm going to go ahead and click ok to apply that edit and it looks a little bit better we have some color banding in here which is another editing challenge so we're going to go ahead and zoom out just a little bit here and what i want to do is i want to work on the white balance of the image because i find the color is a little bit off it's a little bit too green and the other thing you may notice here is we have some discoloration here and it kind of looks muddied that's another effect of trying to fix an extremely underexposed image because there was not a lot of detail in here and this is what you're left with even with the hair here we can see it's kind of muddy so the exposure adjustment that i did was probably too much so one of the things i can do now is i can either start over or i can lower the exposure just a little bit to kind and counter that effect to darken up parts of the image i'm not going to do that i'm going to go ahead and leave that there and i'm going to leave the noise turned on as well let's create a new layer from here and let's call it white balance we're going to go up to colors and select color temperature and i want to adjust the intended temperature to the left because i find it's just a little bit too warm for my taste so here's the before and the after the other thing i'm noticing is there's a lot of green in her skin and her hair here so i want to bring some of that out and add a little bit of red i'm going to call this one green adjustment let's go up to colors and select color balance so to add red i'm going to adjust the cyan red here to the right not too much that might be a little bit too much i'm going to bring that down to about 1.5 so that's looking pretty good now the other thing that i'm noticing is especially when i'm zoomed out here i just used command or control plus shift plus j to zoom all the way out her eyes are a little bit too dark and i think it would be better if they're just a little bit brighter so let's go ahead and do that i'm going to go ahead and duplicate that layer and i'm going to call this one let's just call it eyes and i'm going to make a curves adjustment so i'm going to increase the highlights here and i'm going to add a little bit of contrast by bringing the linear line and the shadow area here down to make that part of the tonal range darker now overall the entire image has been affected but we're going to remove that edit and then apply it directly to the eyes with a layer mask so let's go ahead and add a black layer mask to remove that edit and then we can paint with our paintbrush with white to paint that edit back into just the eyes how cool is that all right so there's the before and the after so they're a little brighter not too much and if you find that your edit is too intense you can always lower the opacity of that layer to try and tone it down that way so that's a lot of layers and a lot of edits to try and fix an under exposed image and we still have some problems with this image especially in the hair and her arm right here so overall there's not much more we can do other than doing targeting with our editing in other words doing it dodging and burning so instead of doing the exposure on the entire image we should have done an exposure just in different parts of our subject so her face her arms and her hair all separately and adjusting the intensity of that edit differently for each part of the image that is if you want a higher quality image needless to say that's a lot of editing for an underexposed image but that's what you're left with and the challenge of underexposed images again i highly recommend trying to get that exposure done right in camera so now i'm going to switch to on my mac here so i can show you the raw edit in now as you know we cannot open raw files in but if you have a raw editor like dart table linked to you can begin the process of opening the raw file with and then when you close the editor it will then open the file in for further editing so i have my raw file of this image on my second monitor here so i'm going to click and drag it over to and once i release it will then begin opening up dark table so this isn't going to be a full tutorial on dart table it's just going to be an introduction of how you can edit a raw file and how it will give you a better result versus editing an underexposed jpeg file if you want to learn more about dark table i do have some tutorials on it in my youtube channel here so go ahead and check that out i'll put a link in the description below so the first thing that happens when you import a raw file into dart table is it's automatically applying edits which you can see over here in the history now this is the raw file and these are not my edits this is just what dark room or dark table is reading from the metadata in your raw file and then it's applying this information it's not creating this half hazardly and just doing it for the fun of it it's actually information it's getting from your camera so it's your camera that's actually applying these edits now i bring that up because one of the things you may want to turn off in this history of edits is the base curve so watch what happens to the image when i click on orientation the exposure of the shadows is much brighter and the detail in the hair is much crisper than it was before so i'm going to turn it off so it's much darker a lot more contrast versus not having that base curve turned on so this is a better starting point for fixing your underexposed images versus the jpeg file because we have more detail to work with versus that jpeg file even though the histogram shows right here there's a huge gap here there's still more information than the original jpeg file so the first thing i want to do is i want to do some basic adjustments and i'm going to increase the exposure to the right here and i think around one and a half stops is pretty good now if i go ahead and zoom in here we