We all know that a properly exposed photograph will be a better looking photo. And as hard as we try, we or our meters don't always get it right. Yeah sometimes one part is perfect but another part of the photo maybe too bight or too dark. Is all lost for these photos? Maybe not, through the use of Levels, we may be able to turn that photo you were about to delete into a Jewel.

I was going to write this and send it to Smalltown in an e-mail but thought maybe more would like to see it. She was concerned about a photo that I and Lil said seemed Dark on our Monitors. So she asked how would I correct it and I showed her the photo redone as I would. She asked how I did it and that leads us here.

I think the tool I use most often in Photoshop is Levels. Levels is a finer controlled version for adjusting Contrast and Brightness. It breaks the Light Spectrum up into three bands (It actually can do even more if you break it up into each color but that is beyond the Beginner view we are taking here) It Break it up into Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. And displays them in what is called a histogram. A correctly Exposed Photo should show levels all across the band and spectrum of light without Big Plateaus or Big Peaks. (Yes there are exceptions)

I took two Photos, one close to correctly exposed and one totally and purposely too bright and over-exposed.
Let's look at the Photos and Histograms for each.

 Overexposed

The Overexposed one you can see has a very Large Plateau on the left side of the histogram or the Shadow area extending into the Midtones and a very big spike on the right in the Highlights area. This is unacceptable Exposure.

Correct Exposure

 On this one where I exposed correctly with the in camera meter you can see that the spectrum of light is for the most part all across the spectrum with a slight amount of Plateau in the right Highlight area and a spike in that area cause by the whiteness of the cup.  This is a more correct exposure but perhaps not perfect.

How to Use Levels

Now on how to use Levels to correct for an incorrectly exposed Photo. For this I will use Smalltonwn's Image from her post the other day. This is a very well composed image and uses the shadow in the image wonderfully. But in my opinion could use some Levels work to bring out all the detail this photo has to offer.

Let's look at the Original Photo and its Histogram
Original

We can see that There is a huge Plateau on the right in the Highlights area and also that there is a tall spike on the left in the Shadows area which is probably attributed to the Black of the #4 sign.

So, let's drag the slider on the right that controls the highlights and move it to the left and smooth out the highlights area of this photo. It will look like this.
Highlights adjusted

Now I would like to bring back a little more of the Contrast to this photo so I am going to drag the left slider that controls the Shadows area a little to the right and also move the middle Midtone slider till I get the look I really like. (Remember this is all up to your artistic eye and should not be based on the histogram or mathematics only)
It now will look something like this.

Shadow and Midtones Adjusted

I then hit OK and applied these adjustments in Levels to the Photograph and it resulted in a Photo and Histogram that looked more like this.

Final Adjustment applied and Histogram

This is what I, in my view, would rather see for this photo.

Now I wanted to still take this photo one step further and this step is only available to those who have a Full version of Photoshop which Smalltown does.

I next went to Image/Adjustments and Shadows and Highlights and then set the shadows to 10% and the Highlights to 20% this resulted in an image most pleasing to me although it may not to Smalltown. But at least now she has the ability to adjust this image to her liking in what ever way her artistic eye sees.

Here is the final comparison between the two images

  Before and after

Mine is on the left. In my opinion it brings out the wood grain that is in the background and also shows off the number 4 that is cast in a shadow on the background but the Black in the number still stays black. I still would have liked to get rid of a slight amount of Blowout on the right which I could have with the Dodge tool but that is for another lesson.. Is mine better than her's? Not necessarily, it is just the way I saw it and the story the Histogram had to tell.

Just a note, I did not spend a ton of time working on Smallys Photo cause that is for her to do and I wanted to spend more time writing the story, so if you think my version stinks, that's OK as long as the writing was acceptable. Hehehe