Adjusting Levels

Even if you set your lights correctly and white balance, you may still not like the way your images look on the computer screen.  While it is not necessary for every shot, you should try to get the color bar in all of your images, as this will be of invaluable help when doing levels and color corrections.  Photoshop has many useful tools that can be used to adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness and colors of a photograph, but the Levels tool will usually be all that you need for most of your photos.  The Levels tool lets you monitor and adjust the balance of white and black pixels in your photo, allowing you to define the black, white and middle gray points. 

Photoshop has a great function called Adjustment Layers, which allows you to create a layer over your original image without affecting the actual pixels of the image.  In other words, you can do as much as you want in an adjustment layer without worrying about making irreversible changes to your original image.  If you mess up, just delete the layer and start over with a new layer! 

Levels Adjustment Layer

To start, pull down the Layers menu, and select “New Adjustment Layer”, then “Levels”.

This will open up the following window, where you can name your new layer (or just leave it as “Layer 1”).  Don’t change anything except the name, then click “OK”.

Go ahead and click “OK” - a new window will appear, which is the Levels control panel. 

In this control panel, you have several ways of adjusting the balance of white and black pixels – or brightness and contrast – in your image.  The graph in the center is called a histogram: it shows you the number of pixels of each value between white and black.  The three little triangles, from left to right, represent the black, middle gray and white ends of the histogram.  You can manually adjust these by dragging the little triangles to the left or right – experiment and see what happens in your image. 

A quick and simple way of adjusting the brightness and contrast of your image uses the eyedropper tools in the bottom right corner of the Levels control panel.  Again, the dropper on the far left is your black point, the one in the middle is for middle gray and the far right dropper is the white point.  Select the white eyedropper, and then click on either of the white squares of the color-bar (you did remember to shoot with the color-bar right?) in your image.  You can also click on your label, if that seems whiter than the color-bar’s white. Use your eye - it's more important that you select the whitest part of the image, and sometimes this may not be the color-bar at all!   Without closing the control panel, select the black eyedropper and do the same, but with the black square on your color-bar. 

You can also select the middle gray eyedropper and then select a gray square on the color-bar; it may be difficult to determine which square is the best, and depending on which color-bar you use, its location may be different than in the picture above.  However, you can experiment and see which gray gives you the most true-to-life color.  Or you can just not set the gray point at all, if you are satisfied with the color after picking the black and white points with the eyedroppers.  When you are done, select “OK” in the Levels control panel.  

Reviewing Your Adjustments

To see how much of a change you have made, go to the Layers palette and uncheck the little “eye’ box to the left of your Levels layer.  This turns the layer visibility off and on.  If you want to re-open the Levels control panel again, just double-click on the half-and-half circle to the right of the “eye” check box.  

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the original image next to the levels-adjusted image. Wow! Viva la difference!

Not every adjustment is going to be this dramatic, and sometimes you will hardly notice any difference. Don't despair - this just means that your original photograph was accurate, and excellent!

Once you're satisfied with your changes, I'll show you how to save them properly in the next section.

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