Playing with the shadows slider in Photoshop

The Lordco Ladies photographed at Kelowna's Canada Day Celebration, 2026.

Backlighting is a constant issue for photographers, regardless of whether your subject is human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.  Averaging light renders the foreground dark.  Exposing for the foreground leaves the background overexposed and incurs bloom.  Exposing for the background and filling with flash is often the best way to go, if you have a powerful enough flash.  But what if none of those options work for you?  What solution do you employ?

Exposing for the background, especially when it is significantly out of focus as above, makes no sense, so having it slightly overexposed is fine.  This will leave the foreground modestly underexposed, but there is enough latitude in raw dark values to lighten them using a pixel editor like Photoshop.  Lightroom will do the same thing, as will iPhone editing software (although I find that iPhone raw images do not have the save dynamic range as most DSLRs or mirrorless cameras). 

You don't even have to use the "Shadows" slider, you can use levels, curves, or other tools.  If you are really into control, you can mask the foreground and alter the background and foreground separately.  I did this for the image below.  The ting is that each tool will have a slightly different affect on the image, some better than others.  I like to play with shadows, highlights, whites, and darks as they offer more precise control than curves or levels.

Same raw image as above, with making in Raw and processing foreground and background separately.

The resulting histogram is far better for the above image, with highlights being less blown out; the image also seems to jump from the page a bit more.  It is an excellent way to process an image with so much contrast, but it takes having the right software and a knowledge of how to use it.  And, I will fully admit, I haven't figured it all out, and my attempts to correct issues aren't always so successful.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com



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