Adjusting brightness without washing out an image

I'm using a ColorTransform to adjust the brightness of an image, but it's also causing it to look faded and washed out as I increase the brightness, even by just a small amount.
Is there a way to adjust brightness without getting this effect, or something that can be done to offset it?
(edit: using Actionscript 3.0, require code solution, not something in Flash IDE)

Hi and welcome to the forums....
I'm certain you can't do that in Aperture... Aperture is a pro photo management system with some excellent image adjustment features. But for what you describe you will need Photoshop or other such application.
HTH
Gerry......

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When I set my background image on my today screen (check the box in settings, browse to image - use 320x320 resolution) I get a "washed out" version of the image regardless of its original color, tone or intensity. Images from the preinstalled themes are fine - vibrant and clear - but the user set images are very light (almost like a 50 percent transparency in Photoshop for example). I have tried both .jpg format and .png. Backlight settings do not cure this either.
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Hi Again:
Upon further investigation, I have discovered that the options for setting background and transparency levels is found through the pictures and videos explorer not the file explorer.
As suggested I have set the transparency to 0 and the image (Crab Nebula through the Hubble space telescope) is as bright and vibrant as it should be.
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Imported RAW Photos too bright (overexposed, washed out)

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I recently got my first iSight and when I hook it up and look at the video picture in iChat, I can see a decent quality picture when I point it out my window to the street in front of my house.
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FCP Filter control brightness? - washed out - too bright?

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Hello Jeff,
generally you should avoid overexposing your footage. Most cameras have a "Zebra" that will indicate areas over 100 IRE. Blown out video may not be fixable in post because the information in the overexposed areas may be lost. You can try the following:
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Disconnect+reconnect external display = washed out image

hi guys
I need some expert help on this. Using a Dell E178 WFP external display on my 2010 Macbook Pro via mini-DVI-to-VGA adapter. This display has no EDID it seems so I use SwitchResX to create the necessary resolution override (1440x900). SwitchResX has nothing such as daemons or helpers installed on top, so this boils down to graphics drivers.
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Again, this is not the gamma problem that's fixed by just opening the display preferences and resetting the colour profile.
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Evening,
I have just bought a new Apple TV 2, on my TV it seems too bright or washed out.
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I've had a noticeable yet unknown problem, and today I figured out why, but now need help fixing it.
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When I import a grayscale psd file into ID, it gets washed out when I add a transparent element to the page. My page started out in the page Window as a solid white background, and changed to transparent when I added the transparent element next to it. At the same time, my nicely contrasted grayscale psd image (contains levels adjustment layer) became washed out and lighter. This is the first time I've actually watched it happen as I added a transparent element - probably because often transparent elements are added before my photos.(this explains the poor image quality I've had in the past - always thought it was a calibration issue on my monitor).
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I'll try that out tomorrow and see what I find out.
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Costco and soft proofing show dull washed out image

OK, so I am trying to utilize my nearest costco to print some images from lightroom 5. I am getting back dull washed out prints.
Facts:
I shoot in RAW in manual mode
I am using sRGB when I do my post processing
I export to jpg for printing
I used the costco LR5 plugin from Alloyphoto to upload to Costco
I have installed the printer profiles from drycreek for the specific location/printer and have chosen the correct profile as I export
I made sure that I chose to have Costco NOT autocorrect the color
Even when I use LR5's soft proofing, I get the same result on my monitor
I checked the print I got back and it says that they did NOT autocorrect (taken with a grain of salt)
The machine they are using is a Noritsu QSS-A, so I know my profile is correct
I have attached a screen shot of what I am seeing.
Why am I seeing this on my soft proofing as well as my prints?
How can I solve this and get vibrant prints?
Any advice would be helpful.
Message was edited by: moviebuffking

