Lecture: Underexposed Photos

How to Lighten Photos

First, let's see how to quickly fix an underexposed image. Here's a photo shot at Niagara Falls. It was a dark, cloudy day to begin with, but the underexposed image makes it look even darker than it actually was:

Step 1: Add A Levels Adjustment Layer

With the image newly opened in Photoshop, click on the New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel:

Choose a Levels adjustment layer from the list that appears. Technically you could choose any of the adjustment layers for this technique, but we'll use Levels because it's one of the most popular and commonly used image adjustments:

For Photoshop CS4 and CS5 users, the histogram and other options for the Levels adjustment layer will appear in the Adjustments panel. You can leave the Adjustments panel open on your screen but again, just ignore it because there's no need to make any changes.

If we look in the Layers panel, we see that we now have a Levels adjustment layer, which Photoshop named "Levels 1", sitting above our image on the Background layer:

Step 2: Change The Blend Mode Of The Adjustment Layer To Screen

To brighten the image at this point, all we need to do is change the blend mode of the adjustment layer from Normal to Screen. You'll find the blend mode option in the top left corner of the Layers panel:

The Screen blend mode is one of several layer blend modes that lighten an image, and simply by adding a Levels adjustment layer and changing its blend mode to Screen, the underexposed photo now appears brighter. We can start to see more detail in the darker areas, especially in the trees which appeared almost black initially: