Balancing Brightness Within a Photo

I the photo below, shown within Adobe Photoshop 2020, I found the ground area to be a little dark and the sky to be a bit washed out with brightness. One way to get the exposure you want in a scene like this is to put the camera on a tripod and shoot 2 identical shots, one exposed for the peeps on the ground and one exposed for the sky. The first reason I didn't do it that was was that the peeps on the ground were not holding still. The second reason is that I knew I could balance the brightness in developing, another reason to shoot RAW files.

I might have used a targeted adjustment brush in Lightroom to get more detail and a deeper blue in the sky while bringing detail out of the shadowed area on the ground. I chose to do the same in Photoshop after making a "virtual Copy" in Lightroom. In the screen grab below you'll see 2 layers in the layers panel and the white rectangle of a layer mask in the top layer. I adjusted the lower layer to get the sky I wanted and then, using a brush painting black, removed the mask over the sky from the top layer. I think the resulting image looks about like what the human eye would see.

This is the late afternoon crowd at the New Orleans Greek Festival in 2015.

It's All In The Sliders

Those sliders in developing software can turn a young person old or turn a new photo into an old photo, visually speaking.

A photographer can do so much more with any given photo today than when I was shooting film that I don't think you could accurately put a numerical value on the change, such as, "We can to 200% more with a photo today." The method is completely different and the key fact is that you can always go back and start over. Adobe likes to say that their tools are "non-destructive" but you never destroy your original unless you delete it or save something with exactly the same name in exactly the same location.

This video is just me having fun to provide some examples. I've used the sliders in Adobe Lightroom Classic and those in an adjustment brush to make changes that I really hope this lovely lady never sees.