lightning a photo

[ggfolio.com]

I've got a brief next week part of the job will include having to lighten a lot of photos.

I was wondering what the most standard way of doing this. I just pull the curves line up and down till i think it looks right, but is there a more professional way of doing it
how do you guys go about it?

Cheers for your time

[DCurry]

Like anything in Photoshop, there are many ways to do this, and not one of them is perfect for every photo. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Curves - What you are doing now seems OK. I usually lock in the 3/4-tone and then lighten the 1/4s and mids. Locking in the 3/4s keeps your contrast up.

2. Levels - slide the center triangle to the left to lighten an image's midtones.

3. Shadow/Highlight - use sparingly, the Shadow slider can really improve a dark photo quickly. It can also ruin it if you're not careful. Immediately after running it, go to Edit>Fade and change the blend mode to Luminosity to eliminate any unwanted color shift caused by Shadow/Highlight.

4. Adjustment layers - make a Levels or Curves Adjustment layer, but don't actually make any changes to the settings. Set the Blend Mode of the Adjustment Layer to Screen and reduce opacity until you like what you see.

There are other ways, but these 4 are my main techniques.

[The Repro Kid]

There are some things some "professionals" do besides just sliding the curves up and down until it looks good. Here's some info I can add to what DCurry has already given you.

In general, a photo is rarely too dark across the board, or overall across the whole image. The first thing you might want to do is identify which area is the worst offender. Is it too dark in the Highlights and quarter tones, in the mids, or in the three quarter and shadows? This is helpful as a clue as to where to "grab" your curves when pulling up of down.

If the three-quarter tones are too dark then grab the curve at 75% and pull from there, this concentrates the adjustment in the problem area and affects the other areas less. If the quarter tones are perfect and the adjustment to the three quarter tones are affecting the quarter tones, then anchor the point where you don't want it to shift. Notice the other side the anchor now creates contrast when pulling the quarter tones, the area of the curve can be smoothed on the other side of the anchor to control how much or how little contrast is introduced. Sometimes it is helpful to set the anchor near the center even you want the quarter tones to stay put, because it is easier to smooth the opposite side of the anchor. You can do quite a lot with reshaping of specific areas if you keep the overall curve as smooth as possible. Abrupt ramping can cause severe banding when printing.

Another thing to consider for severe images is to pull the curve from the corner of the curve rather than on the curve itself. This gives you a "straight" curve which will give you a smoother ramping of tones (less banding). This is also the way to go when dealing with black and white half tones when introducing a dot into areas that are 100% or 0% black.

Attention must also be given to how light not to make things. All whites must still maintain some color. No areas can be 0C, 0M, 0Y, 0K, except for specular highlights. No other areas, not white clothes, not white walls, paper etc, there must still be some color. Specular highlights are the only exception. This is important with people and faces as well. Faces look very bad with specular highlights. Black and white half tones should contain no areas of 0% except for specular highlights and they should contain no areas of 100% ink, not even in the darkest shadows.