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A: The best fix to any image is an overall correction whenever possible.
By Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop
This room has uneven sunlight from left to right.
In this example of a family portrait you will notice that it has natural light coming in from left to right. The people on the left are too hot and the ones on the right are lost in the darkness.
Some would think to immediately go in and start dodging and burning with the Dodge/Burn tool. However, I suggest that you first make an overall correction by adding a Levels Layer.
In order to control what part of the image the Levels Layer will affect, we will adjust the Layer Mask that automatically appears when we create a Level Adjustment Layer.
Open an image in Photoshop. Make sure your layers are showing, Window > Layers.
Create a Levels Correction layer.
Create a new Levels Layer using the Adjustment Layer button on the bottom of your Layers Palette as shown. In the Levels window make adjustments that slightly brighten the shadows and midtones. Some people prefer to use the Auto Adjustment Eyedroppers, but I prefer to have more control.
Adjust the levels for the layer below.
Now you may notice two things… one is that this Adjustment Layer did in fact lighten the darker areas, but it also lightened the highlights that were already hot. The way we're going to fix this is by adjusting the Layer Mask.
Using a Layer Mask on a Levels Adjustment Layer.
The purpose of a mask is to hide or show something. That's it! To hide something with a mask you add black to that area of the mask, and to show something, you add white. Let's try it. Select the Brush tool (B on your keyboard). Choose the default black and white colors for Photoshop (D on your keyboard). With the brush tool opacity set to 40-80% and NORMAL, click on the mask for the Level Layer as shown.
Select the mask.
Now it makes sense to only brush the highlighted areas of the image because they were not the areas we were trying to change or correct. You can brush repeatedly to adjust your mask and if you go too far, just switch you default colors (press X on your keyboard) to make white the foreground and brush in white to undo masking.
Here is a sample of what my final layer mask looks like:
Masking out the highlights.
Now to apply this adjustment layer, go to the pull-down menu of the layers palette and choose Flatten Image, or Layers>Flatten image in the Photoshop menu.
Applying the Adjustment Level.
There are still some areas I would choose to lighten with the dodge tool, but by performing this overall correction first I will have a lot less painstaking work. Cheers…
Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop, is the color management expert for Logan Photography at Studio Exchange, Santa Ana, Calif., and runs KCH Digital, a digital artistry, education, and consultancy firm.