moviebuffking wrote:
I have calibrated my monitor as good as I can get without specific hardware. I have 18 years experience calibrating monitors (via optical media and my eyes), so I know that mine is very close.
It is virtually impossible to "accurately" set the Luminance, Gamma, and Color temperature "by eye." This is most likely the cause of your prints not matching the screen image you see in LR. That being the monitor's Luminance (i.e. Brightness) level is too set to high.
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/colour_management/prints_too_dark.html
To see if this could be your problem I downloaded the posted screen shot and cropped out the 'Copy' image, which has your adjustments applied to it. Here are my results:
Click on image to see full-size
I needed to apply a full F stop (+1.0 EV) of Exposure correction to achieve a good midtone brightness level for the print image. You'll notice I also added -50 Highlights and +50 Shadows along with +25 Vibrance. I bet the image with my adjustments added looks way too bright on your uncalibrated monitor.
You have two (2) issues–Monitor Calibration and LR Basic Panel Control Adjustments
Monitior Calibration
I would highly recommend investing in a hardware monitor calibrator such as the X-Rite i1 Display and ColorMunki, or Datacolor Spyder models. If you tell me what make and model monitor you are using I can recommend specific calibrators.
Temporarily you can try adjusting the monitor "by eye" to get it closer to the desired 120cd/m2 Luminance, 2.2 Gamma, and 6500K Color Temperature using the test patterns at this site:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
When the monitors Brightness and Contrast controls have been correctly set the screen image should look much closer to the prints you have recently made with the LR Soft Proof adjustments. So in fact you will be adjusting the monitor to make it look bad with the LR adjustments you applied. The proper monitor settings will make the Lagom test patterns look correct AND should make your bad Costco prints now match the screen image using you original LR settings.
After changing the monitor's Brightness and Contrast settings try readjusting a few of the image files you had printed and send them to Costco as check prints. Compare them again to your monitor's screen image. They should be much better!
LR Basic Panel Tone Control Adjustment
LR's PV2012 Tone controls can provide much improvement to your raw image Highlight and Shadow detail. Start with all of the Tone controls at their '0' default settings and adjust them from the top-down in the order shown below.
1. Set Exposure for the midtone brightness ignoring the highlight and shadow areas for now. Setting Exposure about +.5 EV higher than what looks correct for the midtones seems to work best with most images.
2. Leave Contrast at 0 for now. You’ll adjust this after the first pass.
3. Adjust Highlights so that blown out areas are recovered and “fine tonal detail” is revealed.
4. Adjust Shadows to reveal fine detail in dark areas. For most normal images simply setting -Shadows = +Highlights (Example -50 and +50) works very well.
5. The Whites control sets the white clipping point, which you can see by holding down the ALT key as you move the slider. Adjust it to the point where you see clipping just appear with the ALT key.
6. The Blacks control sets the black clipping point, which you can see by holding down the ALT key as you move the slider. Adjust it to the point where you see clipping just appear with the ALT key.
7. Now go back and adjust the Contrast control to establish the best midtone contrast.
8. Lastly touchup the Exposure control for the best midtone brightness.
9. If necessary “touch-up” the controls using the same top-down workflow.
moviebuffking wrote:
Am I correct in assuming that the soft proof (with a certain profile) is a "preview" of what that print will look like?
Soft Proof does two things. It shows you what the image's colors will look like in the target color space (i.e. printer profile). You can see what (if any) colors are "out of gamut" by clicking on the small icon in the upper-righthand corner of the Histogram. You can also see if any of the colors fall out of your monitor's gamut by clicking on the small icon in the upper-lefthand corner of the Histogram.
When you check 'Simulate Paper & Ink' the Soft Proof image's contrast and color saturation are changed to make it look closer to what the "reflective" print image will look like when held next to the monitor for comparison. Many people have difficulty using 'Simulate Paper & Ink' since it requires using precise light levels for viewing the print and a well calibrated monitor.
In summary my best suggestion is to purchase and use a good hardware monitor calibrator on a scheduled basis to insure you have an "accurate" screen image inside LR and other color managed applications like PS.

HP Officejet Pro 8100 - Washed out blacks in images / Dark blacks in text prints???

Here is my system: iMac Maverics OS, HP Officejet Pro 8100, Photoshop, Pages & Genuine inks.
I print a text page (Black and various colours) from Pages/Text Edit or any other text program and the colours are deeply saturated, blacks are black and I'm totally happy.
I print the exact same text, recreated in Photoshop, everything is washed out. Blacks are greyish, colours are pastel & it looks like it's been printed at 50% opacity.
I saved my Photoshop text mock up as a .Jpg .TIF .BMP and tried printing them in Pages & Mac Preview - same washed out results as when I print direct from inside Photoshop.
All my software is genuine, drivers are up to date. It's like HP use one process to print text and a whole other process to print images, **bleep** is going on???
Please advise on how to fix, if anyone else is having or has had similar issues.....

Hello @pA8100 , and welcome to the HP Forums, I hope you enjoy your experience!
I see you're experiencing Photoshop colour issues. I would like to help.
It is possible you need to adjust the colour settings in Photoshop from RGB to CKMY.
I would recommend utilizing this article on How to Convert RGB to CMYK in Photoshop.
Good luck and please let me know the results of your troubleshooting steps. Thank you for posting on the HP Forums!
Please click “Accept as Solution " if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
Click the “Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the right to say “Thanks" for helping!
Jamieson
I work on behalf of HP
"Remember, I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together!" - Red Green.

Levono 2323s Monitor Brightness not working and colors washed out

Just purchased a Levono 2323s monitor and installed the latest drivers. I am trying to calibrate the color and the brightness adjustment doesn't work. Also the rest of the colors are very washed out on every setting. Any ideas? I'm not the most technical person but I can do a little.

Just purchased a Levono 2323s monitor and installed the latest drivers. I am trying to calibrate the color and the brightness adjustment doesn't work. Also the rest of the colors are very washed out on every setting. Any ideas? I'm not the most technical person but I can do a little.

Why do my images look washed out...

