Hi, I'm Lorri Freedman.  I'll be publishing posts about photography and Photoshop here at CoolTechU. 
You can also see my work at PhotographyByLorri.com.  My first post is how to tweak photos taken in
low light conditions.

Here is an image taken at sunset from a moving van. My husband and I were taking a guided tour on
Zion Mountain in Utah. The cow is blurry and so is the background and foreground. What do you do? 
Well, it would have been ideal for the van driver to stop the van, but since he had no intentions of doing
so I had to think fast. This image was taken at an ISO setting of 200.

I quickly changed the ISO to 800, and I was able to get the cow in focus even though the van was still
moving and the sun was going down quickly. Below is the image.  Now that the cow is in focus, I have
something to work with. It’s time for some Photoshop.

I did a quick spot healing on one spot using the Spot healing brush on the cow’s coat. There was a
piece of dirt that bothered me. I usually do this at the end. So, I’ll save the rest of that for the last part of
this tutorial.

The first thing I do in Photoshop is look at the levels palette. To get to the levels palette, select the
Image menu, then select Adjustments, then Levels. A box will pop up called levels.

Actually, the levels don’t look too bad. I would move the right slider just a hair to the left to meet the
black part of the level. Then click ok.

The next thing I would do is zoom in and get rid of the tag on the cow’s ear. A little cloning should do
the trick.

Here (above) the clone stamp is active. You can tell because it is highlighted with a box around it.

When cloning make sure you keep the clone stamp as close to the area that you want to clone in order
to keep the same colors and texture you want in the area.

Next, I would go into Color Balance, found under the Image menu, Adjustments, Color Balance.

Move the sliders around until you’re happy with the look. Then give the image a small tweak with some
contrast. The contrast is found under Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast. I wouldn’t go
higher then a 4 or 5. If you do, it will give the image an off-look.

Last, but not least, I would crop this image. I think it has too much foreground and a little too much
empty space on the left. The crop tool is found in the toolbar on the left.

Then just click on the checkmark in the toolbar that runs horizontal at the top of the screen:

I save the image and just go over the image to see if there are any imperfections, like little marks or spots
that you wouldn’t want on the finished image. For that I use the Spot Healing Brush, which is located
on the toolbar:

Here is the “before” image:

And here is the finished “after” image:

You can download a PDF version of this article here:
Troubleshooting in Low Light Conditions with Some Photoshop Tweaking.pdf (2.4 MB)