I criticized Franzis’ HDR projects for making simple stuff hard – you have to figure out somewhat complicated settings for tools that are supposed to make it easier, but don’t. So, I figured it only fair to show what I meant, that photo editing doesn’t have to be hard or mysterious.
Lots of editing apps like PaintShop Pro have features to automatically make the most necessary adjustments. Depending on the app, that often just means a basic Levels adjustment, which is really easy to do yourself, & as a bonus you can usually do better than the software on its own. The controls for setting Levels are pretty standard nowadays, showing you 3 eyedropper icons, one for black, one for white, & one for average or neutral gray. Click the brightest, lightest spot in the photo with the eyedropper for white, & the darkest with the eyedropper for black, and all the colors in the photo will be stretched to take advantage of the full range available. If you’re not sure which spots are the lightest & darkest, click your 2nd & 3rd choice etc., and watch what happens – the best choice will show the most detail, while making a bad choice you can see detail disappear.
But it’s the middle eyedropper that causes the magic to happen – because there’s often nothing gray in a photo, click a neutral color and all the colors in the photo will adjust, fixing all sorts of color tint and other problems. Again, don’t be afraid of clicking more than one spot in your photo until you get something you like. In my experience that’ll fix almost every photo, but there are exceptions, like some 30 or 40 year old prints I scanned that, because of their age & chemicals breaking down, have a very pronounced red tint. With these I have to take extra steps to set the neutral color.
The idea is to create a new, solid color layer that’s the average of every color in the photo, then use that as the target for that middle eyedropper. In Photoshop & many other image editors you create a duplicate layer, then use the Filters -> Blur -> Average filter. In PaintShop Pro it’s a little harder: you have to look at the histogram [for info – not adjustment], select Red, Green, & Blue one at a time, and write down their Mean value, using that color to fill a new layer. Next, in Photoshop [& many others] you add either a curves or levels adjustment layer, click that solid color with the middle eyedropper, then either delete the solid color layer or turn off its visibility. In PaintShop Pro you must use curves, since in this case levels won’t work. Then you set that adjustment layer to color blend mode – in PaintShop Pro I have to use Legacy Color, and then reduce its opacity.
You’ll probably see some sliders below the histogram in the levels dialog. Sticking to the basics, it’s the middle one for Gamma that’s of most interest – that’ll lighten or darken the image overall.
While setting the levels will do more than anything else to fix or improve your photos, sometimes different areas are too light or too dark. Depending on the software you’re using, most often there are controls [sliders] to lighten/darken shadows & highlights &/or whites & blacks – in Photoshop you can find them using the Camera Raw filter. That usually helps, but something called Dodging & Burning does more for the overall image [their names come from developing film negatives]. While your editing app probably has Dodging & Burning tools, I think you’ll have better luck [& results] adding a layer set to overlay blending mode, filled with 50% neutral gray [RGB = 128, 128, 128]. Simply paint with white on that layer to lighten, black to darken. Lower the brush opacity, and flow if available, & use a soft &/or feathered brush, and you’ll have more control, since you’re able to slowly build up the white or black with repeated brush strokes. If afterward you think you went too far, reduce that layer’s opacity.
And that’s stuff anyone can do. You might feel that you need more practice painting with a brush for Dodging/Burning, but there’s not much learning involved. You can do the same thing without any skills or practice or talent really, but you will have to learn about selections, masks, and gradients -- you can lighten or darken just parts of your photo using a mask with a gradient for example. And there are apps & plugins like Luminar Neo that can let you do some very neat stuff that would take you quite a while otherwise, but I don’t recommend them unless you know how to use masks, because they can also very easily screw up parts of your photo -- a mask lets you block the effects for those areas. There’s nothing at all wrong with saying all this, or just the levels part is enough, but if you want to go further learn about selections & masks & gradients in whatever app you want to use, then when you know basically how they work, start watching/reading tutorials at sites like Photoshop Café. If you’re not using Photoshop, that’s OK too – you can still learn the principles and then figure out how to do the same things in the software you use.