From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

Customizing a Levels adjustment - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

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Customizing a Levels adjustment

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- In this movie. I'll show you how to customize your levels adjustment for even better results. But first I'd like to refresh your memory on the histogram. We first saw it back in chapter seven of The Fundamentals Course, and it is literally a bar graph showing the number of pixels that are set to each one of the 256 luminance levels per channel. So once again, these are the levels. These bars right here are the levels for which the levels function is named. And so, as you may recall, Black is located on the left. White is located on a right and the other 244 luminance levels in between become progressively brighter as we move from left to right inside the graph. So with this specific graph as concerned, we don't have that many shadows. We've got a bunch of dark mid-tones. We have some light mid-tones as well. And then finally we have a ton of highlights but no pixel is quite black. So we have a little bit of a gap here and no pixel is quite white. And so the Level Adjustments biggest function is to increase the contrast of the image. And as we'll see in a future movie, balance the mid-tones. So I'm going to go ahead and switch over to this washed out image right here. And I'm going to press Shift Tab to bring back my right side panels. And I'm going to go over here to my adjustments panel once again, click on that little icon to open it up and then Alt or Option click on the levels icon to bring up the new layer dialogue box. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy Contrast and click OK. And now we are going to see that Histogram that we were just talking about here inside the properties panel. Now I want it to be a little wider than it is now. So I'm going to drag out on the bottom left-hand corner until we have a histogram that is exactly 256 pixels wide. So we've got a pixel, a horizontal pixel devoted to each and every luminance level inside of our composite image. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is click on the Auto button. In order to apply an automatic enhancement. And you can see that does indeed add some contrast to the image. And the reason is because of this black value right here which now reads 25 and this white value that now reads 229. They each correspond to either the black or the white slider triangle, here underneath the histogram. So if I were to move this black triangle over to, say 40, is what I'm trying to get there. Then I'm saying, I want Photoshop to take any pixel with a luminous level of 40 or darker and make it black. And so that is naturally going to darken up the image. Notice what the image looked like when that value was zero which means black is black, that's it. Versus taking this up to a higher value such as now, 58, in which case I'm saying anything with a luminous level of 58 or darker should become black. Whereas with this white value right here, I'm currently saying anything with luminous level of 229 or brighter will become white. And so as you reduce this value from 255, you're going to brighten up the image because you're making more pixels inside the image white. Now, I want you to notice that the histogram is currently remaining unchanged here inside the properties panel. And that's because we're making composite modifications. In which case we can send you to see that original histogram because after all it represents the original image and we can come back to that original image, anytime we like because we're applying an editable adjustment layer. What if you want to see what's actually happening to the histogram in real time. In that case, you want to go up to the Window menu and choose the Histogram Command in order to bring up the Histogram Panel, which for me is located over here on the right-hand side of the screen. Now, initially you're going to see a tiny histogram as we're seeing right now. If you want to see it bigger, go up to the Fly Out menu icons for the Histogram Panel and choose Expanded View. And then unless you want to see what's happening in each and every color panel. Go ahead and change this Channel option to RGB which shows you that same composite view that we're seeing inside the properties panel. The difference is that it is updated to represent the current condition of the image. Now, if you see this little caution icon right there that means that you're seeing a cast version of the histogram. That is a quick and dirty rendering. If you want to see the real thing, then go ahead and click on that Caution icon. Or I could have clicked on this little Update icon in the upper right corner of the panel. Now notice that we've got a bunch of gaps in our histogram and that's because by virtue of the fact that we're moving the luminous levels around, we're crushing and spreading them. And so you can see if I click right here on one of these gaps, let me see if I can get it. I'll go ahead and click. That was the wrong location. So I'll try right there, should do it. And notice this level right here, a level of 93. We have no pixels whatsoever as indicated by this count value of zero. Whereas if I click on this big spike right there, it represents a level of 127. At which point we have 304,000 Nearly 305,000 Pixels with that level. You can also drag across the graph. And as long as you keep the mouse button down, you'll see a range of levels. In my case from 105 to 156, which includes 589,000 pixels. So you can get that kind of detail as you work inside the panel. And that friends is how you customize your Levels Adjustment and notice what a big difference it makes, in order to get the best results possible here inside Photoshop.

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