Next are four controls which affect the colours in the image.

there are solid black areas – you won't be able to retrieve any extra detail. However, try not to overdo it as you can increase the noise if you lighten the shadows too much. It's useful for lifting shadows where you need to see more details. Shadows – this allows you to make dark areas within the image lighter. It's a useful control however, if an area is burnt out you will find it has very little effect as this tool cannot recover detail that simply doesn't exist. Highlights – this allows you to adjust the very bright parts of the image and make them darker if necessary. Sliding to the left decreases the contrast and taking it right increases the amount of contrast. Moving to the left makes the image darker and right makes it brighter.Ĭontrast – this increases or decreases the difference between the lightest areas and darkest areas of the image. The top sections has four controls which affect the exposure of the overall image.Įxposure – this makes the image either lighter or darker depending on which way you go. This image shows the original position of the sliders, for reference. You then have various sliders available for further adjustments. (Note: it’s greyed out if you haven’t made any adjustments.)

Best of all, if you try it and you don't like what it does, at the very bottom of the window there's a button called ' Reset all' – click on this Reset button and your image file will revert to how it looked when you first opened it. If you are new to adjusting images, it's worth trying this because much of the time this tool actually does a very good job of getting the image looking good. Underneath the histogram there is a button marked ' Auto levels'. This brings up a nice simple tool palette.Īt the top of this palette window you have a histogram and, if you are experienced with a program such as Photoshop, you can use the little triangles at the bottom of the histogram to adjust the shadows (left triangle), midtones (middle triangle) and highlights (right triangle) just as you would in Photoshop.

How to crop a jpeg on a mac