How to adjust levels in Photoshop

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Ever taken a picture and thought it was too dark? Ever wanted to find an easy way to make it look better without having to know a lot about Photoshop? In come levels. (No, you aren't going from level 1 to level 2 and getting more magic missiles. This is something different.)

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Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

A dark photo (either scanned in or from a digital camera).

Step1

Go ahead and open up Photoshop. The easiest step! Or it should be at least. I'm going with the assumption that you have it installed already. And yes I know what happens when you assume things. But I didn't! This will only make an ass of u and mption.

Step2

I'm going to make another assumption and say that you have the photo on your desktop. Drag your photo from the desktop to Photoshop.

Step3

Now open up your Levels Dialog Box (Image > Adjustments > Levels, or Ctrl + L). It will look like this picture here.

Step4

Now comes the tricky part. So that long black line to the right of the hills? (Yes I know those aren't the technical words for those but I don't know them. And really, hills are more fun than something like "points" 'cause it gives the idea that if you tried hard enough you could roll down the hill laughing in the sun and rolling over the flowers on your way down.) Now, do you see the little white thingy (yes that IS a technical term, ask anyone in tech support)? Good, I want you to drag that to the left until it's at the bottom of the hill. As you can see that made things much better! And it was easy!