From the course: Photoshop: Advanced Adjustment Layers and Blend Modes

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Improving contrast with Auto Levels

Improving contrast with Auto Levels - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Advanced Adjustment Layers and Blend Modes

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Improving contrast with Auto Levels

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- At its core, levels is about contrast, allowing you to manipulate the black point, the mid-tone, and the highlights to really dial things in. This shifting allows you to change the contrast or dynamic range quite easily. If we look at this photograph, it lacks a lot of dynamic range. I can, in fact, open up the histogram here and see this quite clearly. While it's not awful, you'll see that there are some gaps. Notice here between the darkest shadow and the leftmost edge, which would be a true black. Well, this means that our richest black is only about 85% as dark as it could be. Similarly, the brightest highlights here stop short of the right edge, meaning that the whites are a bit dingy. Let's apply a levels adjustment. And we can see that here as well. The two histograms are quite similar. In this case, I'm seeing the composite histogram for all the RGB added up, as opposed to the more elaborate histogram here.…

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