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Adjusting the lighting in an image is a common image editing task that can be completed in Photoshop. In the next photo we’re editing, we'll be adjusting the lighting to make the image brighter.
Let’s open the image we’re working with and save it as a Photoshop document, then take a closer look at the image itself.
Click File, Click Open…
Double-Click the file Happy Angelica.jpg
Click File, Click Save As…
Press & Drag .jpg, type: Spacebar edit
Click 
, Click Photoshop (*.PSD, *.PDD, *.PSDT)
Click 
Now that we have the image open, we can see it's a little dark, as shown in the following image:
There are multiple ways to make changes to the lighting in an image. For the image we’re working with, we’ll start out by performing an adjustment that will lighten the overall image and make the details in Angelica's fur show up better.
Before we start applying any adjustments, it's important to understand how they work and how best to apply them — and that requires some familiarity with the Adjustments panel.
The Adjustments panel contains many common adjustments that we may want to apply to an image. For example, we can make the colors in an image more vibrant, change the brightness and contrast of an image, and even make an image black and white. While some of the adjustments found in the Adjustment panel can be made in other ways, using the appropriate adjustment in the Adjustment panel has a number of benefits. To understand those benefits, we'll need to understand the concepts of destructive and non-destructive editing.
To gain a better idea of what destructive and non-destructive edits are, let's think about a common image editing task: adjusting an image's brightness and contrast. There are two ways we could do this:
Which method is the best one to use, however — the one in the Image menu or the one in the Adjustments panel? Both methods achieve the same results; changing the brightness and contrast of an image. However, what if you want to be able to edit the brightness of the image later on, or revert the image to its original state?
If you used the Brightness/Contrast dialog box, those changes can't be undone once the image has been saved. This is an example of destructive editing, as it makes changes to the original image that can't be reverted later on if desired.
However, if you used the Adjustments panel to make changes to the image, those changes are editable later on because of how those adjustments are stored. Since these can be edited or removed and don't affect the original image, they're an example of non-destructive editing. Whenever possible, it's preferable to make non-destructive edits to an image so they can be easily reverted later on.
What makes an adjustment applied from the Adjustments panel a non-destructive edit? It's all in how Photoshop applies the adjustment — when making an adjustment using the Adjustment panel, that adjustment is stored in a layer. With the adjustment stored in a layer, we're able to control which underlying layers are affected by the adjustment, and also able to go back and edit the adjustment itself if desired. We'll explore layers in more depth in a moment - for now, let's go ahead and add an adjustment to the image.
NOTE: For more information on non-destructive editing techniques, view the Nondestructive editing article on the Adobe Help site.
At this point, we're ready to start lightening the image. We'll be doing this using the Levels adjustment.
When we select an adjustment, Photoshop will open the Properties panel for that specific adjustment. Let's start the process of adding a Levels adjustment, and view its properties in the Properties panel.
Click 
NOTE: If the Adjustments panel tab is not visible in the panel dock, to open the Adjustments panel, in the Menu bar, Click Window, Click Adjustments.
Click 
The Properties panel will open, and display the properties for the Levels adjustment:
The top part of the panel displays a histogram (which looks like mountains) representing the tonal range of the image. Underneath that, there are controls that will help us adjust the overall lightness or darkness in the image. The histogram is a chart that shows the relative amount of pixels that are of varying brightness, with the amount of darker pixels displayed on the left and lighter pixels on the right. The histogram for Happy Angelica.jpg shows higher “mountains” on the left side and smaller ones on the right, which tells us mathematically what we can already see by looking at the image — the photo is a little too dark.
Let’s adjust the lighting of the image to make the details of the dog more visible.
Press & Drag the far right slider to the left until more of the details of the dog are visible
The position of the sliders under the histogram should look similar to the following:
Click File, Click Save
At this point, the Photoshop Format Options dialog box may appear:
This dialog box typically appears the first time a PSD file is saved after adding layers or other Photoshop-specific edits to the file. Here, we're given the option to ensure that the PSD file we're about to save is compatible with other versions of Photoshop, as well as other applications that can open Photoshop documents. The Maximize Compatibility option is selected by default, so we can go ahead and finish saving the file here.
NOTE: To prevent this dialog box from appearing in the future, if desired, Click the checkbox next to Don't show again in the lower left corner of the Photoshop Format Options dialog box.
Click 
The photograph should now look similar to the following image:
We can see the details in Angelica's fur a little better, but now the background is too bright. We'll explore how to fix that in the next section.
