brightness, colour cast, Commands / Tools, contrast, eyedropper tool, free, guide to levels, highlights, histogram, levels command, luminance, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, tint, video tutorial
A colour cast is when the colour of an image shifts towards a specific hue, say green, to give the whole image an unsightly green tint. The reasons behind this and the resulting cast can be as numerous as the tools available to fix it. For this reason we'll take a classic example and put things right both manually and automatically.
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brightness, colour, colour blend mode, Commands / Tools, contrast, free, guide to levels, highlights, lab colour mode, levels command, luminance, luminosity blend mode, midtones, photoshop cs3, saturation, shadows, Special Effects, video tutorial
So we know the difference between colour and luminance information, now's the time to look at dividing the two and working on each individually. Whether we're doing that with blend modes or the highly theoretical Lab colour space we're going to be opening our eyes to a whole new universe.
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brightness, Commands / Tools, contrast, eyedropper tool, free, guide to levels, highlights, levels command, luminance, luminance histogram, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, video tutorial
Because the human eye doesn't see red, green and blue light equally we need a reliable way of representing the brightness of a pixel independent of colour. And so steps up the luminance histogram - the most accurate way of spotting clipped shadows and blown highlights threatening the very existence of your image!
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brightness, clipped highlights, clipped shadows, colour panel, Commands / Tools, contrast, eyedropper tool, free, guide to levels, highlights, histogram, levels command, luminance, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, RGB, shadows, video tutorial
Photoshop produces red, green and blue histograms inside an RGB image, when it's done it puts the results into a composite version and displays it as the standard view. How that composite view is calculated decides how we see clipping inside our images - and as you'll bear witness, things aren't always what they seem!
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16 bit mode, brightness, channels, Commands / Tools, contrast, free, guide to levels, high bit depth, highlights, levels command, luminance, midtones, non destructive, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, video tutorial
The 16 bit mode allows us to introduce 32,000 luminance levels of data per channel, which in theory gives us access to billions of colour variations inside one RGB image, enough to make any number of extreme edits and not produce a single sign of colour banding or posterization. Sometimes seeing is understanding, and understanding is believing.
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brightness, channels, Commands / Tools, contrast, free, guide to levels, highlights, histogram, levels command, luminance, midtones, non destructive, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, video tutorial
The more we know about a subject, the further we want to push ourselves to create the unimaginable. Before long we're building complex compositions from a single flat image, and the more complex we get, the more scope we need for readjusting settings that looked perfect five edits ago but no longer stand the test of time. The world of non-destructive editing inside levels brings about a whole new concept to an already able set of editing techniques.
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brightness, broadcast safe colours, channels, Commands / Tools, contrast, dvd menu, free, guide to levels, highlights, histogram, levels command, luminance, midtones, output sliders, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, video tutorial
Most of this series is focused on increasing contrast in our images - but what happens for the occasions we want to reduce it? Enter the output sliders! By using the output controls we gain more accuracy in deciding the exact brightness level of shadows and highlights in our images, which can complement our ever increasing knowledge and allow us to take our creativity even further.
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brightness, brightness/contrast command, Commands / Tools, free, guide to levels, highlights, input values, levels command, luminance, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, shadows, video tutorial
It's time to open up the levels dialogue box, roll up our sleeves and get down to some good old fashioned image editing, but not before we take a look at why we're not using the more straight-forward brightness/contrast command to amend the brightness and contrast of our images.
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brightness, channels, clipped highlights, clipped shadows, clipping, Commands / Tools, fade command, free, guide to levels, high key, highlights, histogram, levels command, low key, luminance, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, pixels, shadows, video tutorial
It's time to realise that those cleverly spoken words were actually a full-blown conversation between the pixels in our image and our ears, spoken by the soothing voice of the histogram. Now comes the time to understand terms such as contrast, clipping and other references used in the world of photography such as high and low key images.
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brightness, channels, Commands / Tools, fade command, free, guide to levels, highlights, histogram, levels command, luminance, midtones, Photographic, photoshop cs3, RGB, shadows, video tutorial
Understanding how channels represent colour and how colour works in the first place is a basic topic, it's also an important one that will serve you a good foundation of knowledge as you motor you're way through this series. We'll also take our first look at the histogram and turn a series of lines into some cleverly spoken words.
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