• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Organizing
  • Editing
  • Explainers
  • Photo-editing A-Z
  • About

Life after Photoshop

  • Lightroom Classic
  • Capture One
  • Nik Collection
    • Analog Efex
    • Color Efex
    • Silver Efex
    • HDR Efex
    • Viveza
    • Sharpener
    • Dfine
    • Perspective Efex (retired)
  • DxO PureRAW
  • ON1 Photo RAW
  • Exposure X

Mastering Elements Levels adjustments

October 23, 2013 by Rod Lawton

03 Levels adjustment panel

Elements Levels adjustments

You can see the new Levels adjustment layer added at the top of the Layers palette (1). Elements will now display the adjustment palette (2) for making your Levels modifications.

Straight away I can see the problems with this picture. The histogram displayed in the adjustment palette doesn’t reach either the left hand or right hand sides of the scale. This means it doesn’t have any true blacks or true whites, and it’s this compressed tonal scale that’s making the picture look so flat.

04 Black point and white point

Elements Levels adjustments

The solution lies with the black point and white point sliders directly under the histogram. If I drag these two sliders (circled) to line up with the left and right ends of the histogram, the picture’s tones now fill the full range, and you can see straight away that the picture has much more contrast and ‘sparkle’.

This method is quite conservative, though, because although it avoids ‘clipping’ either end of the histogram, it doesn’t allow for the possibility that there are shadow or highlight areas we just don’t need. In many images, it really doesn’t matter if there are some areas of solid black (though areas of solid white are generally less desirable).

In other words, we’re keeping all the the tones in the image when we may not actually need them. And the other point about this method is that it corrects the brightness range alone – it doesn’t correct any colour problems.

05 Use the Levels eyedroppers

Elements Levels adjustments

So here’s another, more aggressive method, but one which does yield higher contrast and corrected colour rendition.

The Levels dialog also has black point and white point eyedroppers, and you simply use these to click on the darkest and brightest parts of the picture respectively. These eyedroppers don’t just adjust the brightness values, they correct the colour balance to produce a truly neutral black and neutral white.

The picture has more contrast and more neutral colours. It looks good, but the histogram display shows up some problems. Both ends of the histogram are now ‘clipped’, which means there are areas of the image which are a solid black or solid white… but I don’t know exactly where.

The histogram also shows some ‘combing’, i.e. gaps between the bars. This means the tonal transitions will not be quite so smooth, but this is a characteristic of all Levels adjustments – it’s just that the eyedropper adjustment actually shows you the effect on the histogram. You’re unlikely to notice this ‘combing’ effect on the image itself.

Related

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

Filed Under: Tutorials

Rod Lawton has been a photography journalist for nearly 40 years, starting out in film but then migrating to digital. He has worked as a freelance journalist, technique editor (N-Photo), channel editor (TechRadar) and Group Reviews Editor on Digital Camera World. He is now working as an independent photography journalist. Life after Photoshop is a personal project started in 2013.

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to this site

Enter your email address to subscribe to Life after Photoshop and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Adobe Lightroom: what is it, where do you get it, what does it cost in 2025?

Adobe Lightroom is not one program but three. You could … [Read More...] about Adobe Lightroom: what is it, where do you get it, what does it cost in 2025?

The best photo editing software for organizing, editing, RAW and effects

Choosing the best image editing software used to be easy. … [Read More...] about The best photo editing software for organizing, editing, RAW and effects

Layers explained

Layers explained: what they do and how to use them

Layers are a central part of many photo editing processes, … [Read More...] about Layers explained: what they do and how to use them

BAN adjustments… Basic And Necessary image corrections to do first

Photo editing software does two quite different jobs. It can … [Read More...] about BAN adjustments… Basic And Necessary image corrections to do first

More Posts from this Category

Mission statement

Life after Photoshop is not anti-Photoshop or anti-subscriptions. It exists to showcase the many Photoshop alternatives that do more, go further, or offer more creative inspiration to photographers.

Affiliate links

Life after Photoshop is funded by affiliate links and may be paid a commission for downloads. This does not affect the price you pay, the ratings in reviews or the software selected for review.

Contact

Email lifeafterphotoshop@gmail.com

Copyright © 2025 Life after Photoshop · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OK