Photoshop Tutorials: Fix Tone and Color with Levels In Photoshop
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Written By Steve Patterson
When it comes to editing images in Photoshop, the first thing we always want to do is fix any overall tonal and/or color problems in the image (commonly referred to as "global" problems) before moving on to more specific problem areas ("local" problems), and the tool of choice for the task is the same today as it's been for years - Photoshop's Levels command, which not only handles the job like a pro, it makes overall tonal and color correction incredibly simple and easy.
In this Photoshop tutorial on photo editing, we're going to see just how easy it is.
Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:
And here's how it will look after a quick overall tone and color correction with Levels:
Again, this is the step you always want to start with when editing your images, so having said that, let's get started!
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Step 1: Set Up The Levels Defaults
With our image open in Photoshop, let's first take a moment to set up our Levels command properly. Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Adjustments, and then choose Levels, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+L (Win) / Command+L (Mac). Either way brings up Photoshop's Levels dialog box. In the bottom right corner, you'll see three eyedropper icons. Double-click on the one on the left, which is the white point eyedropper:
This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker. If you look on the right side of the Color Picker, down near the bottom, you'll see the letters R, G and B, which stand for "Red", "Green", and "Blue", along with an input box to the right of each one. Type the value 245 into each of the three input boxes:
By default, the white point value is set to 255 for each of the "R", "G" and "B" options, which in Photoshop's world means pure white. By lowering the values a little to 245, this will help us maintain detail in the lightest parts of the image by preventing them from becoming 100% white and being printed as paper white. Click OK to exit out of the Color Picker when you're done, although we'll be seeing it again in a moment.
Now, back in the Levels dialog box, double-click on the eyedropper icon on the left, which is the black point eyedropper:
Once again, Photoshop's Color Picker will pop back up. This time, enter a value of 10 into the "R", "G", and "B" boxes:
By setting this value to 10 rather than its default of 0, we'll prevent the darkest parts of our image from becoming pure black, allowing us to maintain detail in the shadows and also save us a little black ink when we go to print the image. Click OK to exit out of the Color Picker.
Now click OK to exit out of the Levels dialog box. Photoshop will ask you if you want to save the changes you just made as the new defaults. Click Yes, and you won't have to make these changes the next time you edit an image because they've been saved as the default values:
Now that we've set up our white and black point values to something a bit more useful to us, let's fix the global tonal and color problems in the image.
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