From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Introducing luminance - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Introducing luminance

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- The name of this chapter is Brightness, but here's the thing. In the world of digital imaging, brightness goes by many names. They include shade, tone, and my favorite, luminance. But it's all brightness, starting at black, which is no brightness, all the way up to white, which is as bright as it gets. When I first started using Photoshop 30 years ago, I mean, how's that even possible? I'm so youthful. The first command I tried out was brightness/contrast. Used to be a terrible command. Nowadays it's great, which is why I'll be showing you that command, but here's my point. If I discovered it all by myself minutes into using the program, I'm sure you can too, which is why I'll also be showing you things you probably won't discover by yourself, like channels. Your everyday, average digital photograph offers three channels, red, green, and blue. Each one of them offers a different view into your photograph. At this early stage, you and I don't need to worry too much over these channels, but Photoshop does 24/7. Then there's this measurement tool called the histogram which is a column graph of luminance levels from black to white on a channel-by-channel basis. It doesn't show you where they are. It just shows you that they exist and in what quantity. It might sound complicated, but the histogram, it's a sweetheart. You're going to love it. And so the purpose of this chapter is to show you how to adjust luminance in ways that make your photographic images look always better and never worse. In the end, I think you'll be amazed at the degree to which you can rescue even the most washed out or drab photo.

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