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Digital Photo Contrast

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Abstract

What do you do if you take a photo and it turns out too dark or too bright? You can use your computer to fix it for you.

Summary

Areas of Science
Difficulty
 
Time Required
Very Short (≤ 1 day)
Prerequisites
None
Material Availability
Specialty Item: Requires Adobe Photoshop or similar photo editing software
Cost
Very Low (under $20)
Safety
No issues
Credits

Sara Agee, Ph.D., Science Buddies

Objective

In this experiment you will investigate how changing the contrast of a digital photo will change the colors and quality of the printed image.

Introduction

One of the most common photo edits is to change the brightness or the contrast of a photo. Brightness refers to how much light is in your picture. Contrast is the difference between points of color, called pixels, that are next to each other. The more different the two adjacent pixel colors are, the higher the contrast is. The two highest contrasting colors are black and white.

How can contrast help you make your photo better? Sometimes we take our pictures where there is not enough light. If the picture is too dim you can lighten it by increasing the brightness. The problem will be that as you increase the brightness of the photo, it will start to look washed out. Changing the contrast can correct for this by amplifying the differences in color between pixels in the photo.

Enhancing a photo by changing the brightness and contrast is tricky. You need to strike a careful balance between the two. If you over do the contrast, your picture will look very exaggerated. In this experiment you can investigate the limits of changing the contrast of an image. How low or high can you go before the image quality is compromised? Can you identify the window of opportunity?

Terms and Concepts

To do this type of experiment you should know what the following terms mean. Have an adult help you search the internet, or take you to your local library to find out more!

Questions

Bibliography

Materials and Equipment

Experimental Procedure

Note: the directions are for Adobe Photoshop. If you are using different image editing software, you may need to read the help files or do a web search to find out how to adjust a photo's contrast.

  1. On your desktop, create a new folder called "My Photo Experiment" and place a copy of your favorite photo in the folder (like puppy.jpg).
  2. Open the photo in Adobe Photoshop.
  3. Click "Image" then "Adjustments" and then "Brightness/Contrast" from the file menu.

    Screenshot of the image menu drop-down in the program Photoshop

    A cropped screenshot from Adobe Photoshop showing image adjustment options. Image adjustments can be accessed by selecting Image and Adjustments from the main menu. Brightness/contrast is selected in the Adustments drop-down menu

  4. You will see a dialog box that has two slider controls, one for brightness and one for contrast. Click and move one of the sliders, what happens to the image?

    Screenshot of the brightness settings window in the program Photoshop

    A cropped screenshot from Adobe Photoshop shows the Brightness / Contrast settings window with 2 sliders. The top slider will adjust the brightness of an image and the bottom slider will adjust the contrast of an image. The OK button to the right of the sliders will save the changes made.



  5. Next you will make a series of different images with different contrast levels. Set the brightness level to zero for each image. The contrast levels will be set at the following values: -100, -50, 0, +50, and +100. If you want to collect more data, add more settings in between these values.
  6. After changing your first setting, click "OK" to apply the settings and close the dialog box.
  7. Click on "File" and "Save As" to save this picture as a new file in the folder on your desktop named "My Photo Experiment", naming each new file with a different name to keep track of your experiments (like puppy1, puppy2, puppy3, etc.). Keep all of the settings and file extensions the same. You can use a data table to help you keep track of your contrast settings and file names:

    File Name Contrast Setting Description of result:
    puppy.jpg original file  
    puppy1.jpg -100  
    puppy2.jpg -50  
    etc.    

  8. Print the picture on photo quality paper and label the image by writing the contrast setting on the corner of the image.
  9. Close this image and re-open the original image from the desktop folder (puppy.jpg).
  10. Repeat steps 3-9 changing the contrast setting each time, until you have one picture for each setting you wish to test.
  11. Arrange your photos in a row and compare the images. How does contrast change the colors in the photo? Does it change the quality of the photo? When might adjusting this setting be useful?
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Variations

  • In this project, you changed the contrast levels. You can also try changing the brightness levels. Do you get similar or different results?
  • To kick this project up a notch, you can quantify the data by counting the number of unique colors in each image. Photoshop can not calculate the unique colors used in an image, so you will need to use another program like PaintShop Pro, which is a shareware program available for a free download. Open each of your files with PaintShop Pro and choose Colors/CountColorsUsed. After a while PaintShop Pro will show a dialog box that tells you the number of unique colors in the image, (like 16,777,216). When you increase or decrease the contrast, what happens to the total number of colors?
  • Another interesting component of a digital image is the saturation and contrast of the image. To investigate these topics see the Science Buddies project ideas Color Saturation and Color Profiles for more ideas.

Careers

If you like this project, you might enjoy exploring these related careers:

Career Profile
If you've ever watched a cartoon, played a video game, or seen an animated movie, you've seen the work of multimedia artists and animators. People in these careers use computers to create the series of pictures that form the animated images or special effects seen in movies, television programs, and computer games. Read more
Career Profile
Lights, camera, action! It takes more than actors to put an exciting motion picture movie together. It takes film and video editors and cutting-edge computer technology to make an exciting movie that people want to see. From the many thousands of minutes of film and video, the editor has to choose the best shots to tell a cohesive and compelling story. In addition to having an artistic bent, the film and video editor must relish working with complicated computer equipment. If you would like to… Read more

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General citation information is provided here. Be sure to check the formatting, including capitalization, for the method you are using and update your citation, as needed.

MLA Style

Science Buddies Staff. "Digital Photo Contrast." Science Buddies, 20 Nov. 2020, https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project-ideas/Photo_p006/photography-video/digital-photo-contrast?from=Home. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

APA Style

Science Buddies Staff. (2020, November 20). Digital Photo Contrast. Retrieved from https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project-ideas/Photo_p006/photography-video/digital-photo-contrast?from=Home


Last edit date: 2020-11-20
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