(magical jingle)
Hey what's up everybody? Welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, brought
to you by tutvid.com. I'm Nathaniel Dodson, I messed up my voice a little bit doing
some voice exercises and, you know, just some seasonal stuff, I guess. So I'm going
to try to take this tutorial a little lower, slower. Today we're going to talk about
levels in Photoshop, and just how important they are. And just how useful and
versatile they are. Kind of what you should know about using levels in Photoshop.
If you enjoy the video, make sure you subscribe to the channel. Let's jump into
Photoshop right now, and get this thing started. Alrighty, well here we are in
Adobe Photoshop. And the first thing I want to show you is just three different
ways that you can use levels. You can first go Image>Adjustments, and just levels,
and apply it to whatever layer you're working on. We can make this image
much darker, voila. Or, you can convert that layer to a smart object and now,
when you apply levels, by going adjustment - Image Adjustments>Levels.
And you - say we make it darker this way. Well, you can always - whoa! we don't
quite want to make it that dark. Let's make it just kind of that dark, hit OK.
You can hit the little arrow here and double click levels to get back into it, and
adjust it as you wish. Or you can double click the little sliders, and say, you know
what? I like the levels adjustment, just not quite as much. And just reduce the
opacity of that levels adjustment, hit OK, and there you go. I'm going to undo that
a few times. Because, the final, and the way that I prefer most to use levels is
using an adjustment layer here within the adjustments panel. I'm going to hit
levels. It applies the levels adjustment, just as it's own separate layer, and it
trickles down to every layer beneath it. So, the important thing to note here is
we have a black point, a mid point, and a white point. And when we drag the
black point up, we're basically saying, look, all this dark stuff? Cut it off and
compress it all the way up here to this point. So really, flood those blacks. Make
them even darker. And the white point does the same thing, just with white.
Makes those really bright points just really, really white. And the mid point,
in the middle. I'm just going to reset this whole thing, by hitting the little reset
button here. The mid point, if you drag it toward the white, you're opening up
the shadow side of the levels. Therefore, you're flooding more darkness into
your image. And if you open up the highlights, the highlight side of it. The white
point side of it, if you will. You can see, you're brightening the image. Not
necessarily the best look right there, but it is something you can do. I'm going
to undo that stuff, and let that sit where it is. The black point, you can see it
sits here at a numeric value of zero. Whereas, white is at 255. You can ignore the
1.0 in the middle, that doesn't really correspond to the 0-255 in this way. The
0-255 represents the 256 levels of tone that you're going to have in your standard
8-bit image. Zero counting is one of the values. And if you add zero as a one number,
if you will, to 255, well of course, you get 256. Now, one thing you can do is hold
down ALT/OPT as you're dragging any of these handles. Well, really, the black or
the white handles, I should say. And you're going to get this clipping overlay. It's
not really something I use, but it lets you know when you're losing detail down
here in the shadow, right? So those areas that are, you know, turning black,
there's absolutely no detail left there, and you know, sure enough, when we look
at the photo, yeah they do get pretty dark down there. If we wanted to do a simple
contrast adjustment, it would be as simple as make the blacks a little darker,
make the lights a little lighter. And, if I shut off the adjustment layer, there's
before, there's after we've adjusted the contrast very simply. Now, we also have
this output slider. If I drag up on the black area of the output slider, it's going
to boost the output levels you can see there, on the black side, to 30. And
essentially, it's giving me this fade. It's lifting the absolute darkest areas of the
image, and just saying look, you just can't get darker than this value of 30, in
terms of the scale of 0-255. So you can get pretty dark, but never pure 100% black.
We can do the same thing with the white point, and what that'll do is just dull
highlights. So you can think of it as a way to fade your shadows, and dull your
highlights using the output levels slider here within the curves dialogue. You can
also adjust the color of your photo here, using these eyedroppers. The one you're
really going to be focused on, is the middle, gray eyedropper. Using this, in theory,
you can select a part of an image that should not have a color cast. So let's say
this building is pure light gray in real life, the fact that it's showing up as blue would
indicate that overall, our image has a bit of a blue cast. So we could just click on
this building, and what's going to happen is, curves is going to say, alright, I'm going
to force that to be a light gray, and adjust the color of everything else. Now, this
may be a bit of an extreme effect, because the image doesn't necessarily now look
all that pleasing. You can see, there's before, and there's after. We, for sure, have
warmed the image up a lot. And infused a lot of green and yellow and red into
the image. And maybe that's what you're going for. But even if it's not, you can
always reduce the opacity, because this is an adjustment layer. And you can find
the sweet spot in between, and leave your image at that point. And of course,
if you mess it up, and you just don't like it at all - we can just set the opacity
back to 100 - I can just reset, I can grab the middle gray eyedropper and I can
say, you know what? I'm going to try to out here. No, I don't like that. And you
can just keep trying until you get something that you think matches where you
think the image should be. So, we could do something like this. And then maybe
fade the shadows here a bit. And then, maybe this is the effect we're going for.
