|
Adjusting Levels: Overall |
|
|
|
 Without the right contrast, an image can seem dull and boring. The white points turn gray, blacks loose their intensity and the mid-tone colors take over the appearance of the image. It only takes a few blown-out highlights to have serious printing catastrophes. To fix – instead of turning to your images brightness and contrast settings – simply look into your levels to enhance your image.
In this tutorial, we are only going to go over one small, very important, step: Overall level adjustment. This is often a great place to start when retouching an image because its a great way to determine the photos overall contrast.
As soon as you open an image, we recommend that you start with an overall level adjustment. Often leveling the RGB Channel is all that is necessary, although sometimes you may need to adjust individual Red, Green and Blue channels to achieve desired results.
ABOUT THE HISTOGRAM:
*The sliders under the histogram in the levels adjustment window represents shadows (left), mid-tones (center), and highlights (right). Black areas of the histogram indicate tonal information, and white indicates where no information is available.
Step 1.
Bring the shadow and highlights inward to discard extraneous information.
 
IMPORTANT:
Shadows need to be at least 4 and highlights should be no greater than 252. Numbers lower than 4 or higher than 252 fall out of range for acceptable printing and viewing.
Don't overdo it! Remember that doing an OVERALL levels adjustment is just the first step of color correcting! As you continue to edit, consider doing a SELECTIVE level adjustment.
|