Subtitles of the Movie

In this lesson we're going to take a look at the Curves and Levels Dialog boxes in Paint Shop Pro Photo 11. I'm going to open up an image, take a look at it. It's an attractive image of the courthouse here in town, looking up into the sky. Let's choose Adjust, Brightness and Contrast which then brings us to our Curves or our Levels. Curves adjusts colors based on a curve, Levels adjust brightness values. Let's go to Curves first. And like most effects or adjustments, dialog boxes in Paint Shop Pro, you can choose to preview that on the image. You can navigate around the preview windows, you can also zoom in and out to fit the preview image to the window, automatically zoom to 100 percent. You can also click the Pan Button and pan if you hold your mouse button down and drag that panning box to the new location you can immediately navigate to whatever part of the image you want to go to. I find this a very useful tool. All right. You can load Save Settings, let's say we want to low contrast darken, and that automatically loads in this curve which does what it says. All right, you can save your current settings, you can actually revert to the default as well. Here in the Channel Drop-down Box you can choose to adjust each red, green or blue channel independently or do them all at the same time with your RGB setting. You can choose to automatically adjust certain things; let's do Auto Contrast, automatically adjusts the contrast and that did a pretty good job you can see. You can also do that independently on each channel if you like. Let's go to Coloring, select Color or Levels. Options brings up the lower and upper limit which is the percent at which the histogram is clipped, in this case a half a percent, you can raise that up to a maximum of three or a minimum of .01, and then the strength. You can reset the entire dialog box. You can also click in the image to select a black point. So let's select here in the Before preview window, so it's not actually on the image. So let's select the Clock Hands for a black point, and now we need to select a mid tone, and lets look at the dome here for that. Now white point and I'm going to look Clock Face for the white point. Press okay, and we can see a before and after. It looked like we're looking through a screen window and then we took that away and it's much clearer. Okay, we're going to open up another image and now we're going to look at adjusting levels. Very similar dialog box where you've got all the same options at the top and in fact, all the way down to the bottom. Only this time you're adjusting levels of brightness and contrast. You can choose Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Auto Levels and the same options, in fact. You can also reset your tool. Let's click the black point, I'm going to zoom in, and I'm going to pan to a black part of the image, choose the pick guard on Ben's guitar, let's choose a gray point as probably one of my gray hairs, here, but how about the remote control right there, and white point we can choose the frog's eye and press okay, and there we go. So both those dialog boxes have been greatly enhanced. Now again, you want to choose Curves if you need to adjust colors based on a curve, and Levels if you're adjusting brightness values. I think we can wrap this lesson up and conclude that Curves and Levels dialog boxes are very similar but you would use them for different purposes.