Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Fixing Exposure Problems with Picasa

You can’t always control the lighting for your photos as if you were in a studio. Sometimes your subject is hidden in shadows. In other pictures, the detail is washed out by too much light. As discussed in Chapter 3, you can take measures to balance these problems when you take your pictures (like using a fill-in flash or adjusting your camera’s aperture), but when you need more help, it’s time to turn to your digital darkroom.

Adjusting Fill Light in Your Photos

Picasa’s Fill Light tool is designed to fix a problem that’s pretty common for outdoor pictures. How many times have you seen beach pictures where the background is bright but the faces are lost in shadows? With the Fill Light slider, found in Picasa’s Edit View (View → Edit View) you can make the shadowy faces a bit brighter.

The Fill Light slider bar appears on both the Basic Fixes panel and the Tuning panel in Edit View. Adjustment is a simple matter of moving the slider until you’re pleased with the results. Technically, this tool is supposed to add light to the foreground when you use it on photos with too much brightness in the background. In reality, as shown in the before and after images in Figure 9-9, the Fill Light tool seems to find the darker areas in the image and increase their brightness. Whether you consider the areas to be foreground or background doesn’t really matter, so you can use this tool on any photos where lighting is uneven.

Figure 9-9. The Fill Light control ...