Quick Photoshop Trick: Levels

Do you ever load your photos from your camera onto your computer and think, "Hey! What happened?! That’s not how it looked in real life!” Sometimes, my photos just look a little… blah, for lack of a better word. Take, for instance, this shot, taken from my window seat when I landed in Denver earlier this month. In real life, the sunrise was illuminating the clouds and reflecting off the mountains in the west, the grass was this gorgeous shade of green, and everything was just generally more vibrant.

Not too impressive, right? This is how the photo came straight out of camera.

Digital cameras are almost universally guilty of blanketing our images in a gray fog which really takes away from the beauty that you saw in real life – the beauty that made you pick up your camera to record the scene in front of you. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s a pretty quick fix in Photoshop. The steps I’ll show you are for Photoshop Elements, which is what I use. They’ll also work in the full version of Photoshop. You can also do the same thing in GIMP, which is a completely free photo editing software, but things are set up differently there, so you’ll have to poke around to figure it out.

 

To start this fix, we’re going to focus on the Layers palette, which is circled below. If you look closely, you’ll see a row of icons under the word “Normal.” The second icon in that row is a half-gray/half-white circle. This is the adjustment layers button, and you’re just going to click on that.

A box drops down with lots of options, and to get rid of that gray fog, we need a Levels adjustment layer. Clicking on Levels will create one for you.

The Levels box will pop up, and show you a graph, called a histogram. The histogram is basically showing you a graph of all the tones in the photo. The left side is for dark tones or shadows; the right side is for light tones or highlights; and the middle is for what’s in the middle or midtones.  As you can see on my histogram below, all my tones are in the middle. There’s nothing really dark, there’s nothing really light. For whatever reason, my camera interpreted the scene this way, and that’s what’s giving me that gray fog.

What you’re going to do is click on the little black triangle and move it in towards the center to where your graph starts to rise. Same thing with the white triangle. The graph will look the same, except that you’ve told the computer that the lightest tones in your photo are white, and the darkest ones are black. This will help the computer interpret your photo closer to the way your eye saw it.

Now, click OK, and sit back and admire your handiwork. You can click on the little eye icon next to the Levels layer to toggle that layer off and on so you can check out the difference between your before and after.