Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Using Photoshop Levels - Quick, easy, effective

Hello again, everyone!

It's been a long time since I've posted to my blog (about two months!).  I can blame life for that. :-)

In addition to a new role that I got at work that has created 15-hour work days recently, a lot of things have been going wrong or simultaneously breaking around our house and these things have taken high priority to resolve over everything else.  Washing machines, dishwashers, cars, you name it.  Things have not been going well...

But since I got a minute to breathe this weekend before heading out for a hike with my daughter, I came across this short article and decided to post it here because it makes some good points about using Levels in Photoshop for quick and significant fixes to the most common technical/exposure photography issues.

The article is located here:
http://www.lightstalking.com/why-you-should-use-levels-in-post-production

For a variety of reasons (e.g., camera settings, exposure mistakes, etc) photos can sometimes come out of your camera looking flat and dull.  They lack the "pop" of a properly exposed and edited photo.  People often ask me what the fastest way is to fix this in Photoshop, but that single question opens up a Pandora's box of answers because there's always more than one way to fix things in Photoshop.

Since Photoshop is such a massive beast of a program, I often try to guide people to the easiest way of doing something and still obtain proper/usable results.  For the type of situation that I'm talking about above, often using the basic Levels function is enough.

Check out the steps in this article on a sample photo of your own, and if you like the results that you get then I suggest developing a further understanding of what Levels can do for you quickly and easily.  There are any number of tutorials available on websites like Digital Photography School and others.  Enjoy!