Sometimes you get a photo with a lot of contrasts of luminosity, like the photo below. This photo was taken last year during the annual presentation of our prayer chaplains at church. As you can see, we've got a really bright bald head in the foreground, and the chaplains lined up at the front of the church, standing in the dark. (That's me with the guitar!) This is not a very attractive or useful photo as it is. If it was all dark, I could just brighten it to correct the problem, but with such a difference in contrast, I can't take that approach. This tutorial will show you how to even out the luminosity in the photo to correct the problem.
 The original photo is not very pleasing. There's too much contrast between the light of the foreground and the dark in the background. |
 Here's the final photo with the contrast adjusted. A great improvement! |
The first thing we want to do is copy the photo and paste it over itself as a new layer. In PhotoImpact, this can easily be done with the keystroke combination Ctrl-C (to copy) and Ctrl-V (to paste).
Next we want to remove the color from the layer. This process is called desaturating. The desaturating function is located in the Photo menu. Select Color and then Hue and Saturation. The keyboard shortcut to this dialog box is Ctrl-E. As shown below, slide the saturation setting all the way to the left to remove the color.
You will end up with a colorless layer.
We want to brighten the dark areas and darken the light areas so we want to invert the layer. Select Invert from the Adjust menu.
Now the dark areas are light and the light areas are dark--just the opposite of what we had before.
Now we want to blend the inverted layer with the original photo with the Overlay merge option. Right click on the layer and select Properties. Change the Merge Mode to Overlay and click OK.
The luminosity has been corrected, but the colors are a little off. We can soften them by using a Gaussian blur on the top layer. Go to Photo, Blur, Gaussian Blur. For this tutorial, I just selected the default blur setting.
Here's what I ended up with. A greatly improved photo!