Brightening/darkening parts of a colour image: LAB burning

[AdrianW]

Don't think I've seen this technique anywhere before - but I could be wrong ;-)

Maybe you have a picture that suffers from vignetting? Perhaps you have a shot which is just a little too light/dark in a certain area?

No doubt, many of you have tried to use Dodge/Burn on colour images - but have found the results are disappointing?

Well, the solution is quite easy - convert the image to LABcolor (possibly called YUV on some packages), then select only the Brightness (Y) channel. Now dodge and burn at will - this will alter the brightness of the colours, but not the colours themselves :-D

[philip_coggan]

Thanks Adrian - I'll try it out.

The way I've been using so far is to use the Brush with grey as the foreground colour and in C\olor Dodge (or Color Burn) mode. Control of the degree of dodging/burning can be via the percentage controls, or by using Edit>Fade. It will be interesting to compare.

Incidentally, you're quite right about the Dodge and Burn tools - they just don't work too good for colour images.

[BobTrips]

Can't find anything like this in PS Elements. Any clues?

[zto]

Hi Bob,

Fortenatly we can't choose Lab colours in PSE. Instead you can set the range to either shadows, midtones or highlight. Then set the Exspocure to a % that gives you the effect you want to have. I'm not sure if it is ecually good as working with lab colours, never tried it, but it works ok.

[Guzman]

Just to add that Corel Photo Paint10 has this (LAB)option for any that have this program
thanks for the tip Adrian will try this out
Regards Roland

[padam]

Maybe this can help: the version 8 of PS has a new feature called "shadow/highlights". It allows to easily correct over- and underexposed areas in an image in one step.

A nice feeling to increase the dynamic range of the image...