Hi, Glad the info was helpful. Editing a JPG or PNG is not always the best option, because they are cooked formats (meaning anything that's already applied to the image can't be modified) (unlike .RAW / .NEF / .DNG etc) and it's been my experience that it's much harder to rectify under exposed images once in that format and still retain detail / quality. Often it adds artifacts and banding and you often lose control over what should be black.
But for this scenario, my suggestion would be to try adding a Levels layer and then you can control the black, mid and white points. See the two attachments. I just picked one of your modified images. In the first image you can see the Levels show that the white point (far right of the 3 chevrons under the graph, see red arrow), is way out ahead of any data in the graph. So instead of using Brightness / Contrast you can try scaling that back until it's just ahead of anything showing on the graph. You can position it anywhere you like and if you look at the second attachment you'll see what it does to the image. My attachments are high compression jpg, but you'll still see what I mean. Experiment for yourself so you can compare the differences. You can also adjust the middle chevron so you can control the mid point as well. In my second attachment I did adjust the mid to 0.75 to compensate for the drastic change in the white point. Another option is to apply a Curves layer then you can create multiple points and adjust the curve so that you have greater control over more ranged points.
Adjusting Levels I think is a safer way than adjusting Brightness and Contrast. You can also adjust the numerical values in those 3 boxes if you want to define a specific value to be used as black (0) or white (255).
In Photoshop if you have lots of images you need to apply that to, then best option is to create an Action, then use the Image Processor, select a directory where your images to be processed are stored and apply that action. Photoshop will do the rest.
Regards.
Last edited:
