essential skills: digital photography in available light
- If you are used to optimizing the histogram using the Levels adjustment feature, the following
step might come as a little bit of a surprise. Instead of dragging the black shadow and white
highlight sliders that sit directly beneath the histogram in to the start of the histogram, we are going
to temporarily clip (render white) the highlights of the sky. Click on the ‘Create adjustment layer’
icon in the Layers palette and choose ‘Levels’. Hold down the Alt key and drag the highlight slider
just below the right side of the histogram towards the centre of the histogram. The image window
will temporarily look black. As you drag this slider (still holding down the Alt key) you will notice the
sky start to appear in the image window. These are all the pixels that are now 255. Do not worry
about the sky clipping but focus your attention instead on the foreground. We are expanding the
contrast in this region in an attempt to increase the drama. - As you continue to drag the highlight slider to the left the steel bars will start to appear. Back this
slider off to the right until only thin blue lines are apparent (this indicates only the blue channel is
clipping). Let go of the Alt key and now drag the central gamma slider (the gray one) to the right to
darken the midtones. What you have effectively achieved here is double the contrast in the foreground
at the expense of the sky (which is now clipped). Sometimes things have to get worse before they
get better so select OK, even if you think things are far from OK, to apply these changes.