Fixing Overall Tonal and Color Problems With Levels In Photoshop Elements 5

Step 4: Use The Threshold Adjustment Layer To Find The Lightest Areas In The Image

At the bottom of the Threshold dialog box, you'll see a small slider. Click on it with your mouse and drag it all the way to the right:

Your image will turn completely black at this point. Then, begin slowly dragging the slider back towards the left, and as you drag, you'll start to see white areas appearing in your image. These white areas are the lightest parts of the image. Drag the slider to the left until a white area appears that's just large enough for you to be able to click inside of it:

Once you have a white area in the image large enough for you to click inside of, click OK in the top right corner of the Threshold dialog box to close out of it for a moment.

Step 5: Click Inside The White Area With The White Point Eyedropper

Go back to your Layers palette. You'll see that you now have three layers - the Background layer at the bottom, the Levels adjustment layer above it, and the Threshold adjustment layer at the top. We need to bring back the Levels dialog box, so double-click on the Levels adjustment layer's thumbnail:

The Levels dialog box will pop back up. We're going to fix any tonal and color problems in the lightest parts of our image by clicking on that white area in the image with the white point eyedropper. To do that, click on the white point eyedropper icon in the bottom right corner of the Levels dialog box to select it:

Then, with the white point eyedropper selected, click on the white area in the image, which will fix any tonal and color problems in the highlights. You can zoom in on the area if you need to by holding down Ctrl+Spacebar and dragging a selection around the white area as I've done here. Then click inside the white area with the eyedropper:

When you're done, click OK to exit out of the Levels dialog box. If you've zoomed in on the image, press Ctrl+Alt+0 to quickly zoom back out.

We've corrected the highlights in the image. Now we just need to correct the shadows, and we'll do that next.