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

Step 7: Adjust The Midtone Slider To Brighten The Image If Needed

Often times, after you've corrected the highlights and shadows, your image will appear too dark. We can fix that easily by adjusting the Midtone slider in the Levels dialog box. Double-click once again on the Levels adjustment layer's thumbnail in the Layers palette:

The Levels dialog box re-appears. If your image is looking a bit too dark, click on the Midtone slider in the center of the dialog box (circled in red below) and drag it slightly to the left:

Keep an eye on your image as you drag the slider. The further you drag to the left, the lighter your image will appear. There's no "correct" distance to drag the slider, it's purely a visual call on your part and depends entirely on your image and what you think looks good, but you usually don't need to drag it very far in order to get good results Once you're happy with how your image looks, click OK to exit out of the Levels dialog box, and you're done!

Here's my original image once again for comparison:

And here's my image after correcting the highlights and shadows and brightening up the midtones slightly:

The only thing we didn't look at in this tutorial was color correcting the midtones. We brightened them using the Midtone slider, but we could have also tried to color correct them using the gray point eyedropper in the Levels dialog box (the eyedropper between the white and black point eyedroppers). There's a couple of reason why we didn't. The first reason is because often times, color correcting the highlights and shadows takes care of any color problems in the midtones as well. The second reason is because it's not as straightforward as correcting the highlights and shadows. In fact, it usually involves simply guessing where the neutral gray point in the image is supposed to be, and several "trial and error" attempts at it usually follow. Plus, not every image even has an area that's supposed to be gray, so trying to find what's not there is a bit pointless.

However, there is a trick to finding the neutral gray area in an image (if one exists) and color correcting the midtones, and we have a complete tutorial on it, An Easy Way To Find Neutral Gray, which you can access here. Currently, only the Photoshop version of the tutorial is available, but check back soon for the Elements 5 version.