PROGRAM BASIC: Lighten Up! Quick Fix 1: Levels and Curves

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PROGRAM BASIC: Lighten Up! Quick Fix 1: Levels and Curves
By Shelleyrae Cusbert 2008
Jul 19, 2008, 11:28

When you got your printed film photos back from the lab there was probably a good chance that you had a least one photo where the details were shrouded in deep shadow or just plain dull. In fact it’s likely that even now you have a few photos stored on your hard drive that are dark and you may have been tempted to delete them. In many cases it takes just a few seconds to rescue one of those photo’s so that it can take its’ rightful place in your album. This tutorial will show you how Photoshop’s tools can bring your image into the light.

Quick Fix 1. Levels and Curves

Select a photo that is uniformly dull and dark. This can happen when your camera set to auto, struggles to find a good medium between the subject and the surroundings. It was a sunny morning but the girl was in shade and the camera chose to neutralise the contrast leaving the image dull, grey and underexposed.

A quick fix for this type of photo is to edit with levels and curves. There is an entire science behind these two tools but my aim here is to show you only how to make an improvement to your image quickly using the simplest steps.
The first step is to select Layer> New Layer Adjustment> Curves

Select OK when the popup window appears

The Curves dialogue will open and you will see the adjustment layer in the layer palette.

The light grey graph, known as a histogram, represents the exposure of the image from dark at right to light and left. In a good exposure there would be a distribution of the graph from the right to the left. This graph shows that the lighter areas of the image are missing. To lighten the image we can push the slider at the base at right, towards where the histogram starts. With Preview checked you will see the effects of the movement. You can push it further, but watch carefully for the introduction of digital noise.

It’s already better but by adding light we have lost contrast. We can improve the contrast by creating a gentle S Curve. Select a point along the top half of the diagonal line and push it gently to create a curve. Watch the image to assess the changes. You can see in the screenshot below that the photo has lightened further while retaining color and saturation.

Pushing the diagonal line in the top half of the graph lightens the tones in the image. We need to offset that and reclaim some contrast by gently pushing the diagonal line in the bottom half. This creates an S curve.

The comparison between the before and after photos is obvious.

The changes that were made are visible in the remapping of the histogram when the final result is viewed.

If you still aren’t sure about using Levels and Curves then let Photoshop do the work for you.
Select Layer> New Layer Adjustment> Curves and click the Auto Option. You can make further adjustments to the Auto results to get the result you desire.