can see the transitions of colors on our arm here are much smoother than they were with the jpeg file they're not as muddy the same with the hair we don't have those color distortions that we had in the jpeg file we do have the digital noise but the digital noise tool and dart table is a hundred times better than in now before we get to removing the digital noise i do need to brighten up this image a little bit by adjusting the black and white points so i'm going to go to my levels tool here and i'm going to adjust the black and white points to brighten it up and add a little bit of contrast so now i'm closing that gap now take a look at the histogram here we can see that the histogram really doesn't have any gaps in it if we go back to here with the jpeg file and take a look at the histogram again we can see that the histogram is now filled in from the left to the right but look at these big gaps in the histogram all those gaps represent information that is missing detail not there that's what causes this part of the image to become muddied like this because there's not enough detail information in the jpeg file to create a smooth histogram so let's go back to dart table here the next thing i may want to do to improve the exposure is apply a curves adjustment so i love using the tone curve because it allows us to target our edits within specific tonal ranges of the image so we have our shadows here on the left mid tones in the middle and highlights on the right so if i click and drag up that's going to make the image brighter down it's going to make it darker so if i leave this anchor point right here i can target the shadows and then the highlights are not being affected you don't want to go too far in this situation otherwise the colors will become flat and the tone range will become flat as well so let's take a look at the before and after with that tone curve and it helps brighten up those shadows a little bit more maybe too much i'm just going to bring it down and just do a small adjustment so one more time just to make sure and that looks pretty good all right let's tackle the digital noise now i'm going to zoom in here and we can see all these different colored specs and that's the digital noise so i'm going to come up here and type in noise and we have several different options so the first one here is for astrophotography we have a surface blur here i'm not really sure what that one is i don't really use it the two that i use the most is the noise and raw denoise and that depends on the type of digital noise whether it's a color noise like rgb colors here or if it's more of a gray color and it also depends on the type of camera so you have to experiment with both to see which one will work best for you so let's compare these two together real quick i'm going to click right here to turn on this the noise filter and as soon as i turn it on boom that digital noise is gone so that actually worked pretty good just with the defaults i'm gonna go ahead and turn this one off and let's take a look at the raw denoise filter and that one is a lot more intense and it removed more digital noise but what it's also done is it smoothed out the digital noise a lot more and her skin now is starting to look a little bit unnatural because it's too smooth so either filter will work for this particular image i like raw denoise because it gives me more flexibility on where to adjust the digital noise based on how fine or coarse that digital noise is or the details in the image and we can increase the smoothness or increase the amount of noise to reduce the smoothness so all we have to do is drop this midline down it's going to add some digital noise back but now the overall image is not as smooth as it was before so there's the before and the after we can also target the noise whether it's coarse or fine here as well but i think that option right there does a pretty good job so we do have some additional editing to do for this image for example i probably brighten up the eyes a little bit and maybe add a vignette and maybe sharpen the image a little bit let's go ahead and bring this into now by closing dart table and once you close it will do its magic and open the image automatically for you inside of so we've already gone over some of the dodging and the burning and i've done other tutorials on sharpening so we're not going to do that now what i want to do is i want to export this file with export as so you can see the before and after of a raw file versus a jpeg file i also need to change the file format to jpeg i'm going to go back into the windows version of here okay i'm going to set it to 90. that should be good enough quality for this experiment so i'm going to grab the file here and i'm going to click and drag it over my document so it's added as a new layer so here is the raw file and the jpeg file so this image here is a little flatter than this one this one has more contrast but if we zoom in and take a look at the shadow areas in here and compare it to the raw file we can see that the discoloration in this area is not as prominent as it is here so for me i prefer this particular edit of the under exposure because it looks a lot more natural than this one here i can always come in to this image now and increase the contrast if i find it to be too flat so let me know which edit you prefer the raw or the jpeg and let me know in the comments below and if you'd like to learn how to fix over exposed images check out that tutorial there to your left thanks for listening and have an awesome day

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 2,879

Keywords: parker photographic, gimp tutorials, gimp editing, gimp underexposed photo, gimp editing tutorial, gimp editing photos, gimp photo editing, gimp photo editing for beginners, gimp photo editing tutorials for beginners, gimp photo editing effects

Id: qvC_SYRk5SM

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021