Working with Light and Shadows - Photoshop

SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS

I would use this tool to edit photos that have either too much light, or too much dark shadows in them, or even a mixture of both. Here is the original image!

The starting image is imbalanced, so we'll go over to the Image menu > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlight.

A box will pop up where you can adjust the shadows (make them brighter/darker) and highlights (making the lighter areas of the photo brighter/darker).

If you still want to make changes to the photo after these smaller adjustments, click on the Show More Options box.

With the expanded dialogue box, a good place to start fiddling would be the Radius slide-bars. In this example the shadows and highlights radius slide-bars are both raised to 200.

A good touch-up choice would be to set the Color slide-bar in the Adjustments section to 0, so that colors aren't over-exaggerated. 

For some final touches, go to the Amount slide-bars in the shadow and highlight sections and adjust them as you see fit. In this example both are set to 50.

HOW IT LOOKED AT FIRST

HOW IT LOOKS AFTER EDITING