ACDSee Pro Blog Archives

As a cat fan, this photo caught my eye online. So I took a screenshot & adjusted it in ACDSee Pro 2 using the Shadows & Highlights tool. The results were so amazing that I sent them to the owner. He was kind enough to send me the original jpg so that I could share this. Aren’t the results just amazing?!

Before:

After:

In the previous post, Sue used the Advanced Tab. I used the Light EQ tab with the sliders. The top sliders for ‘Brightening’ brought the front cat out of the deep shadows & details like the whiskers can be seen! The ‘Darkening’ sliders alleviated the blown out background behind the white cat & brought details back to the cement bench outside. They also gave detail to the white cat.

A huge thanks to Jim Hathaway for sharing his photo!

Have you tried the Shadows & Highlights tool & gotten great results? Please share your example.

If you aren’t a very good photographer (like me) and only have a point-and-shoot camera (like me again) - you often get this sort of thing happening in your photos…

Most of the time I used to just delete them. Then David Hooper, ACD’s resident genius, developed the Shadows and Highlights tool . It made that photo look like this…

The great thing about this tool is that you can brighten dark areas without loosing the existing bits that are ok, like the sky and clouds.

In ACDSee Pro 2, the Shadows and Highlights tool now has two new tabs that make it really easy to get good results. My favorite is the Advanced tab. Here are my settings:

You start by dragging the Brighten Compression slider to the right to create a Custom curve. You will see the orange curve come up as the dark areas in your photo get brighter. You can then click and drag the actual curve around. I find that if you match your orange curve closely to the gray one, it is almost perfect. If you go over the gray, it shows bright pink and this is a warning that you are clipping some pixels.

To make sure that the light areas of your photo don’t loose richness or color, you can then drag the Darken Compression slider, which affects the bottom half of the graph, to the right.

Sue

P.S. I’m the technical writer at ACD.

ACDSee has made it easier to get started digiscrapping with ACDSee Photo Manager & ACDSee Photo Editor. There are two ways to get the 12 exclusive kits on CD by fabulous designers:

1. download the trial of ACDSee Photo Editor & purchase it for $49.99
2. purchase the bundle of ACDSee Photo Manager and Photo Editor for $79.99!

It’s the perfect way to get started or add to your collection. If you already have digiscrapping software, ACDSee Photo Editor is perfect for your child, relative or friend to get started! We have tutorials & a video here at DigiScrapInfo.com to make it easy.

The CD has kits by these fabulous designers:

Misty Cato, Sue Cummings, Lie Fhung, Karah Fredricks

Vera Lim, Gina Miller, Kellie Mize, Tracy Robinson

Traci Sims, Vicki Stegall, Amy Teets, Jen Wilson

Here are the kits (if you go here, you can click on each one to see a larger view). They are absolutely gorgeous! You can download the trials for ACDSee Photo Manager & Photo Editor here.