Checking Scan Quality And Tonal Range - Adobe PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS Manual

CHAPTER 4
84
Making Color and Tonal Corrections
Make other special color adjustments
have corrected the overall color balance of your
image, you can make optional adjustments to
enhance colors or produce special effects.
(See "Applying special color effects to images" on
page 95.)
Sharpen the edges of the image
use the Unsharp Mask filter to sharpen the clarity
of edges in the image. This step helps restore focus
to images that have undergone resampling as a
result of tonal adjustments. (See "Sharpening
images" on page 98.)
Checking scan quality and tonal
range
A histogram illustrates how pixels in an image are
distributed by graphing the number of pixels at
each color intensity level. This can show you
whether the image contains enough detail in the
shadows (shown in the left part of the histogram),
midtones (shown in the middle), and highlights
(shown in the right part) to make a good
correction.
The histogram also gives a quick picture of the
tonal range of the image, or the image key type.
A low-key image has detail concentrated in the
shadows; a high-key image has detail concentrated
in the highlights; and an average-key image has
Once you
detail concentrated in the midtones. An image
with full tonal range has a high number of pixels in
all areas. Identifying the tonal range helps
determine appropriate tonal corrections.
As a final step,
Original with insufficient detail, and sufficient detail
Original, and corrected average-key image
Original, and corrected high-key image
Original, and corrected low-key image