Make the Best of Difficult Lighting

Use an old-fashioned darkroom trick to put more light on an underexposed, backlit subject.

A backlit scene--one in which the main light source is behind the subject so you're shooting into the light--is to photography what a 7/10 split is to bowling, or parallel parking on a steep hill is to driving a car.
The problem is that direct lighting in the back of your scene confuses your camera into closing down the aperture or shooting with a faster shutter speed, leading to an underexposed subject. But just because it's a little tricky to shoot with backlighting, that doesn't mean you can't get great results anyway.
This week, let's take a classic backlit photo and punch it up in Adobe Photoshop Elements. If you use a different photo editing program, you can get the same results; you'll just need to adapt the steps to your program.

Dave Johnson's Part 1 of a special five-part series at PC World

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