To brighten or not to brighten?

[relux]

So after reading up on how to process a photo afterwords I have come to a few contradicting things. I have been using brighten/contrast to lighten up some of the photos I have taken. After reading various people say how they deal with darker photos I have heard about levels and curves. I have heard some say never to touch the brithness/contrast controls and to only deal with curves. I have played with unsharp mask a bit but have had mixed results. Below is a photo I took last night at a concert, what would you all do to make this a better image? I am using Photoshop 7 so I am able to do most things. I would love to see what can be done and how you did it for an example of how I should deal with processing these pictures. I understand I should look into getting a book on this sort of thing but would love any feedback you may have time to give me. Thanks!

Only thing I have done with this photo is scale it to 50% of image.
http://www.failedsecurity.com/atr1.jpg

[Scottes]

You may be interested in this thread:
Correcting Underexposed Images Using Curves
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35041

[who10]

Especially for those starting out in Photoshop, sometimes less effort is best. I would recommend using a "screen" overlay rather than curves - for one it's easier to use (or at least easier to learn).

http://www.haskellct.com/photos/atr1_lighten1.jpg

For this sample you would:

1 ) Choose Layer=>duplicate layer
2 ) Select the new "background copy" layer in the layer pallet
3 ) Set the upper left mode selector to "screen", adjust the affect with "opacity"

At the link below I duplicated the newly created "screen" layer to further increase the affect (essentially stacking two overlays together) setting the first to "100%" opacity and the second to "50%" opacity... overlay is an interesting and powerful facility.

http://www.haskellct.com/photos/atr1_light.jpg

As a side, one would likely not stop PS processing here - the point was to show how to evenly lighten an entire image with greater control than use of "lighten/contrast" and less knowledge and expertise than curves.

NOTE: Multiply mode has a darkening affect on "over exposed" images.

David

[relux]

Thanks got your reply! All this is helping me out a ton! I have actually decided to throw that picture in grayscale. That seems to be the only way to salvage some good pictures. I take a lot of concert pictures and it seems unless I am on the stage I get drowned out by reds which make it very hard for me to make it turn out in photoshop. I am not able to use a tripod so that makes the pictures difficult without flash.. I am learning though. Not sure what to do about the reds in some pictures though...