Have you ever wished you could use Picasa’s Fill Light tool on just a selected area of a picture? Take the picture at right as an example, the Lincoln Memorial in the background is perfectly exposed, but the two faces in the foreground are too dark to see. If you use Picasa’s Fill Light tool, you can make it so the faces are bright, but the whole picture is affected. The Memorial will be way overexposed.
If you upload the picture, using the “Share with Google+” button, you will have more editing tools available to you, including the Selective tool. Once the picture is showing on your Google+ Photo album, you can view it then click the Edit menu. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, you will then see the four basic editing tools and several “Creative Adjustments.” We’re using the Basic editing tool of ‘selective.’ This is similar to ‘burning and dodging’ in darkroom terminology. This feature requires the Google Chrome browser, it won’t work with Internet Explorer, or Safari.
Once you’ve chosen the ‘Selective’ tool, then you click on “Add Control Point.” In this example, I did it twice, once for each face. So
- Add Control Point, and click on one face
- Adjust size of selection to cover the face
- Increase brightness by clicking on B and dragging to right
- Increase contrast by clicking on C and dragging to right
When you’re done, click “Done Editing.” Now isn’t that better?!
This edited picture only exists online, in your Google+ Photos Album. If you want it on your computer, you’ll need to use the Download command.
Geeks on Tour members may want to review the videos about uploading pictures:
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7 Responses to “Picasa Tip: Brighten a Selected Area of a Picture”
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Although your method is great, before Picasa offered this option, I found a much easier way to do this.
1) take the entire photo and then use the “fill light” until those faces are as bright as you’d like them.
2) now use the “graduated tint” to darken what needs to be darkened.
In your example I just darkened the Greek-style building.
The link shows:
top) your original photo
middle) the use of “fill light” to lighten the faces, and
bottom) the use of “graduated tint” to darken the Greek-style building
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70649832/1-Downloads.jpg
Thanks, Chris; I’ve been struggling to make that Selective adjustment work. Easy when you know how 😉
I read this past week that Google is seriously considering ditching Google +. Might want to check this out. Sure hope I’m wrong cause this is a lifesaver feature. Thanks.
I’m curious where you read that … I sure don’t think it’s true. Google seems quite committed to the Google+ platform to me.
Now that is impressive…I see that Google+ has made it easy to get to the Web Albums too..hmmmmm
Here’s the link that will always take you to the Picasa Web Albums interface: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1 Although I don’t think there’s anything there anymore that I can’t do in the Google+ interface, except embedded slideshow, but I don’t use that anymore anyway.
Really Cool ! You always have such good information.
-John