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Levels adjustments

Levels adjustments are one of the most basic yet most important things you can do when enhancing photos. The levels tool will usually display a histogram which shows you whether the tones in your image cover the full range from solid black, on the left of the scale, to solid white on the right.

If they don't, you can then move black point and white point sliders to line up with where the histogram does actually start and end to maximise the tonal range of your picture.

It's a quick and simply way to maximise contrast and tonal without clipping (cutting off) any details in the extreme shadows and highlights. You don't have to do it with every single image – some look best with low contrast – but it's one of the handful of core adjustments you'll find yourself doing again and again.

Nik Collection presets: Even on a Cloudy Day (Color Efex Pro)

June 20, 2020 by Rod Lawton

Color Efex Pro Recipe

You can learn a lot from experimenting with manual adjustments and individual filters in a program like Color Efex Pro, but you can learn even more by dismantling a preset to see how its individual parts work together.

Filed Under: Featured, Nik Collection, Tutorials Tagged With: Color Efex Pro, Cross Processing, Curves, Levels, Nik Collection, Old Photo (Color Efex Pro), Presets, Recipes (Color Efex Pro), Sunlight filter (Color Efex Pro)

How to get started with Silver Efex Pro

June 10, 2020 by Life after Photoshop

Silver Efex Pro is one of the best-known plug ins in the Nik Collection and widely regarded as the premier tools for fans of black and white photography. There are lots of really good ways to create black and white images in all sorts of software, but even now Silver Efex Pro has a magic […]

Filed Under: Featured, Nik Collection, Tutorials Tagged With: Black and white, Black and white filters, Borders and frames, Burn Edges (Silver Efex Pro), Contrast filter, Control Point, Curves, Dodging and burning, Film simulation, Grain, Histogram, Levels, Loupe, Nik Collection, Presets, Silver Efex Pro, Split toning, Toning, Vignette

Histograms aren’t sacred: shadows and highlights CAN be clipped

September 5, 2019 by Rod Lawton

Histograms just show you what’s happening in your images, they’re not there to tell you what to do. But there’s an old adage from the days of film photography that you should still be able to see some detail in the darkest and brightest parts of your pictures, and that’s carried through into digital photography. […]

Filed Under: Capture One, Featured Tagged With: Clipping, Histogram, Levels

Levels vs curves vs luma curves: ways to adjust contrast in photos

July 26, 2019 by Life after Photoshop

Levels and curves can both be used to adjust the contrast in photos, but how are they different, which should you use and is one better than the other?

Filed Under: Capture One, Editing A-Z, Featured, General, Tutorials Tagged With: Curves, Histogram, Levels

Restore faded art using levels and curves

August 15, 2017 by Rod Lawton

Levels and curves

With careful use of levels and curves adjustments you can rescue even the faintest and most faded artworks and restore both saturation and contrast. Levels and curves are two of the most basic adjustment tools in any image-editing program, but there’s often confusion about which to use and when, and it often appears as if […]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Curves, Levels, Lightroom

Mastering Elements Levels adjustments

October 23, 2013 by Rod Lawton

Elements Levels adjustments

Levels are one of the most basic image adjustments in any image-editor. They’re your first chance to act on the information you get from the image histogram and use adjustments to maximise the tonal range of your picture. In fact, although the Levels dialog may not offer the advanced image control of curves or other […]

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Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: Levels, Photoshop Elements

Adding localised levels and curves adjustments in Color Efex Pro 4

August 8, 2013 by Rod Lawton

Nik Software Color Efex Pro levels and curves

DxO Color Efex Pro 4 isn’t just a collection of special effects. It also has a number of powerful image-editing tools hidden amongst them, and one of these is the Levels & Curves tool. You can use this to make adjustments to your images in the same way you would in Photoshop, Elements and other […]

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Filed Under: Nik Collection, Tutorials Tagged With: Color Efex Pro, Curves, Levels, Nik Collection

How to preview and control histogram clipping in Lightroom

July 30, 2013 by Rod Lawton

Lightroom levels and clipping

There’s this idea in digital photography that your histogram must never be clipped, and that it should always fit – just – within the maximum width of the scale. And sometimes we work so hard to recover shadow and highlight detail to prevent clipping, that we end up with an image that has lost its […]

Filed Under: Lightroom, Tutorials Tagged With: Clipping, Histogram, Levels, Lightroom

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Reviews

The best image-editing software: what to look for, where to find out more

November 2, 2020

DxO PhotoLab 4 review

November 2, 2020

Exposure X6 review

October 9, 2020

More reviews

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  • Skylum Luminar 4.3 review
  • ON1 Photo RAW 2020.5 review
  • ON1 360 review
  • Analog Efex Pro 2 review
  • Perspective Efex review
  • DxO Nik Collection 3 review
  • Exposure X5 review
  • Capture One 20 review

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