Adjusting Brightness Levels
As I mentioned at the outset of this lesson, luminance refers to the
quality of lightness and darkness of an image, as opposed to just the
color values. It’s the contrast of shadow and highlight that allows us
to discern the edges and textures of an object, distinguish it from its
background, and decide if it’s something worthy of our attention.
You saw Photoshop’s simplest luminance control, the Brightness/
Contrast command in the video at the outset of this lesson. In this
exercise, we’ll take a look at the Levels command, which allows
greater control over how those values are represented, and how
they contribute to each of the component colors in a photograph.
While not necessarily the most powerful brightness and contrast
function in Photoshop’s arsenal—as we’ll see later, the Curves
command outshines it in a few key areas—Levels provides the best
marriage of form and function. It lets you tweak highlights, mid-
tones, and shadows predictably and with absolute authority while
maintaining smooth transitions among the three.
Figure 6-21.PeaRl Of WISDOmThe Levels command is great for manipulating brightness
values. And because you can work through the adjustments on
a channel-by-channel basis, the Levels command also allows
you to correct color cast simultaneously. See “The Nature of
Channels” sidebar, on the next page, to get your bearings on
how channels work to calculate colors in Photoshop.
The following exercise explains how to correct the bright-
ness and contrast of an image with the Levels command
and neutralize a color cast in the process:
- Open an image. Open Washed out
beauty.jpg, included in the Lesson 06 folder
inside Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1. This image
comes from the Fotolia.com photographer with the
handle PhotoCD. You can see in Figure 6-21 that
the photo features a red-haired beauty in a salmon-
colored sweater against a pink-hued background.
This convergence of similar colors only makes the
lack of contrast in the image more problematic.
Adjusting Brightness Levels 195