The shadows know: there are many ways to take the mystery out of shadows

摘要

There are lots of ways to repair images using Adobe Photoshop, but I prefer using power tools. These small bits of software can be Photoshop-compatible plug-ins, Photoshop Actions, or graphics utilities that make a digital photographer's life a little easier. For many photographers it's really the shadows that make or break a photograph, but sometimes the results may be a bit more shadowy than we prefer. Now we've got Photoshop to control shadows and sometimes highlights, too. Photoshop tools can almost completely eliminate shadows, giving images a flat and boring look. I prefer to use them to open up detail that might otherwise be lost, sculpt shadows, and create shape and dimension. A Photoshop Action is a sequence of editing steps that you can record and subsequently apply to other images, individually or in batches, with a single click. Computer-savvy photographers will recognize this as a "macro" instruction as applied to digital images. Creating Actions with the Photoshop Actions palette is easy, but finding ready-mades is even easier. Lots of Actions, among them Shadow Lifter, can be found on the Internet. (Shadow Lifter is available from many sites, including www.e-10.org/issues/index.)