More Help From Photoshop

It was just after a rain when Erica lay on the sofa to finish waking herself up. Passing by, I saw at once the raindrops on the screen, the rich green of the trees behind, and Erica, half silhouetted on the couch. My eyes made a seamless, split-second adjustment from the outdoor brightness to the relative darkness of the girl, with her face half in shadows and half in the soft light.

Eyes---and brains that adjust them and interpret the view---are an intricate and fabulous part of God's creation.

Sometimes, the beauty of a photo is that it doesn't record exactly what your eyes see. For example, part of the fun of the rose pictured on the windowsill in an earlier post is that Audrey in the background is out of focus. Of course, when I took the shot, my eyes saw Audrey in perfect focus.






Other times, however,the trick to taking a good photo is to work with the camera to record what your eye actually does see. The photo to the right is exposed so that the trees and raindrops are lit properly, but you can't see the soft features in Erica's face. Although I liked this shot fairly well, exposing for the proper light outdoors hid too much of Erica's face in darkness.
At left is the result from adjusting my camera for more light. This photo didn't seem too bad, either, but what I really wanted was to record the richness of the outdoor colors AND the points of light reflected by the raindrops on the screen AND the soft light on Erica's features. Perhaps a better photographer than I could have accomplished this with her camera alone, but I needed Photoshop Elements to ride up on its white horse and rescue me. The top photo is the end result, after tweaking the illumination of both parts of the picture.