Photoshop Levels Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Alight, so in this tutorial we are going to be talking about levels. What is levels? Levels is a basic tool that is used in Photoshop to correct exposure and it is basically a tool that helps make your picture look a whole bunch better. And some people use the levels, some people use the curves. I personally do not use levels and I never use an auto feature in Photoshop. I never use auto levels or auto contrast or auto color, I do everything manually. So, here's a picture I took of a dog which is already perfectly exposed. The picture is already done to the max. I don't want to add any more levels or curves to it, but for this tutorial I'm just going to show you what levels does. So, as you can see the shortcut for levels right here is command L or PC control L. So, you want to go ahead an click levels and you're going to get this dialog box that pops up. Basically you have the option of changing either every color channel in your picture or you can go into your individual channels, which is red, green, and blue and change the different hues in the photograph separately. But, for this we're just going to use RGB. Right here is your histogram and there's slider that are in there are the sliders that are going to be used to fix the levels in your picture. So, if you click and drag this one over it's going to darken your image. And more than likely it's going to mainly darken your shadow areas and it's not going to touch too much on highlights. If you click and drag this one it's going to brighten your picture just like I'm doing here. As you can see I can probably make my picture look a little bit better if I drag the levels over just a little bit, but I look the way it looks. There's also output levels and this mainly changes, it mainly to deal with the outer pixels, not mainly having to do with, as you can see it's kind of hard to explain. But, just look as I turn this one over to the right it darkens more of the shadows. If I bring this over it's kind of like lightening your image and outer pixels that are not having to deal with the real darkness of your image. It's kind of brightening up. If you move the output levels to your left it kind of darkens everything. It's kind of a weird funky thing that I never use and I'm not sure too sure how that would even be in use, but this is basically it. I mean, you got other options here. You can enhance your monochromatic contrast. You can enhance the per channel contrast. You could find the dark and light colors. A lot of stuff that I never use because I don't use levels a lot. So, in a nutshell this is levels. Thanks."