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How To Adjust Exposure in Photos Using Colorcinch

Editorial — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 12:34:03 +0000

In today’s world, getting into photography is easier. The internet provides access to a vast amount of readily available information and tutorials. You can never have a valid reason to not jump right into it.

Taking photos and posting them on social media has become a popular trend. Hence, words such as “instaworthy” and “instagramable” were born. And the quality of the photo should be of the utmost importance when it comes to capturing special moments.

How your photos turn out depends a lot on how you set the exposure on your camera. Once you learn a few simple terms and techniques, it’s easy to know how to expose an image correctly.

What is Exposure in Photography?

Exposure is the overall brightness or darkness of the photo. More specifically, it is the amount of light that gets to the film or camera sensor. The photo will be lighter the more you let light hit the film or camera sensor. The darker your photo is, the less light it will have.

Exposure is one of the most important factors in determining whether a photograph appears amateurish or professional. It is best to have a simple understanding on this.

What Influences Exposure?

There is not just one method for adjusting the exposure settings on a camera. There are three distinct data settings that affect exposure, collectively referred to as the exposure triangle. The shutter speed, the aperture or the size of the opening, and the ISO all play a role in photography.

Shutter Speed – The length of time that the camera’s shutter is open, expressed in seconds, is referred to as the shutter speed. For instance, 1/100 means that your shutter is open for 1/100th of a second. The longer the shutter is open, the brighter the photo will be because there is more time for light to get in.

Aperture – This is the size of the opening that lets light in. It is measured in f-stops. Contrary to what you might think, the higher the number, the smaller the opening. The aperture affects the depth of field. When the opening is bigger, the depth of field is shallower, while when the opening is smaller, more of the image is in focus.

ISO – An ISO number indicates your camera’s sensor’s sensitivity to light. The greater your camera’s sensitivity to light, the higher its ISO setting.

Adjusting Exposure Using Colorcinch

Even inexperienced photographers can edit their photos and produce stunning images. There are numbers of web-based editing software to use. This time we will be exploring Colorcinch to manipulate and adjust a photo’s exposure.

A Step by Step Guide Using Colorcinch

This step-by-step guide will show you how to use an easy-to-use app to make your photos look more professional. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Open Colorcinch and Upload image

Step 2: Click Edit – Exposure

You will see a bar of features on the left side corner of the application that will help manipulate your photo.

Click on the Edit tab and you will see sub-groups such as Basics, Enhance, and Creative options. The Enhance option brings you to where the exposure feature is located.

Step 3: Navigate Exposure

By using the Exposure tab, you will have complete creative control over your photographs. It has four essential components, allowing you to make straightforward adjustments to the exposure.

The four components that you can easily adjust with a slider are:

Brightness – Brightness refers to how light or dark the image is as a whole. When the brightness is turned up, every pixel in the frame gets brighter.

Contrast – Contrast is the difference in brightness between objects in an image. Increasing the contrast makes the light areas brighter and the dark areas of the frame much darker.

Highlights – In photography, the term “highlight” refers to the area of an image that is the most illuminated.

Shadows – In photography, the shadow is the darkest area of the picture while retaining some level of detail.

Experiment with the sliders and make adjustments until you achieve the desired result.

Step 4: Save and Share

Once you get the correct exposure, you can Save the image and may start sharing it on various social media platforms.

Why Should You Properly Expose Your Photos?

When you take a picture with the correct exposure, you are able to see every detail in the highlights and shadows. Underexposure is the term used to describe the effect that occurs on the camera’s exposure when the sensor does not receive enough light.

People who are new to photography or who only take pictures for fun and not as a means of earning a living may find it especially difficult to understand all of this photography jargon.

If you are not familiar with how to use the exposure triangle, it will be difficult for you to ensure that the exposure is correct. The good news is that there are a lot of web apps that make it simple for novices to get the results they want and to adjust the exposure of a photograph.

In conclusion, the quality of your photographs will undoubtedly improve if you take the time to get the exposure in-camera right. When you expose the photos correctly, it will give the impression that you are more professional and that your photos are more appealing.

However, if the photos taken directly from the camera require additional adjustments, just keep in mind that there are other ways to fix the problem.

The post How To Adjust Exposure in Photos Using Colorcinch appeared first on Photo to Cartoon – Cartoonize Yourself & Create Avatar Characters for Free.

3 Quick and Easy Ways to Brighten Photos

Editorial — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 19:07:12 +0000

Have you ever taken a few photos – whether with your phone or a camera – only to later discover that they came out way too dark?

If yes, then this article is for you! The good news is that you can quickly brighten photos using an online image editor.

