The Photoshop levels window - how to use it to enhance your photographs

Do you ever look at your photos after a trip and wonder why the colors aren't the same as you remember them? Even the fanciest cameras are subject to the mechanical limitations that cause inaccurate colors in your photos.

In this photo, there's a yellowish cast to the image, and the contrast is much flatter than the actual scene I photographed. Let me show you how I used levels to make it more accurate, and make it pop off the screen.

Select Image from the menu bar, then choose Adjustments and Levels.

This window will open up. Familiarize yourself with the drop down menu, buttons, and sliders.

See the little eye-dropper icons on the lower right? If your image has some spots that are black or white, or nearly so, you can use those to set the black point, white point, and sometimes the midtone point. This method is great for making sure you have strong contrast in your final image, and is especially important if you're going to convert it to black & white.

For this image, I clicked first on the far right eye dropper, then selected the whitest field of snow in the photo. Next, I clicked on the left eye dropper, and clicked on the darkest trees I could find. Here's what happened:

If the image doesn't have any points that are very white or very black, the set point feature won't work right. I'll give your photo too much contrast. That's when you'll want to use the manual sliders below the histogram.

Here I've clicked on the drop down menu and chosen the blue levels. See how the histogram doesn't have values on the far right? Either click and drag the slider below that side, or double click in the third window to the right of where it says Input Levels and use the scroll button on your mouse to bring the indicator over to where there are values in the histogram. Then repeat for the green and red levels.

The results look like this. While better than the original, I don't think it looks as good as the one achieved from using the eye droppers to set the black and white points. A slight increase to the contrast may get what I want, or I can undo this action and redo the first one.