Use lighting tools

You won't always have perfect lighting conditions when you take a pictureGeneral term refers to a single photo or a composite project on the canvas., nor will you always take a picture that's perfectly exposed. However, with the lighting tools provided by Picture It!, you can correct or fine-tune the lighting in your picture.

A picture consists of three areas: shadows, midtones, and highlights. Depending on which lighting tool you use, you will affect one or more of these areas in your picture.

You can use the following tools to adjust the lighting in your pictures:

• Brightness and Contrast Brightness refers to how light or dark, overall, your picture is. If your entire picture is too light or too dark, you may want to fine-tune the brightness.

  Contrast refers to the range of light and dark tones in a picture. A high contrast picture has both highlights and shadows. A low contrast picture, however, does not have much contrast between the lightest and darkest areas: it consists mostly of midtones. If you've taken a picture on a cloudy, rainy day, where there aren't any shadows or bright highlights, you may want to increase the contrast. By increasing the contrast, the light areas get lighter, and the dark areas get darker. However, if you've taken a picture on a bright sunny day and have a lot of shadows and highlights in the picture, you may want to decrease the contrast.

• Adjust levels With the Adjust levels tool, you can adjust the brightness of the highlights, midtones, or shadows in your picture. As a result, you have a great degree of control over what portions of your picture get lightened or darkened. This tool also can help correct minor color imbalances. It's often worthwhile trying this tool with a picture to see if you like the color better.
• Add Flash As with using a flash on your camera, this tool adds light to your picture. If your picture is too dark overall, use the Add Flash tool to lighten the dark areas and restore important details. Add Flash does not
• Reduce Backlighting Try this tool when your picture is too light overall. Reduce Backlighting darkens the light tones and midtones in your picture, which can restore important details in those areas.