Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Color Correcting Photos / Correcting with Levels pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Color Correcting Photos / Correcting with Levels pt. 1)
I've been dying to show you a color correction command here in Photoshop called Levels and you know, I wanted to get into non-destructive color correction as well, sort of in combination with showing you Levels but you know, I think that might be a bit too much. I might be hitting you with too much all at once. So we'll talk about the non-destructive color correction in just a little bit but until then, let's talk about this command called Levels. Now, before we get into Levels, I want to make sure of a couple of things. First of all, make sure that you still have your Histogram Palette open. I want to show you something very cool in relation to your histogram. The other thing that I'll have you do is hit the F Key on your keyboard so that we can move our photo around because the Levels Dialog Box is actually kind of big and what I'm going to do is sort of shift my photo over towards the left-hand side of my screen. I'm just holding down the spacebar there to move that over. Alright, something like that. OK, Levels. Let's head up to our Image Menu and then down to Adjustments and then of course look for Levels. There's your keyboard shortcut, Command L or Control L on the Windows side. Go ahead and pop open your Levels Dialog Box. Alright, now at first glance things are getting a little bit more complicated in terms of our dialog boxes here but low and behold, inside our Levels Dialog Box we have a histogram. In fact, we have the exact same histogram inside the Levels Dialog Box that you and I see back inside the Histogram Panel or the Histogram Palette down in the background. So it's exactly the same thing. Now, here's what I want to do though is I want to start shifting the colors inside my photo. Again, my photo of this dirt road is looking really washed out so essentially what I want to do is I want to set my black point, as it's referred to and I also want to set my white point. Remember way back when, Photoshop automatically set our white and black points for us when we used the Auto Commandsright? And that little experiment that you and I did with those gray boxes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. So essentially what I want to do is I want to try and shift or I want to try and clip some of my pixels and force them into the darker areas of my photo. So this is what I'm going to do here. On the left-hand side, sort of the bottom-left side of the histogram that appears inside the Levels Palette, we have a black arrow and then over towards the right we have a white arrow and in the middle we have a gray arrow. So we have black, we have white or we have shadows and highlights and also midtones, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my black arrow and I'm going to drag him into the histogram, way over into the histogram this way, right? Now, a whole bunch of things happened. Let me try and slow things down here a little bit. What's happened here is I've basically said any pixels from this point in my histogram and any that appear towards the left, so all of the pixels from the black arrow to the left, I want them to be pure black. So what I've done is I've remapped them if you will. I've shifted them. Just like we shifted 75 percent gray to a hundred percent black, right? And the other thing that's happened as well is check out the Histogram Palette. This is why I wanted you to keep your Histogram Palette open by the way, is in the background of the Histogram Palette almost you can see the original histogram there in gray and then overlayed on top you can see the new histogram. So what I've done here is I've just shifted a whole bunch of pixels down towards the left side of the histogram, creating this, sort of this peak on the graph, right? OK, let's do the same with the white point. So what I'll do is I'll grab my white arrow and I'll push him towards the left, into the histogram, something like this and of course what I'm doing there now is I'm setting the white point. So what I've done here is I've said any pixels that appear on this point on the graph or at this point inside my image and any that appear from this point and to the right, all now become pure white, right? So again, what we've done here is we've done a color shift. We've pushed the pixels. We've remapped the color if you will. Now, ideally in the real world what you would do is you would take your White Slider and bring him into the foothills of your histogram on the right-hand side and same with the dark side, same with your black point. Bring him into the foothills of the histogram as well and because I have my Preview Check Box turned On inside the Levels Dialog Box, you can see my image looks ten times better. Again, remember earlier I said you'll be amazed at what we can actually do with this image. Look at all the color we resurrected from the dead out of this image, right? And again, if you want that before and after look, just click on your Preview Check Box there. The colors were there. They were just all washed out. We needed to pull them back out. We needed to draw them back outright? So anyway, what we've done is we've remapped the white and the black points inside our image. We have a new histogram that's happening inside the Histogram Palette you can see there. Now, there's a few other things that I want to show you as well in regards to the Levels Dialog Box so we'll continue this discussion on the Levels Dialog Box, the Levels Command in the next exercise.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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