CONTRAST ADJUSTMENT 101 – So!  This is where you can have some fun playing around with good photo program!  Everyone has heard of PhotoShop!  Personally, I use Paint Shop Pro.  But yes these programs are expensive, so for those of you that don’t want to go to such an expense, try out a program that I’ve heard about (not tried mind you!) called GIMP which is free to download and use directly from their site http://www.gimp.org/.  If you are fortunate though to have a good program like the first two I’ve mentioned then here’s what you want to do.

The photo above is one of my own taken last summer. (we have so many frogs in our garden!).  It’s a pretty good photo but upon loser inspection it has a rather grayish look to it compared to what i saw in reality with my critical naked eye!  OK, the greyness is barely noticeable…  But against those unforgiving white backgrounds on the likes of Etsy this photo would look a bit dull and I wouldn’t want to show it off unless it looked right.

So this is where contrast adjustment can be used.  Slight adjustment of this setting literally intensifies the color casting of your photograph giving it more depth and in most cases bringing out a bit of the detail that has previously been washed out.

Above I have opened up my photo adjustment tool bar and navigated my way to where the color contrast setting can be found.  You will notice that I have highlighted two settings.  Contrast/Brightness and Levels.  The reason being is that either can be used to achieve the same goal.  The reason I have suggested that “level” adjustment is ideal is mainly because it is more flexible and you can be a little more specific with you end result, whereas just adjusting the contrast and brightness alone may take a bit of trial and error so you don’t over do it (this will be in either slider form or number value form… a bit of experimenting will show you how both settings will change your photograph).

With levels, you are able in the program to view a histogram of the images tonal value which is quite important in knowing where your photo has most of it’s information on either end of the shadow/midtone/highlight scale.  More of a peak in the middle means that the shadow and highlight values are low and can be brought closer to the central midtone value to enhance the photo’s appearance (see below).

In my own example above I have focused my attention on the shadow and highlight settings as most of the photo’s information resides in the middle of the histogram.  By sliding each of them ever so slightly toward the central midtone setting, as a result the grayish layer has faded, more color has broken through the dullness (hurrah!) and the sharpness of the photo is seemingly enhanced, making the photo look a lot brighter and colorful without going crazy!  Like i say you only need to tweak these things to keep them looking natural and crisp, and escape the dullness that plagued you once before!

And that is all there is to it.  The above photo shows the image without the levels setting box in the way in it’s newly renewed glory, and it definitely pops now!  Jewelers, clothing designers or generally anyone that has a need to show off details and color in their work will benefit from this simple method immensely!

* Finding Your Spark – Photo Composition
* Finding Your Spark – Got The Shakes?

Best of luck!  Happy snapping :)

Nay – http://moonangelnay.etsy.com