Tweaker

PaintShop Pro, like most graphics hosts, has several methods for altering the brightness and contrast of an image. Some of them are simple but clumsy, some of them are powerful but complex. I felt the need for something in between - something that would allow me, for example, to lighten and darken the highlight and shadow areas independently, but without the irritation of theshold and cutoff points that can introduce obviously artificial areas. Well, here it is.

	I'm very fond of this image - Lee, walking on the beach at Tywyn, at sundown. It was one of the first photographs I took after buying a digital camera. It's in the lowest resolution that the camera can manage (about 640x480, I think), because my lovely new toy arrived with only a 2Mb memory card, and I had to get three days' shooting onto it! Actually, I like this picture just the way it is - but it will serve to show what Tweaker can do.
	There are just three sliders to play with. 'Shadows' allows you to boost or cut the brightness in shadow areas, while 'Highlights' does the same for the light areas. The overall saturation of the image will change as these two sliders are changed; the 'Saturation' slider allows you to correct this, or even to boost or cut the saturation for other purposes.
	And this is the result with the settings shown above. The shadow areas have been lifted to show more detail, while the lighter areas have been backed off to deepen their colour. As I said, I prefer the original; but this does at least show what the filter's capable of!