Correction of a Dark Picture

Jean-Claude Grégoire offers us a tutorial on how to improve a photo with uneven exposure. He used the AKVIS Enhancer and AKVIS Noise Buster plug-ins in Adobe Photoshop.

Jean-Claude wrote:

"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 photographed 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. Jean-Claude scanned the photo. Actually, it was a very bad case and when processing the picture in Adobe Photoshop he "couldn't get a fully acceptable result, even with the help of several adjustment layers and masks."
  
• Step 2. He called the AKVIS Enhancer plug-in (Filter -> AKVIS -> Enhancer) and selected Improve Detail mode.
• Step 3. Even the default settings gave a good result.
  

  But he decided to go further and adjusted the settings.

  
• Step 4. The button applies the correction to the image and closes the plugin.

  Jean-Claude writes: "The image is now 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 remove the noise with AKVIS Noise Buster. A detailed description of how to reduce digital noise in this photo can be found here.

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

  

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