Lighting problems are common in photography. Photos taken in bright light
often lack detail in the shadow areas. If your photo's background is too bright or
if the difference between the photo's light and dark areas is too great, you
can lighten the darker underexposed areas with a fill light.
The term "fill light" or "fill flash" refers to the light source that is used to fill
in the shadow area of an image. Picture your subject being lit from behind. It
can create almost a silhouette effect. To see more detail, a fill light is required.
In Paint Shop Pro there are two ways to adjust fill lighting. In this tutorial
we'll look at both of them. To start, I'm going to give myself a little bit more
working space by collapsing my menus. I click on this thumbtack and it will hide
the menu for me. I'm going to do the same to the Navigator and to my Organizer.
If I need to access the Organizer or Navigator again, it's simply a matter of
doing a mouse-over on the tab and it will appear. I'm going to start with fill
light and clarity. So from the Adjust menu I'll scroll down to Brightness and
Contrast and I'll select Fill Light and Clarity. if your dialog box looks like
this, you can select Preview on Image. Now if I make a change to one of these
sliders that will be reflected in my image. Or by clicking on Preview you can
get a larger preview let me maximize this and now I can see my before and
after. I'm going to set the fill light to about 40 or 50. As you can see, this will
lighten the darkest area of the photo. I'm going to set the Clarity control. Now
clarity lets you adjust the level of detail in the image by analyzing
contrast within the localized area. A positive number increases the detail, a
negative number decreases the detail and focus. A value of zero preserves the
original setting. I'm going to set my Clarity to about 60. Again, a positive
number versus a negative number and I'm going
to leave mine at about 60. I'm happy with those results I'll simply click OK. Now
one nice thing about that dialog box is it will remember the last settings. I'm
going to open up my second image. Again from the Adjust menu > Brightness and
Contrast >Fill Light and Clarity. I'm going to leave the Clarity where it is
for this one but I'm going to bring up the Fill Light to about 60. I like that.
I'll click OK. Now the final image I'm going to bring up for Fill Light and
Clarity is the image of my fence. For this one from the Adjust menu > Brightness
and Contrast > Fill Light and Clarity. I'm not going to change the settings at all
I'm happy with that, I'll simply click OK. Now let's take a
look at Fill Flash. The terms Fill Flash and Fill Light are interchangeable but
with the Fill Flash option we have the ability to adjust the Saturation rather
than Clarity. Let's see how that works. I'm going to open up my kitchen shot and
from the Adjust menu I'm going to go down to Fill Flash. Here we can see a
similar dialog box. I have the ability to Preview on Image. I can also click on
this for a larger preview. I'm going to select the larger preview for this image.
I'm going to bring my strength up to about 70. Now of course I can use the up
and down rotary controls or I can actually type the value in. I've made my
image brighter. Now there's a slight bit of a cast here. I'm going to drop the
Saturation down on this a bit. I'm happy with that I'll click OK.
Let's do one final image. Go back to my organizer, I'll bring out my two giraffes
and then from the Adjust menu go down to Fill Flash and in the Fill Flash dialog
box I'm going to take my strength and want to bring this down to about 45.
That's good now that's 46. I'll bring the saturation up to about 40 as well.
I'm happy with that I'll simply click OK. So we've seen two different ways to
compensate for poor lighting. To end off this session I have a little tip: when
modifying a number of images in PaintShop Pro rather than saving each
one as you make the adjustments, you can do them all at the same time by closing
out all windows and opting to Save Selection. Here I'll show you what I mean.
From my Windows menu I'm going to go down to Close All. In the Close All
dialog box I want to make sure all my images are selected and then I'll simply
click Save Selected. I'll click on Save. It's going to tell me that it's going
to replace those, that's fine. I'll say yes to this. Now here we have the ability
to do an auto preserve of the original and that will basically backup the original
of my images. I'll just simply click OK for that.
And I'll click yes and now all images have been saved. That brings us to the
end of this tutorial on working with fill lighting. If you have found this
tutorial useful be sure to check out learn.corel.com for more equally
informative tutorials.