How Much?

page one
If your image needs tonal and/or color correction, and you have a hard time judging how much is enough, here is a technique that should help.
     First, a disclaimer which I’ve made several times elsewhere on this site. I am not a color photographer. I work in black and white.
     I rummaged around among my digital snaps to find this image, and make no claims whatsoever as to the correctness of the adjustments I’ll make. The point of the tutorial is to teach you the technique, which I believe you will find useful.
     Below, you can see the starting picture I’m going to use. Suppose you wanted to try and lighten the image enough to make the foreground trees show some color, and tonal detail.		 next
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Displacing Textures 		In the Layers palette, click the Add New Adjustment Layer button. It’s the black and white circle icon, third from the right. From the menu that appears, click on Levels.
     In the Levels dialog box, click on the center slider below the histogram. Drag it to the left to make the image lighter; to the right to make it darker. I dragged it to the left.
Levels sliders
For this technique to work, you need to make your adjustment exceed what you are after. You’ll see what I mean in a minute, but for now, just make sure that you make the Levels adjustment a little more than you need. I made the image too light.
     Note; I am assuming that you have a rough idea of what direction you need to correct in, before you start this process. I knew I wanted to lighten the image. I just didn’t know how much. If you know that you want to darken your image, you should move the slider in the other direction (to the right) and make sure you make it a little bit more dark than you will want it to be in the end.
     Below, you can see my image after the Levels adjustment. Clearly the clouds are too light. This is what you want at this stage. You need to have created a range of possibilities within which you will find the correct adjustment. We now have a too dark starting image, and a too light adjusted image. That’s just what I want.
Continue on page two		  
 

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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com
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