Right there. So, just tread a little carefully when you're using this. Same thing if
you want to set a white point. You can really just start to blow your image out,
and do a lot of damage. And also, if you're doing something like setting a black
point, you can do all kinds of weird stuff with that, as well. I typically don't use
the white or black point sliders much at all. I'll mess around with the middle
point, and just see what I can do color correction-wise. But it's always good to
know how to do some of this stuff manually. And speaking of manually, you can
adjust color in any individual channel. So I can go to right channel here, and let's
actually just reset this whole dialogue box, but here within this channel, what I
can do, I'm aware I'm moving this dialogue box around probably way too much
here. But I can swing, well let me go to the red channel, I can swing any number
of colors in and out of this image. Now, red is the opposite of cyan. So, if I pull
my mid point here to the right, you can see, I'm flooding a lot of cyan into the
image. But if I pull it back to the left, I'm flooding all this red into the image,
that's pretty cool. If I pull up on the black point, you can see this is introducing
a lot of cyan. If I pull back on the white point, you can see, I'm getting this nice,
pink, very rich sunset, or sunrise, color. And even with the output point, I pull
up. There, I'm getting a lot of reds in the shadowy areas of the image. And I pull
back here on the white, I'm going to get a lot of cyan, but it's particularly in
the highlights. So, if you understand that red and cyan are opposites, you can
understand what you're doing when you're coming in here, and pushing and
pulling some color in or out of your image. Now, green - the green channel;
green and magenta are opposites. So when I pull up on the black handle, you can
see, I'm getting a ton of magenta. When I pull down on the white handle, I'm
getting more - a bunch of magenta, as well, this time more concentrated in the
highlights. Same thing here, if I pull over on the white, I've got green. Pull up on
the black output, I'm getting a lot of green, but this time, kind of more targeted
toward the shadowy areas of the image. And then here, if I slide my middle color
stop back. Or, really, not color stop, but just middle stop, back. I get a wash of
green in there. Pull it up toward the white, get a wash of magenta-y/purple
in there. Not necessarily what I'm looking for here. I'm going to reset that. I'm
just trying to you an example. I can come over here to blue, I can pull up. You can
see, I'm going to get a bunch of yellow. Why is that? Well, that's because blue
and yellow are opposites. Pull back on the white point, we've got a bunch of blue.
And you kind of understand how this works, right? We're going flood blue into
the shadows, and yellow into the highlights. And then open this up and get a lot
blue and a lot of yellow, and yadda, yadda, yadda. Now, before we do any kind of
color correcting here, and play around with this, one thing that's kind of cool that
you can do. You can go to your channels, and you can SHIFT click several channels.
And you can apply a levels adjustment to individual channels like this. Now, this
is a very destructive way to edit. But just know it's something you can do. So if you
want to work particularly in your red and green channels. You can select them
both - I just SHIFT clicked them - and you can go image, and you can see - well,
we don't have adjustments, and that's because probably I have the adjustment
layer selected. Let me select the background image. Go back to our channels,
let's select red and green, voila. And let's go Image>Adjustments, and now if
we bring up levels - check this out. You can see we have this RG channel, and
the option to work within just red or green. Now, again, like I said, very
destructive way to edit. And if I hit OK, and I turn my original image on, you
can see we've done all this to it. Maybe you would consider that damage...
I would, just because it's so destructive, and you know, when you're working
with an adjustment layer, if I don't like it, I can just shut it off, and I can always
undo what I did. So, let's just color this. Let's flood a bunch of red here, into
this. Maybe we'll pull some red into the shadowy bits. Let's go over to green.
Let's open this up, and apply some purple in there. And then maybe we'll
throw a little bit of blue into the shadowy parts of the image. Maybe top
off a little blue in the highlight/midtone region. Now this is, obviously, way
too much in terms of the color effect, but we could do something like the
soft light blend mode. We could reduce the opacity a little bit. And just using
a levels blend mode, we can just apply this nice, popping contrast/additive
color effect to this image. I'm going to drag my properties panel back over
here. I want to show you one more thing here. I'm going to shut off the levels
adjustment layer here, that we just created. And let's say we're just applying
a levels adjustment directly to this layer. One of the things that you have, well,
number one, the dialogue is slightly different, not too much. You have this auto
option. Use it if you want to mess your image up, I'll put it you that way. Because -
I pretty much never use it. It really doesn't do that, that great of a job. You can
see before and after. It's adding a little bit of contrast, but the colors are still off,
and it's just kind of funky. I'll put it to you that way. If you do hit auto, you could
hit cancel. But you could hold down ALT/OPT when you're here in the dialogue
box and you can see the cancel button turns into a reset button. And then we
can say, look, we want to just bounce a little bit of contrast in here. We want to
flatten out those shadows a little bit. We want to maybe go over to blue. I want
to dump just a kiss of blue down there into those shadows. Maybe we'll come up
here to red, and we'll open up the highlights in terms of - well, highlights and
midtones, add a little bit of cyan to them. Hit OK. And then we have this effect,
just like that. I'm going to undo that, however, I'm going to turn on my original
levels adjustment layer. And that's pretty much it. That's just a quick crash
course in using levels. How you can use levels to affect, not only the contrast and
tone of your image, but also, the colors in the image, by attacking and working
with color channels. And if you use an adjustment layer, or a smart object, in the
whole image adjustments, it's just a few more steps to do it that way, it's all
non-destructive. Non-destructive? Eh, it's pretty much always better. And there
you have it. I think we made it out of that alive. You know, voice a little rough. A
little rusty. A little - not quite where it normally is. But maybe it worked out for
this one. If you guys did enjoy the tutorial, well, make sure you subscribe to the
channel. Pick up a copy of my Photoshop course, you can click on the link right
there. And if you're into Discord or Instagram, I got links right down there in
the description of this video, so you can check it out. Follow me over there on
either one of those platforms. For taking a look at channels within levels;
and levels; and histogram and levels; and white point; and black point; and
mid point; and all the points that we covered here today, in this tutorial about
levels. Ladies and gentlemen, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.