Enhance Your Photos - Color Correction and Exposure

The lower-end consumer ultra-compact segment is littered with some terrible cameras, that give the most under-exposed (even in good lighting) shots and have some of the most horrendously desaturated color reproduction. If you’re a victim of a bad purchase decision involving such a device, don’t panic just yet. Through this guide we shall help you deal with those terribly underexposed pictures, and then give those pictures the vivid color reproduction you’ve always hoped for.

The picture above was taken from such a camera, and is both underexposed, and quite desaturated - the perfect candidate! What you need to fix such an image is a working copy of Photoshop, and any version from the past few years shall do the job.

The first thing we’re going to do, is get rid of those under-exposed areas. This requires a bit of fine-tuning, and since it involves playing around with gamma settings, some of the details on brighter areas might get a little burnt out. Click on Image-> Adjustment -> Exposure.

This brings up the Exposure dialog box. The easiest way to go about this is to select the “Sample in image to set white point” color picker icon, to help decide which is the whitest part of the scene. In this picture, it was the T-shirt. So I selected the tool and clicked on the T-shirt. After you do this, it’s your choice whether you wish to tweak the gamma level a little to fit your needs, but in most cases doing just this is enough. Click on Ok when you’re done.

Next on our list is to fix the terribly desaturated colors. To do this, set the image’s color mode to Lab Color, from RBG; here are the steps: Image -> Mode -> Lab Color. The reason I prefer doing this is that it saves us time, since instead of playing around with three color channels (red, blue and green), we can just deal with two (channel a, and channel b). To understand what I’m talking about, check out the list of channels.