Adjusting brightness and contrast

In this exercise, I'll show you how to approach basic luminance and color…adjustments inside Photoshop.…I'm working inside a file called Amusement park.jpg found inside the…exercise files folder.…This is a classic example of a badly backlit photograph, because the camera…automatically exposed for the background, the foreground is left dark.…I could have compensated in advance for this problem by turning on the…strobe, but I didn't.…So we're left to our devices here inside Photoshop.…Now the first thing I want to review with you is a fairly technical topic called…the Histogram, and we'll become more familiar with it as we work inside the…exercises, but I want to give you a preview of how it works upfront.…

If you've selected the Photography workspace, then you'll see the Histogram…panel in the upper right corner of the screen, and I quite have room to display…it on this screen however, so I'm going to collapse the Adjustments panel by…double-clicking to the right of the word Masks.…Then I'll expand the Histogram panel by double-clicking to the right of the word Info.…