When you take photos of a scene with varying lights your camera can’t capture the whole range of lights. It usually meters the average causing your brights to be too bright and your darks to be too dark. A lot of times this sums up to an awful photo.
Joshua Keay is a product designer living in New York City, and in this video tutorial he shows how you can fix these photos with Photoshop in under 5 minutes.
When faced with wildly differing light and dark values in a single frame, your camera can’t record everything, so it has to make a choice. Usually, it does its best to meter for the average light in the scene. That means the bright stuff ends up being too bright or the dark stuff too dark… or a little of both. Those dark areas aren’t lost, however. Often, they’re hiding detail that the camera just barely saw. Make a few subtle adjustments in Photoshop, and you’re on your way to an improved image!
The video is available at Photojojo, so head up there and learn how to fix up those under-exposed areas in your photos in a snap.