Brightness gradient - how to use?

Hi,

Yesterday I ran into the function „brightness gradient”. What would be the typical situation / kind of photo where I would use this feature?

It´s really nice to play with. If you have an image of a flower as an example, where the sun came directly from “above”, you can easily change the direction of the incoming light. And the picture looks as if you have used a spot light. Is this the idea behind this function? Or am I using it to playful ;-)

Regards,
Ben

Hi,

Brightness gradient is one of my favorite tools within PhotoPerfect.

You can use that to simulate (to certain extend) the classical gradient filter, which is very useful for landscape, especially sunrise and sunset or just high dynamic situtations. In someway it is quite similar to HDR but takes another approach. While HDR "extends" the dynamic range, Brightness gradient or the gradient filter reduces the dynamic range in before hand, so that it fits to the range of the capturing media.
Normally the dynamic range in the mentioned situations are higher than a digital chip can capture. So you will either loose the sky (too bright) or the ground (too dark). By using the brightness gradient you can either darken the sky or brighten the ground or via versa. Of course if e.g. your sky is completely overblown, you would not be able to rescue it later with the help of brightness gradient - thus why I mentioned "to a certain extend".
By doing so, you usually can completely change the moods of your photo.

The following example is just quick and dirty, so I hope that you don't mind the cr&ppy photo.



This sunset is quite contrasty, nevertheless, the photo is quite correctly exposed, but is still a bit boring.

So I open up the brightness gradient:



There are 3 parameters, that you can control:

1) The arrow, which controls the direction and distance of the light source(s). The shorter the arrow, the closer is the light and thus more harsh/intense.
2) The brightness slider, which brightens up or darkens the area marked/pointed by the arrow.
3) The saturation slider, which increases or decreases the area marked/pointed by the arrow. Please use this with care, because it can degrade the image quality if pushed too much.

Well in this case I chose to darken the sky more to create a more dangerous/ mysterious atmosphere. So I moved the arrow to the borber between ground and sky and shortened it. Please note that the arrow pointed upwards. At the same time I moved the brightness slider down:



After clicking on "Accept", I chose to brighten up the ground. Just did the opposite to the last step: arrow points down, moved to the border and shortened. The brightness slider up and the saturation slider up a bit:



and clicked on "Execute". Now this is the result:



Put it in a nice frame and you'll get a quite decent photo ;-)



It's easy, isn't it ?

Cheers

Hoang-Tran

But that's not all. As you can use the brightness gradient to control and virtually add different light sources, you can create a more interesting lighting to your photos. So it is intended to be played with. The more "playful" you are, the more surprising and pleasing effects you will get.

This is a very boring landscape photos with flat light:



I chose to use the brightness gradient to modify the lighting 3 times. The first arrow is pointing to the sky, brightness down and saturation up a bit to give a more vivid sky. The next step is arrow pinting to the left, moved the middle of grass area and increased the brightness, saturation up a bit. The third arrow is located above the trees, pointed down with decreased brightness adn if necessary saturation slightly up.

Photo framed and here it is:



You can see, that the lighting is now very 3 dimensional, making the photo more appealing.

Best regards

Hoang-Tran

Another effect I like to create with brightness gradient is creating virtual "spotlights":

Again boring photo ;-)



In order to add spot light, you will have to shorten the arrow, until it is almost a small line, then the intensity of the virtual light source is the highest, making it looks like a spot light. For this image i chose to add 2 spot lights and a normal light source locating in the sky, pointing down, brightness down and sat up.

And here is the final image:



It looks different, isn't it. These are just some quick and dirty examples, but I hope that you can see, there is much more uses for the brightness gradient. Hope to see some great results from you also :-)

Cheers

Hoang-Tran

Wow,

This is even more than I expected. Thank you Hoang-Tran for this great motivation to try more with my own photos

Regards,

Ben