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Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Color Correcting Photos / Correcting with Levels pt. 2
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Color Correcting Photos / Correcting with Levels pt. 2)
Now I just wanted to mention a couple of quick things related to working with our Levels Dialog Box. I hope you're enjoying Levels here and this is again where things get much, much cooler. Obviously you can see here we have much more control than we did with say Brightness Contrast or even with those Auto Commands we really had no control at allright? What I wanted to mention here is just a couple of neat things that you can do with your Levels Command here. First of all, if you want, you can work numerically. Instead of working visually by dragging these sliders to the left and to the right inside the histogram inside the Levels Dialog. What you can do is you can use these text fields, these numeric fields that appear below the histogram. So for example, I'm going to take my black point, my shadows and I'm just going to shift them just a little bit to 60 there or I could come in here and I could type in 55 if I wanted to or I could come in and I could type in say 75. Obviously, the higher the value the further towards the right I'm moving my black point. The numbers inside these fields below the histogram are on that histogram scale. Don't forget, there's a scale running across the bottom of our graph that measures luminance from zero to 255. Remember that discussion? So there's 256 luminance levels. So if I take my black point and I bring him back to 60, essentially what I'm saying is take anything that's zero and now make it 60 and essentially what I've done here over on the right-hand side is I have said take anything that's 255 and now make it 233. So again, we're remapping it. If you want to work numerically, you certainly can if you want. The other thing that I wanted to mention as well is using this Auto option which does come in handy every once in a while. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll click on Reset to reset my dialog box, so I've just lost all my changes and then I'll click on Auto. I'll say well, what's Photoshop's opinion on all of this? So I'll click on Auto and hey, look at that. Photoshop's done a, I think a pretty good job. Maybe it's a little bit too contrasty for my taste but it really pulled the image back even better than I had doneright? And you know, this reminds me of something else here. At this point, you and I had been working on the entire composite image, the RGB image but I have this Channel Drop-Down and what I can do and what that Auto Command had done for me is it isolated each individual channel and made changes based on each individual channel. Let me show you this in a better way. I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll reset my dialog box one more time. So here's my composite image. I'm going to switch now and focus on my reds and I'll reset my black point for the reds, only the reds and same with the white point, maybe something like this, right? And then I'll isolate my greens and I'll do the same thing. Look at the shift in the greens there. Let's pull this way back in, something like this and then same story for the blues as well. Let's try and readjust, remap our blues. There, that's looking a lot better. So if you want, you can simply work on a composite image or you can isolate your individual channels as I've done here or of course you can use the good old Auto Button as well. OK, finally I want to show you one more method for setting the black point and the white point using Levels. I'm going to reset my dialog one more time here, holding down Alt or Option, going all the way back to where we were and what I can do of course, as you know already, is I can use my sliders, my black and my white sliders to set my black and white point. I can certainly do that. Or what I can do is I can use my Black Eyedropper and my White Eyedropper to set the black point and the white point manually inside my image. So here's what I'm going to do. First of all, I might zoom in a little bit on my image and I'm going to look for what I think is the darkest point inside my photo. Possibly down around here we have, it looks like sort of a pile of leaves, a pile of rubbish there or maybe over into these tree trunks right in there somewhere maybe. Now, what I would do is I would grab my Black Eyedropper Tool, grab that fella, bring him over top of the area that I thing should be pure black and then single click and what that does is that of course sets the black point inside my photo and shifts all of the colors and of course, I see an instant change inside my photo. I see an instant change inside the histogram, inside the Levels Dialog Box and of course a change inside the Histogram Palette that I still have open inside the background. Alright, next up I would do essentially the same thing but now for the white point. So I'll grab my White Eyedropper Tool and zoom in on my image and find what I think should be the lightest point inside my photo. Perhaps some of the lighter-color dirt towards the front of the image there, the foreground of the image or maybe, you know what, I just caught this, this beam of light, this beam of sunlight kind of cutting through the trees. I'll try single clicking on that. So I'm saying that area there should be pure white and again, you'll see that shift not only inside your photo but inside your histograms as well. So, you know, this is just another way to work. There's no right or wrong here. Again, it's all in the eye of the beholder. I feel like I've given you a ton of options in terms of working with the Levels Dialog Box. But again, don't forget. Everything that we're doing here would be a permanent change should we click on OK. So we are slowly but surely making our way towards non-destructive color correction but I've got to show you one more color correction tool before we get to the non-destructive color correction.
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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