How to make photos with too dark colors clear?

The photos are too dark and gray, and exposure may be the most common problem in photography. Whether your photo is underexposed (too dark), overexposed (too bright) or foggy, incorrect exposure will ruin any good photo. First, compare the results with a set of example photos. Here are the steps: You can use the color scale function through menu Image-Adjust-Color Scale, but I don't recommend it. On the contrary, I always like to work with color gradation adjustment layers. By adjusting the layer, you can modify the adjustment or change the opacity at any time. In addition, you can also use the layer mask to adjust the layers, which comes in handy when you just want to adjust a certain part of the picture. These advantages are enough to show that using the adjustment layer is better than using the color scale command. Click the "Create Adjustment Layer" button at the bottom of the panel, and then select "Levels" from the drop-down menu to quickly create a level adjustment layer. In the color scale window, you can see a histogram, which marks the distribution of dark parts and highlights in the picture in the form of coordinates. The dark parts are on the left and the highlights are on the right. There are three arrow sliders under the histogram to set the brightness value of the photo. The three sliders from left to right represent black field, middle field and white field (pink circle in the figure) respectively. The histogram of this photo is a typical low contrast effect. The leftmost curve (black area) in the histogram does not touch the leftmost of the coordinate axis, and the right curve (white area) does not touch the rightmost. In accurately exposed photos, we usually want the photos to have a complete tone. In other words, we want the brightest place in the photo to be pure white and the darkest place to be pure black. In this photo, there are only grayer black and grayer white, resulting in a low contrast effect. To quickly adjust the tone range of this photo to make it a complete tone, just move the black field slider to the right until the left end of the curve, and then move the white field slider to the left until the right end of the curve. When you click "OK", tell Photoshop to turn the blackest place in the picture into pure black, the whitest place into pure white, and other areas are evenly distributed. We call it "standard adjustment". This is the most basic way to adjust the exposure. Of course, you must use your own eyes to judge whether each adjustment is appropriate. For this picture, it has been greatly improved after standard adjustment, but I want to go further, because I want to make the animal's face and eyes more eye-catching, which is the focus of the picture. In order to highlight the midtone of the photo, I moved the midtone slider to the left. Doing so will change the monkey's face and eyes and release details from the shadows. However, although I got a brighter midrange, I lost most of the dark parts. So I decided to move the black field slider to the right and go deep into the curve. Similarly, I continue to move the white area slider to the left to make the highlighted area more prominent. When you put the black and white field slider into the histogram curve like this, you will lose the details of dark parts or highlights. This is essentially telling Photoshop to "turn all the places darker than here into pure black" or "turn all the places brighter than here into pure white". Photoshop allows you to preview this effect. Hold down the Alt key and move the slider. When you see the color start to appear, the pixels representing dark parts or highlights will change. Preview can help you decide how appropriate and how much detail to lose to improve the exposure effect. In this example, you can see that in the final histogram, I changed the black field, white field and midrange sliders to improve the contrast and make the animal's eyes and face stand out, at the expense of losing the details of shadows and highlights. All the above work can be completed in Photoshop in just a few seconds. In addition, because I used layers, I can go back to this step in the future. Just double-click the Adjust Layer icon (pink in the picture) in the Layers panel. Although this is a little more complicated than using the brightness/contrast tool, I hope you can appreciate how simple and powerful it is to use Photoshop's color scale tool to adjust the exposure. Here is the rendering: this effect is really good. Now you might as well try it yourself. More practice will definitely have an effect.