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Levels adjustments
Changing the the black and white points. Sometimes you need a bit more than just moving the midpoint...
The techniques
The sample images for these tutorials are available for download as a zipped folder.
Please note. The images in this tutorial section are for personal non commercial teaching use only. If you are a school or other public educational establishment, you may use them as long as you inform Northlight Images of the use. They may not be used in -any- other way without the express consent of Northlight Images - see our usage and copyright page for more information.
Feedback is always welcome! ---
Northlight Images also provides commercial photography training courses for businesses, including specialist Photography training for Estate Agents and for Product Photography.
Open the image levels.jpg
Have a look at the Histogram.
The picture is very dark. Try the brightness and contrast adjustments if you like. They just don't change the image in a useful way (they rarely do).
See how the distribution of light and dark pixels is all crunched up to the left side (dark)
The histogram display shows the distribution of light and dark parts of the image. It can often tell you the kind of adjustments you should try, just from its shape.
Just looking at this histogram would suggest that the picture is too dark with no light areas. We need to 'spread out' the curve so that the image has a good range of tones from light to dark.
Open a new levels adjustment layer (as in the previous Gamma section).
Move the white point slider (right one) to bring most of the image data between the black and white points.
There is still a lot of the image data below the midpoint, so move it too.
You might want to crop the image as well, to emphasise the ant dragging the dead wasp back to its nest.
While the midpoint adjustment is often enough to get a good image, there are times when the picture is too dark or light overall. This is where we move the white or black points. You are effectively expanding the picture information to fill the available range from black to white (for these adjustments we ignore the colour side of things) Note, that we have done this adjustment in a layer, so we can have other layers and even change our mind later in the editing process.
The techniques
The sample images for these tutorials are available for download as a zipped folder.
Please note. The images in this tutorial section are for personal non commercial teaching use only. If you are a school or other public educational establishment, you may use them as long as you inform Northlight Images of the use. They may not be used in -any- other way without the express consent of Northlight Images - see our usage and copyright page for more information.
Feedback is always welcome! ---
Northlight Images also provides commercial photography training courses for businesses, including specialist Photography training for Estate Agents and for Product Photography.
Other areas of our site that may be of interest...
NEW -- Create your own customised A3 size wall calendar from a choice of 90 of Keith's images. Choose your own images for your own custom printed calendar - 12 months starting any month of the year - many all new images not yet in our main gallery.
Digital Black and White. Keith was recently interviewed about digital black and white photography for a magazine article. We have an expanded version here covering some of his thoughts, techniques and tips for those thinking of trying black and white.
As well as our Commercial Photography services and Training there is a growing collection of photography Articles and Reviews on the site aimed at helping you get the best out of your own photography. We also have a growing collection of Photography related information and links that we hope you find useful.
New site features and some of Keith Cooper's latest work are always covered in the What's New page.
Visiting Leicester or wondering where it is? We have views from the Leicester traffic cameras.