Photoshop: change brightness and contrast - how it works

This guide explains how you can change the brightness and contrast of an image in Photoshop. So you can easily correct pictures with poor lighting.

Manual contrast and brightness change in Photoshop

You can increase the brightness and contrast of an image manually using two controls:

1. To do this, click on "Image"> "Adjust" in the Photoshop menu bar
2. Then select "Brightness / Contrast".
3. In the new window, you can use the sliders to increase the contrast and brightness as you see fit.
4. If you move the sliders left / right, the photo to be edited changes immediately.
5. However, you only save the change if you click "OK" when you have finished. With "Cancel" you do not make any changes.

2nd possibility in Photoshop: Perform tonal value correction

You can have the contrast and brightness corrected even more amazingly with the tonal value correction of the image:

1. Click on "Image" in the menu bar and select "Levels".
2. If you click on "Auto", Photshop corrects the picture immediately.
3. For even better results, it is often worthwhile to make the settings yourself. You can also change the tone value spread using the slider below the graph. This can be used, for example, to correct night pictures for day pictures.
4. Under Options you can make auto color correction options that improve, for example, the black and white contrast.
5. Save the changes with "OK".

With Photshop, motion blur can also be created in images, as we will show in the next article.