From the course: Digital Imaging for Business Professionals

Adjusting the exposure of an image in Microsoft Word

From the course: Digital Imaging for Business Professionals

Adjusting the exposure of an image in Microsoft Word

- For many, being able to adjust the appearance of an image right inside your Office software is going to be helpful. And, in fact, Microsoft does provide tools that make it easy to make basic adjustments. Let's start with exposure adjustments, which are the best place to begin. As you adjust exposure for an image, what'll happen is the color may shift. For example, as we lighten or darken a shot, you'll see changes. I've opened up document 6_1 from the exercise folder and let's go ahead and view this with Multiple Pages, so I see the two images side by side. Let's start with the first image. I'll click so it's active and I'll go to the Format tab under Picture Tools. Here, you'll see the ability to apply all sorts of style and option, but I want you to go over to the left where it says Corrections. If you click here, you'll see some simple previews of being able just to mouse over and make a change. And this will simulate different changes, going from darker all the way to brighter. However, I find that, generally speaking, using the picture control options is a better choice. This will make it easy to format the picture. In this case, we're going to focus on the initial option here for brightness and contrast. You can click to increase in small increments, or take advantage of those same presets you saw before to dial it in initially, and then make a subtle change. In this case, a bump of 20% helps a lot. And I'll do a small increase on contrast. You may also find that you want to temporarily zoom in. Using the scroll wheel on your mouse, you can do so, or a trackpad where you can pinch and zoom, or use the View tab here and zoom to 100%. There we go. Now this will make it easy to judge things like sharpness. While sharpness isn't part of tone, it is in the same picture correction adjustment area, and it's a good idea to subtlety increase that, with most digital images, to bring out some of the edge details. That definitely pops. Let's go back to the multiple page view. And I'll double click on this image. And you see that it also immediately takes me to the Format controls. If you don't see that box on the side, make sure you simply bring up the Corrections controls. Feel free to bring up the picture option controls there and you'll see that on the side. The use of presets is the simplest way to dial this in. And if you hover over each one, you'll get an idea of what the changes are going to be. However, if the presets aren't strong enough, you should feel free to continue to modify. If you go too far though, you may notice a problem of detail loss, so be careful of how far you push this. Generally speaking, boosting any value over 50% is probably going to be a bit too aggressive. But, in this case, both photos are looking substantially better because we've gotten better exposure, so that some of the details that were being lost in the shadows have been recovered.

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