My Photoshop Classroom

Back in the old days with 35mm film the photographer had his darkroom where he developed the film, in our day and age the computer has taken over the role. This article will deal with some of the adjustments you can use to develop your photographs in the digital darkroom.

The software I have used in this article is Photoshop CS3 (on a Mac) but most of these features are available in any decent photo-editing software.

Levels

Levels are one of the most important tools to use when you are working with post-production. This adjustment layer is used to correct or enhance the histogram. To learn more about what the Histogram shows and how it works, please read my article about it.

A word of advice is to work with levels in a separate layer instead of working on the actual photo layer.

There are two methods to use this adjustment layer:

SET WHITE & BLACK POINT

This method will give you an eyedropper and you will have to set one point for the darkest (black point) and one point for the lightest (white point) area. There is also the option to set the grey point (18% grey, in the middle of the tones).

This can be a bit tricky to the beginner, but it’s a very powerful tool. It’s often easy to spot the white point in the photo, often from a light source or something white and/or reflective. The black point may be a bit harder to locate, the best way is to think about where the light is the least likely to be reflected.

In the photograph below you can see that the white point is where you can spot a cloud in the sky behind the trees and the black point is inside the poor sheep’s nostril — there isn’t much light reaching in there.