Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, we are going to take a look now at one of the first steps you should take when beginning any project of adjusting an image in Photoshop, as we have discussed many times, we are going to use adjustment layers. So whenever you are going to do an adjustment, use adjustment layers. You do not want to get into the habit of making corrections on the original image because you run the risk of doing pixel destruction, color degradation, you do too many steps into a photograph and you just end up messing it up. I mean you cannot backtrack; it destroys the image when you do it on the direct original image. But if you use adjustment layers, anything can be corrected, you do not do any destruction to any pixels and the flexibility is much much greater. So in this particular case, we are going to open up an adjustment layer, the levels adjustment layer and up comes the levels dialog box, which is a familiar image of the histogram which tells us about the tonal balance, the tonal range of this photograph, and as you can probably tell by casual glancing, it is a little bit underexposed, and that is also indicated by the fact that the histogram shows that there is not a whole lot of information coming from the whiter ends of the RGB spectrum. So we are going to compensate for that by using the whitelighter, the light slider, hold it down, left-click on it, hold it down and then drag it just inside the existing histogram and notice that the gamma slider also moves proportionately, which helps to maintain a semblance of contrast in brightening this picture, something that the brightness control does not do. Now on this particular photograph we are going to lighten this image with the gamma slider lighter than it looks like it ought to be. We are by no means finished with our adjustments on this photograph, but one of the first steps that I use when adjusting for brightness and contrast is to bring the gamma up lighter than it looks like it ought to be, and then save it and move on to the next steps. But we are going to pause here just a minute and look at everything that the levels dialog box can do, now let us take a look and of course we see that the adjustments we made here were not extreme, they were kind of minor, but had a very good effect on the image and left us with a position to move forward and do further corrections with. Let say you have got a batch of photographs that are all degraded in the same way, and this is not an unusual scenario when you consider that in the fifties and sixties those images, were you know what, forty, thirty or forty years old, and the color balance could have shifted, the colors could have faded, you could have added any number of degradation effects going on to a slide and even to the color negative, especially actually to a color negative. Things were just not so stable in those days and over that amount of time it is not surprising to see that, so when you get to see a boxful of slides, and they are all degraded the same way, you can do batch processing and by that I mean you can take this adjustment, hit save, give it a name, under, obviously, saved levels and then we have that saved. So any subsequent pictures that you bring in, you are going to able to load that and make the automatic adjustment. Let us go ahead and do that right now, let us bring in another photograph, this one here, let us open an adjustment layer on this photograph, bring up the levels dialog box, and then we go load - testing, and we have got the automatic adjustment applied to this photograph without having to make any manual adjustments. It saves you a lot of work and that makes it look better, don't you think? We are going to move forward from there and do other things to this photograph but that is a very good starting point. Some of the other things that the levels dialog box can do obviously is the auto button, as we have seen before. I love the auto button; sometimes it does a wonderful job and at other times does not do anything. In this particular case it didn't do anything so we are not using it, but you can adjust what the auto button does to the photograph by hitting options and the default setting on this is clipping at point five percent and clipping on the highlights at point five percent. Then the shadows at point five and the highlights at point five, but I did not really like the result, so I readjusted my shadows. I want all my shadow information so I have set that at zero. We get very little clipping on the highlights and I want to take that out and enhance per channel contrast, which really does more to improve the image than anything else. That is my preference, and again you may have a different preference. Play with these controls, because as you make the changes on the settings it will automatically show you what that looks like in the photograph that you have active. So play with it to your liking, adjust it to where you want and hit OK and it will save forever, and whenever you hit the auto button, it is going to affect it in the same way. Now let us take a look at some of the other controls here, this is the set black point, set midrange or gray point and this is set white point. What this does is it is supposed to automatically balance your tonal range and I have I never really understood the thinking behind these controls because it never really works for me, but I will show you how they are supposed to work, what you do with the set black point, you find the darkest area of the image that you can find and you click on it, you go to the gray and you find a midrange tone in your image, which could be this area here, whatever it may be and then you hit the light area which obviously is going to be the sky. And there you have it. To me that is a bit more work that I don't want to do, I mean, why go through all that when all I've got to do is, this? Just adjust that. These sliders, I never use them either, I played with them and really I have never had them do anything. These kind of work in contrast to these, so they kind of fight each other, and I have never really used them, so I will ignore this, I ignore this and I will use these items up here and mainly the focus of my attention is on the gamma slider and on the white slider and if I need it, the black slider. The levels control box is a great place to start, you should always start your adjustments with the level dialog box in adjustment layer.