Why do my images look washed out after I have worked in Photoshop CS6 and saved them in Finder? I have been a Photoshop user for a while now and have never experienced this problem. It started 2 months ago and no one can seem to tell me why or how to fix it. I am a professional photographer and I have clients waiting on their images but I can't send them looking as horrible as they do. My workflow is: drag and drop an image from iPhoto or Finder to Photoshop. I change things like levels, contrast, image size and use the healing too. Then I save to Finder so I can upload to dropbox or to website or burn to a DVD. Now when I save the image the thumbnail looks washed out, without color and looks horrible!!! I don't know if my photo files are corrupted or ? If I open the image in Photoshop or Bridge it looks fine. I would be grateful for any suggestions or explanation. Things were working just fine, but not now.

Examining the image direct from the camera of the child on the beach, using http://regex.info/exif.cgi there is a small embedded thumbnail (with black bars top-and-bottom to letterbox it to the LCD aspect ratio), and a small preview probably used for zooming in on the camera LCD screen, and the fullsize jpg image all contained in the one JPG file. All three of these seem to have identical histograms other than the black-bars causing a dark peak on the thumbnail image, but otherwise the shapes of the histograms and the position of the peaks from light to dark are the same.
In other words the full-size JPG and the embedded preview and thumbnail all seem the same other than size so the darkened version seen in Finder is not coming from the camera. The one issue the above website reports is that the camera JPG has a color-profile tag (name of the profile) but does not actually contain the color profile, itself. All other versions of the image have an actual embedded profile not just the name in a tag. It is possible that this is confusing Finder into assuming a different profile or gamma curve for the image that sRGB warrants, but most all camera images have this issue so I wouldn't expect a Mac to show images from all cameras as too dark.
It is a mystery to me why the Finder preview looks darker, but at least in the one side-by-side provided, it does, and is different-looking than all other representations of the image from what I can see.
At the beginning of this thread you said you were worried the photos coming out of Photoshop were washed out and had bad colors. From my perspective, what comes out of Photoshop looks the same as what comes out of the camera, so only Finder has it wrong. Are you seeing the darker image anywhere else besides Finder (and perhaps iPhoto which we don't have a screenshot of)?
Most importantly does the image you see on screen in Photoshop, while you're making adjustments, look dark like the pre-PS Finder thumbnail or does it look lighter, like the post-PS Finder thumbnail and all the images on DropBox?
If more than just the pre-PS Finder thumbnail is darker then you may have a monitor calibration issue that needs to be addressed, otherwise just ignore the pre-PS Finder thumbnail when evaluating if the image needs any adjustments and assume they are all ligher than the Finder image.
BTW, I tested for a sRGB vs AdobeRGB mismatch, and if an sRGB image is assigned an Adobe profile then the colors become more intense but the whole image does not become darker so that can't explain what is happening.

Uneven brightness + washed out colours

I got a new iBook G4 12in a week ago. Love everything about it apart from the screen. As soon as I booted it for the first time I noticed the screen wasn't particularly bright and that the colours were washed out. It's usable but not of a level I'd expect from Apple. It's bad even under standard office fluorescent lighting.
A colleague with an identical iBook noticed my screen was a bit dim and said he usually runs his iBook at a low brightness level (two notches off bottom). If I did that on mine, I'd struggle to see anything! It has to be run at full or just below full brightness to be usable.
I've also noticed that the bottom of the screen is brighter than the top. This took me a week to notice so isn't a huge problem. At the bottom corners there are very light streaks - it's a bit like the screen is being run from two halogen spotlights placed underneath the plastic surround!
Should I phone Apple's support and get this fixed, or is it to be expected? Research online shows half the people have a similar problem with washed out colours, while half claim their screens are bright and vibrant.

I called AppleCare last night. First, the guy asked me to do a couple of adjustments. He suspected that the display was damp. So he asked me to turn off the system, take out the battery, and then discharge the whole machine completely by pressing Shift, Ctrl, Alt, and the power button at the same time. But this trick didn't solve the problem. Second, he asked me to put the installer cd in and adjust something. It didn't work either. After this, he got me a system engineer on the phone, and he said there were two options: I could either send it in for repair, which would be quicker, or exchange it for a new unit, which would be slower, about 10-12 days. So I decided to exchange it for a new one. They are sending me the packing labels. Then I will send this one back. They will send a new one to me.
I suspect that displays with such problems are recycled ones. I mean they are taken from junk ones with an okay display. I hope this is not true. The display on my three-year-old Compaq still looks better than this one.
Apart from this small defect, my new computer works really well, and I love it. I am just a little disappointed with the product quality of Apple computers. It seems that they have put a lot of effort in the design of the appearance of their computers. But there is some degree of negligience on other aspects of their computers. That's why this forum is full of complaints.
Personally I think it is better to buy a computer directly in a store. It is easier to return or get a new one.

Adjusting brightness without washing out an image

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