It wouldn't be summer without salvia.

Bright red in full sun has often been problematic for me in photos,
and I sometimes see the same issues for others. For some reason,
bright highly saturated reds want to over-expose in a digital image.
It is as if the camera's light meter doesn't react to red light in the
same way that it does to green and blue. Sometimes I deliberately
under-expose bright red maybe as much as 1 full stop, and that can
help.

In this case I did some manipulation in Lightroom during RAW
conversion. The LR app has a nifty feature called "Recovery" that
brings back the detail and texture (darkens) just the very brightest
areas in the image without darkening the mid and low-light areas, like
the Brightness, Exposure or Contrast controls will. Maybe PS has this
too (and I'm sure you could do this by fooling with the gamma curve),
but in LR it is a simple slider and I find it very handy. In addition
to this control, LR also has an 8-position color channel brightness
control that I sometimes use too. With this I can darken the red and
maybe brighten the green at the same time rather than do an
across-the-board change. Again, this seems to be a much easier and
more precise control than anything I have found in PS so far.

Canon 1DMkIII
Canon 16-35mm f2.8L lens @ 22mm; ISO-100; f8; 1/100-sec

JD

John - Pa. wrote:
It wouldn't be summer without salvia.

Bright red in full sun has often been problematic for me in photos,
and I sometimes see the same issues for others. For some reason,
bright highly saturated reds want to over-expose in a digital image.
It is as if the camera's light meter doesn't react to red light in the
same way that it does to green and blue. Sometimes I deliberately
under-expose bright red maybe as much as 1 full stop, and that can
help.

In this case I did some manipulation in Lightroom during RAW
conversion. The LR app has a nifty feature called "Recovery" that
brings back the detail and texture (darkens) just the very brightest
areas in the image without darkening the mid and low-light areas, like
the Brightness, Exposure or Contrast controls will. Maybe PS has this
too (and I'm sure you could do this by fooling with the gamma curve),
but in LR it is a simple slider and I find it very handy. In addition
to this control, LR also has an 8-position color channel brightness
control that I sometimes use too. With this I can darken the red and
maybe brighten the green at the same time rather than do an
across-the-board change. Again, this seems to be a much easier and
more precise control than anything I have found in PS so far.

Canon 1DMkIII
Canon 16-35mm f2.8L lens @ 22mm; ISO-100; f8; 1/100-sec

JD



In PS 7.0, Image Adjust Curves does pretty much what you describe.
You can adjust the brightness at any level you choose without affecting
the brightness of other levels.
And you can do it selectively to the R, G, B, or RGB Channels.
It gives a lot more control than LEVELS, which affects the entire image.
Bob Williams