In this article we’re going to take a look at how to use Colorcinch (or a similar online web-based photo editor) and break down 3 quick and easy ways to do just that!

Let’s begin!

The first thing you need to do is upload one of your underexposed images in Colorcinch, or a similar online photo editor.

PRO TIP: If you work with lots of images (on a Mac), you can use Duplicate File Finder to detect and wipe out all unwanted image duplicates—so you will locate your desired files faster.

Next click the Edit tab in the left-hand column, followed by Exposure.

Once that has been selected you will see a list of slider options to choose from, such as: Brightness, Highlights, and Shadows. Additionally, there is a Contrast slider, which I will explain below.

1. How to Use the Brightness Slider:

The Brightness slider can be a great first option when dealing with slightly darker images that don’t require too much correcting.

Increasing the brightness in an image will target the tones evenly rather than having a heavy priority on the brightest areas.

For example:

By simply sliding the Brightness slider to + 15, I start to increase the overall brightness of the image. The rule of thumb here is: Slide to the right to brighten your photo and slide to the left to darken it!

PRO TIP: Do note that when you increase the brightness in your images, you will also lose some contrast and saturation in the process.

To easily correct this you can slightly raise the Contrast slider up a few notches. In this example I added + 10 contrast to counter the added brightness.

PRO TIP: Although the amount of contrast and saturation in an image is subjective, I would recommend not going too heavy-handed on these sliders, so that a natural balance can be maintained.

Another thing that I like to do is to add just a bit more saturation back into the image.

After making your adjustments to the Brightness and Contrast sliders, click the Apply button to save those changes.

Next select the Color tab and slightly adjust the Saturation slider to add a bit more saturation (color) back.

Typically, I won’t push the saturation too high and in this case + 5 works for me.

Make sure to click on the Apply button before saving your new image!

PRO TIP: For every change that you make, you may find that you have to readjust some of the other settings. What we’re essentially doing here is micro fine tuning to keep a nice balance.

And the final result!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ready to save? Skip to the “Saving Your Image” section

2. How to Use the Highlights Slider:

The Highlights slider will have more of a priority on the brighter areas of the image – known as the highlights – rather than the overall brightness of the image.

A good example of this would be in an image with a lot of white areas. In this image the snow is looking pretty gray and is lacking brightness in the highlight areas.

By using the Highlights slider, I can target these highlight areas more so, which in turn will make the snow look whiter, rather than gray. In addition, this will add some nice punch to the image!

To achieve this I simply raised the Highlights slider to + 50 and then increased the Contrast slider to + 20.

In the brightness section above, I mentioned needing to maintain a balance and the same concept applies here. We need to counterbalance our increase to the highlights so that we don’t lose too much contrast in the overall image.

If we only increased the Highlights slider the image would tend to look more flat rather than defined.

Once you’re happy with your changes click the Apply button. The final step would be to save your image.

3. How to Use the Shadows Slider:

Using the Shadows slider can be a great way to fix underexposed images, as this will brighten up any darker areas within your image. The reason that some images tend to come out darker is because some scenes have too great of a contrast between the brightest areas and darkest areas.

Examples of this include:

Shooting into the sun
Any time we have a backlit subject (sun behind the subject)
During the afternoon hours when the sun is at its highest and harshest

Unfortunately, modern day technology can’t always capture the full dynamic range in these types of situations.

To make up for this limitation, cameras will try and expose for that brightest areas, in order to protect them. By doing so, the darker areas of the photo will come out darker.

Thankfully, due to editing software, we can easily recover the shadow areas and bring back detail and brightness.

Let’s have a look at an example of this.

In the before and after we can see the deer originally appearing darker than the sky.

By increasing the Shadows slider I could quickly brighten up the darker areas. This will help even out, or balance the overall brightness of the image.

As with the previous examples, I added a little bit of Contrast to help maintain the balance of the image.

Let’s move on to the final step – saving your image!

Saving Your Image:

Once you’re happy with your adjustments and have clicked on Apply, you can click on the Save drop-down menu and select the location in which you want to save your image.

Next, name your image, select the file type, (JPG, PNG, PDF), as well as the quality and file size.

PRO TIP: I usually save my images as .JPG and set my image quality to 100%. However, if file size is an issue, you can set this to 80% to dramatically reduce the file size while still maintaining 99% of the image quality!

Conclusion:

I hope you found this tutorial useful and can use some of these methods to help quickly brighten up your underexposed photos!

If you’re interested in checking out Colorcinch, we offer a Basic account, which is free to use, requires no registration, and provides access to numerous essential effects and features. Click here to start editing with Colorcinch Basic!

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