At a Level.....Foto Tip, ok Sunday....

My quite obvious failings at actually posting the Foto Tip Friday on a Friday are clear, again I apologize and hope that this wonderful tip may recover something!  

So i realized that although most of the tips I post are pretty simple stuff I haven't really touched on the core areas of Photoshop, so looking at tools and adjustments such as curves, levels and saturation.  These tools have been used within previous posts but not actually gone into great detail about the use of each so I thought it time to get some of that out there as its likely there are some of you out there who would like to know more about what they do.

Lets start with Levels.  This tool is essentially used to set the highlights and shadows within the image and to make sure that your picture has a generally nice tonal range and contrast.

You can find the Levels tool in the Adjustments menu and it will show you a histogram of the shadows and highlights within the image.  You are essentially aiming to make the lightest point of the image white without burning the highlights out and then keep the dark bits of the image dark and solid, not dull.  You do this by dragging the 3 pointers within the histogram left or right accordingly, the far right pointer effecting the highlights, the far left the shadows and the centre pointer the mid-tones of the image.

One way of identifying where the greatest shadows/ highlights are without just looking at the histogram is to switch to the threshold display mode, this then helps you to discern more easily where the greatest areas of dark and light are within the image.  If you want to adjust different areas of the image at a time, then use the Levels tool in different adjustment layers.  (For more info about adjustments layers see this post)


There are further things to do with Levels and above is a general overview, for a more in depth approach then there are a few books you can look at (Martin Evening is good) or some websites here and here.)