Basic
Lighting and texture are two essentials that make up any photo. Lighting can determine the mood and feel of a photograph and sometimes in post-processing, you may want to enhance this mood even more or switch it up completely. Texture and clarity are what make photos pop, giving them a more true-to-life look. In total, there are 8 different sliders you can manually adjust: exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, black point, clarity, and texture.
You can adjust the Basic adjustment manually, or automatically using the machine learning-powered ML adjustment.
Adjust the lighting and contrast in a photo
Do any of the following:
Automatically adjust the lighting in a photo: Click or tap the ML button next to the Basic adjustment. After doing this, you can additionally fine-tune the adjustment sliders.
Adjust the exposure: When taking a picture, the amount of exposure chosen normally determines how bright or how dark the final image will turn out. A higher exposure makes the shadows, midtones, and highlights in an image brighter, while a lower exposure does the exact opposite — darkens all the tones. By adjusting exposure, you can adjust these settings after the image is taken.
Note that drastically increasing or decreasing the exposure may result in blown-out shadows or highlights, i.e. the bright areas of an image turn 100% white and darker areas 100% black.
Adjust highlights: By adjusting highlights, you can increase or decrease the overall lightness of the image highlights, bringing out hidden textures and details in the highlighted sections only, but leaving other bright areas in an image untouched.
Adjust shadows: Using the Shadows adjustment you can deepen the shadows or bring out hidden detail by reducing the contrast in the darker areas of an image.
Adjust brightness: The Brightness slider primarily affects the image midtones, making them lighter or darker. There’s normally less change visible in the shadows or highlights of an image.
Adjust contrast: The Contrast adjustment lets you stretch the tonal range of an image, making its highlights brighter and shadows darker. Reducing the contrast works the other around — the bright and dark areas are leveled out and reduced to midtones.
Adjust the black point: Using the Black Point adjustment, you can increase or decrease the tonal range of the darkest areas in an image. In other words, you can add more definition to the darker tones of an or reduce it, which can be used as an alternative for creating a vintage-inspired faded effect.
Adjust clarity: Clarity is one of the most basic, yet essential adjustments in image editing. You typically use Clarity to subtly enhance image brightness and colors, making the image look overall sharper and clearer. By reducing clarity, you can also create an opposite effect and make the image smoother.
Adjust texture: Texture lets you subtly add contrast to images, especially the edges of objects, making textures pop. Alternatively, you can reduce texture to smooth out the image.
See also
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