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1. Open an image.

Open the image you want to correct. Shot in a dark room with a cheesy consumer flash, this snapshot might as well have been taken in a closet.

2. Open the Histogram palette.

Choose WindowHistogram to display the Histogram palette. (If the palette was already visible, choosing the command will hide it. Choose the command again to display it.)

3. Hide the color channels.

Unlike Levels and Curves, the Shadow/Highlight command lacks individual channel controls. Photoshop applies your changes to all channels at once, so there's no point in wasting valuable screen real estate on multiple histograms. Click the arrow in the upper right corner of the Histogram palette, and then choose Expanded View from the palette menu to see just one large histogram.

4. Choose the Shadow/Highlight command.

Choose ImageAdjustmentsShadow/Highlight. The resulting Shadow/Highlight dialog box contains just two slider bars. The Shadows option lets you lighten the darkest colors; the Highlights option darkens the lightest colors.

5. Adjust shadows and highlights.

By default, Photoshop is a little bit too enthusiastic about lightening the shadows and not enthusiastic enough about darkening the highlights. To temper the dark colors, reduce the Shadows value to 30 percent. Then raise the Highlights value to 10 percent.

6. Show the advanced options.

The Shadow/Highlight dialog box may appear a bit feeble—especially when compared with the likes of Levels and Curves—but it's got a tiger in its tank. To unleash that tiger, select the Show More Options check box. Photoshop unfurls the options pictured below.

7. Maximize the Radius values.

The underlying code behind Shadow/Highlight bears a closer resemblance to Photoshop's sharpening, blurring, and averaging filters, than it does to Levels and Curves. This means that left to its own devices, the Shadow/Highlight command tends to sharpen an image. To mitigate this, raise both Radius values—one under Shadows and the other under Highlights—to 100 pixels. A large Radius value distributes the effect, resulting in the smoothest possible transitions between our friends the highlights, shadows, and midtones.

8. Modify the Tonal Width values.

The two Tonal Width options control just how many colors Photoshop considers to be shadows and highlights. Because so much of our image is devoted to shadow and so little to highlight, we want to narrow the definition of the former and widen the latter. So reduce the Tonal Width for Shadows to 40 percent and increase the Tonal Width for Highlights to 70 percent.

9. Increase the amount of shadow.

Having tempered the shadows by decreasing the Tonal Width and increasing the Radius, they can tolerate a higher Amount value. Raise the Amount from 30 percent to 70 percent to increase the brightness of the darkest colors in the photo.

10. Lower the Color Correction value.

Much like the Saturation value in the Hue/Saturation dialog box, the Color Correction option lets you adjust the intensity of colors. Because the colors in this image are a bit too intense, lower the Color Correction value to +10. Leave the other Adjustments values as they are. The image below shows the Shadow/Highlight dialog box with the final values entered.

11. Save your changes.

Click OK or press Enter or Return to accept your changes and exit the Shadow/Highlight dialog box.

The result above is by no means perfect. In the course of such radical brightness shifts, Shadow/Highlight tends to exaggerate textures and background noise. But the lighting is now significantly more balanced than it was in the original photograph, and you can easily make out details such as the carpeting and the folds in the men's clothing, once clouded in gloom. Shadow/Highlight is the best one-stop method in all of Photoshop for correcting extremely high-contrast images.