contrast

Recently, a few of you expressed mild to moderate surprise that I resorted to Brightness/Contrast to fix an image in the Lab mode. (See this and this.) So I figured I'd run an article that I wrote about a year ago for Photoshop User magazine. Okay, so it's a repurpose, but this version appears as I submitted it, headline and all. By which I mean, with a couple of hours of updating with the denizens of deke.com in mind. Anyway, here goes:

Ask a group of Photoshop experts to name the worst function in all of Photoshop and you’ll probably get a variety of answers: Defringe (doesn’t work), Dust & Scratches (removes neither), Pattern Maker (doesn’t work), Edit > Menus (removing commands doesn't simplify the program), or my personal antifavorite, the sharpen tool (takes a perfectly good image and makes it look like it was rendered in iron filings). But I think you’ll find a fair amount of consensus around what has traditionally been the most notorious image destroyer in all of Photoshop, Brightness/Contrast.

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