Tutorial: AKVIS Enhancer

Correction of a Dark Picture

Jean-Claude Grégoire offers us a tutorial on how to improve a photo with uneven exposure.

Jean-Claude wrote:

For this tutorial I used Adobe Photoshop and the AKVIS Enhancer and AKVIS Noise Buster plug-ins.

Even in very bad cases, the AKVIS Enhancer and AKVIS Noise Buster plug-ins can help you salvage underexposed pictures. In my collection, I have some seriously underexposed photos which, in the past, I tried to salvage with Adobe Photoshop. This was always a long and difficult work and I often needed to use several adjustment layers, or to go into another color mode, or both, without getting a satisfactory result each time. Now that I've discovered the AKVIS Enhancer and AKVIS Noise Buster plug-ins, I've decided to try my luck again with some of those bad pictures : I really was very impressed, because in a few minutes I often got better results than in hours of working with Photoshop alone.

So I decided to share my experience by writing a short tutorial for which I chose an underexposed picture taken last year by one of my grand daughters. She photographied her mother working at home with her laptop. Unfortunately, the flash didn't work and everybody thought the photo was good for the trash can.

• Step 1. I got the negative and scanned it. Actually, it was a very bad case and when processing the picture in Adobe Photoshop I couldn't get a fully acceptable result, even with the help of several adjustment layers and masks.
  
• Step 2. I load the photo in Adobe Photoshop - its size is 1868 * 1280 pixels and the resolution is 300 ppi. I call the AKVIS Enhancer plug-in (main menu: choose "Filter -> AKVIS -> Enhancer").
• Step 3. I get a new window with the default settings of the plug-in and I already can see an improved image.
  

  but I decide to go further and choose the following settings:
  - Shadows: 100;
  - Highlights: 0;
  - Level of detail: 0;
  - Lightness: 100.

  
• Step 4. I click on the apply button on the Control Panel, which applies the correction to the image and closes the plug-in.

  The image is better than the original, but as I am a perfectionist I'm not entirely satisfied with it because, there is too much noise in the darker parts of the picture.

  
• Step 5. It's now necessary to reduce this noise. For this purpose I used the program AKVIS Noise Buster.

  I saved the image. Maybe it's not a "chef d'oeuvre", but nevertheless it's a very good picture!

  
• Step 6. The image shows the difference before and after processing - as described above - with the AKVIS Enhancer and the AKVIS Noise Buster plug-ins.
  
  Original photo and result

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