Adobe photoshop elements User Manual

CHAPTER 4

Once you 

have corrected the overall color balance of your 
image, you can make optional adjustments to 
enhance colors or produce special effects. 
(See “Applying special color effects to images” on 
page 95.)

As a final step, 

use the Unsharp Mask filter to sharpen the clarity 
of edges in the image. This step helps restore focus 
to images that have undergone resampling as a 
result of tonal adjustments. (See “Sharpening 
images” on page 98.)

A histogram illustrates how pixels in an image are 
distributed by graphing the number of pixels at 
each color intensity level. This can show you 
whether the image contains enough detail in the 
shadows (shown in the left part of the histogram), 
midtones (shown in the middle), and highlights 
(shown in the right part) to make a good 
correction.

The histogram also gives a quick picture of the 
tonal range of the image, or the image key type. 
A low-key image has detail concentrated in the 
shadows; a high-key image has detail concentrated 
in the highlights; and an average-key image has 

detail concentrated in the midtones. An image 
with full tonal range has a high number of pixels in 
all areas. Identifying the tonal range helps 
determine appropriate tonal corrections.