After all that let's get back to editing exposure and actually editing our photos.
So below the white balance options you have exposure you have multiple sliders one is for overall exposure
which is the brightness of the entire image.
All parts of the image will become brighter or all parts will become darker and that's a good way if
your entire image is too bright or too dark to sort of adjust the exposure you'll notice with this image
and this happens with most images.
If you bring down the exposure while parts of the image might look good.
Say we want the background to look darker or SAMS Jack to look darker.
The other parts that we want to be exposed properly.
It gets too dark.
That's why we have sliders below that allow us to adjust the exposure of all of the individual exposures
of the image.
So this ladder highlights will adjust just the highlights just the bright part.
So if we want to bring up the highlights we can bring up here say we want to bring up the shadows to
get a little bit more detail in Sam's hair or in the jacket.
We can adjust the shadows slider the whites.
These are the part of the image that are even brighter than the highlights.
Maybe we want to bring that down.
And this is usually where if something slightly overexposed by bringing down the whites you can bring
back some of that exposure and detail blacks if you want to add contrast.
You might want to bring down the blacks just slightly.
You'll also notice this contrast lighter by increasing this you add contrast by decreasing this you
decrease contrast contrast is the ratio of dark to bright.
And so by increasing the contrast the darker get darker and the brighter get brighter by decreasing
contrast the brights get darker and the darker get brighter.
You can see on this histogram up here at the top which is a good thing to look at when you're adjusting
exposure you've got the darks on the left the brights on the right.
And if I take the overall exposure to the left everything moves to the left.
If I take it to the right everything moves to the right.
I mean a double click that to reset that exposure level.
Now with contrast if I drag to the left everything squeezes into the middle and becomes sort of all
that mid range exposure.
If I go all the way to the right everything sort of spreads out the darks become darker the brights
become brighter what we were doing down below with the highlights shadows blacks and whites was also
sort of adding contrast to this image by bringing down the brights by bringing up the highlights you
are creating contrast itself the contrast lighter is just one other way to do so cool so that's how
you adjust exposure.
Play around with these sliders with your own images or with some of the other sample images to practice
getting proper exposure with all those photos and also to get creative with it in the next lesson we'll
be looking at these color options.