Screen Your Way To Better Exposure In Seconds With Photoshop

Written By Steve Patterson

Let's face it, today's digital cameras make snapping photos of family, friends, or anything that happens to catch our interest both easy and enjoyable. No need to worry about wasting film since there isn't any to waste, and that means as long as there's still space left on the camera's memory card, we're free to point the lens and press the shutter button as often as we like. We can get out there and take photos simply for the pure enjoyment of it.

What do you do, though, when these photos you took for fun didn't turn out quite as well on their own as you had hoped? What if, at the end of the day, you end up with a photo you really like, but it suffers from a rather unfortunate amount of underexposure? Being the Photoshop savvy person you are, you know that you could take the time to find the lightest and darkest parts of the image and then use Levels or Curves to do a professional-level tonal correction, but come on, this is just a photo you took for fun! You don't care if it looks professional, you just want it to look better. There must be a quick and easy way to fix an underexposed image without going through a lot of hassle, right?

Right you are! In fact, you can fix that exposure it a matter of seconds, and in this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to see exactly how it's done.

Want a better way to learn? Download this tutorial as an easy to read, ready to print PDF eBook!

Here's a photo I snapped one evening which is in desperate need of an exposure boost:

Again, if this was a photo I took for a client or if it had some other importance to me, I'd put in the effort and do a professional level correction, but I just want this image to look brighter with as little effort as possible. Here I go.