A Fast Trick to Salvage an Underexposed Photo

IN A PHOTO of a scene with lots of contrasty lighting, parts of the photo will likely be under- or overexposed. Here's a trick to make such snapshots presentable for uploading to Facebook.

Duplicate the photo: You can do this in almost any program that supports layers; here, I'll use Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the image at right, a strong back-light cast important parts of

the subjects in shadow.

Open the photo in your editing program, and duplicate the photo in a new layer. In Photoshop Ele-
ments, do that by choosing Layer > Duplicate Layer and clicking OK. You'll now see two copies of the photo in the Layers palette on the right side of the screen.

Invert the layer:  Now you want to saturate the top layer a bit. With the top layer selected in the Layers palette, choose Enhance >Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation. Grab the Saturation slider and reduce it by 50 percent so that the slider says ‘-50’, and click OK. With the top layer still selected, press <Ctrl>-I, which will invert the colors in the layer, making it look sort of like a

photographic negative.

Add Finishing Touches : In the layer palette , change the mode from Normal to Overlay. You should see a better picture, with the shadows much improved, that will serve as a usable image.

To finish the photo, right-click on the Layers palette and choose to flatten the image. This step will let you run a little noise reduction on the picture (select Filter >Noise > Reduce Noise). 


Save the image; you're done!