Work with light adjustments

- [Instructor] The bulk of my image editing is either light or color, and we're going to take a look at light right now. We'll work with this image for both light and color. I'm going to go ahead and hit the return key. That brings me into Edit mode, and then I'm going to click on Adjust and that reveals the Light panel. I'm going to go ahead and close this for a second, and I think I'm going to add the histogram just because it will help me explain what's going on as I make these adjustments. This is the bright area of the image, this is the dark area, and these are the middle tones, and right here this represents these different tones here.

It will change as we make our adjustments. Now as I hover over Light, some buttons are revealed. We have a Down button here and this reveals the individual sliders, and you see that some adjustments have been made, and you go, "Oh, my." Well, let's start from the beginning. We don't want those adjustments right now. So I'll show you the little down arrow right here and that's the reset. So now we can go back to the very beginning. Everything is squared up.

Now there's an Auto button here, and I really like it and I think it's a great way to start working on an image. Just tap on Auto. Photos will analyze the image and take its best shot at improving it. We'll reset that again. Then you have the Master slider right here that makes all sorts of adjustments at once, another good way to go. So you have some really great options for starting out improving your image. I'm going to reset this.

We'll go with Auto for right now and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about the individual sliders. Exposure and Highlights work together and they cover this part of the histogram. Exposure is the bright area of the image. You see as I move it to the right, see how bright things get? You can see how the histogram is moving over to the right. Now if I want things bright, but I want to recover some detail in those bright areas, that's what Highlights does. It helps me recover detail from the bright area of the image.

We'll go ahead and reset that. Black Point and Shadows works together at the other end of the histogram, on the left end. So now I'm making the blacks blacker, and if I want to open up some detail in those black areas, I can do that with the Shadow slider. So those two work together. I'll just reset that. Brightness, those are the middle tones. So you see how the middle part of the histogram is moving around.

Now, generally speaking, the way a lot of people work is they'll set their Exposure first, their Black Point second, and then adjust Brightness right here. If you want to adjust both ends, both the brights and the darks at the same time, that's what Contrast does. See how it's pushing it outward? Or if you go the other way, it'll bring it inward. So Contrast is a two-for-one, and you can turn it off and on, and you can see it before and after by checking and unchecking this box.

This box is checked the minute that you make an adjustment. Watch, the box will be checked, see? This is really handy when you're doing a lot of adjustments in different areas and you want to reset one or just see a before and after of one area without affecting the rest of the image. Same thing with Reset, it only resets this one panel, not everything else. Now let's talk about Brilliance. Brilliance is brand new in Photos 2.0 and it is so complicated, I can't even paraphrase it, so I'm going to read you from the Help menu, it's that crazy.

Applies region-specific adjustments to bright and dark areas, pull in highlights, and add contrasts to reveal hidden detail, and to make your photo look richer and more vibrant. The adjustment is color-neutral. No saturation is applied, but there may be perceived change in color, because brighter images with more contrast appear more vibrant. Brilliance is brand new in 2.0 and it's a heck of a slider. A lot of times you can just use it, and you can see it does all sorts of things at once.

In this case, I'm going to pull down Brilliance a bit, like that, and we're just going to leave it right there. Now if we want to see our before and after, I can just check and uncheck that. We also have the master key trick where I press the M key to see before and after. The difference between the master key and this circle right here is that the master key would be before and after for all the changes, and this is just right here. So that's a look at the Light adjustment in Photos 2.0.

There's a lot going on here. It's very sophisticated yet it's easy to use.