How to Use Levels & Curves in Photoshop | Day 6

welcome to 30 days of Photoshop today we're discussing the incredibly powerful curves and levels hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning fun and in this video as a part of our 30 days of Photoshop series we're gonna show you how to use curves and levels in your photos they are by far the two most powerful adjustment layers that you can use not only the effects lights and darks but also all of the color in your images in this video we're gonna show you the differences between curves and levels and the multiple ways you can use them to start making your images better today now if you haven't already signed up for 30 days of Photoshop go ahead and do so by clicking on your screen right here you're gonna get 30 lessons specifically designed to help you go from beginner all the way to pro as well as the sample images you need to follow along and some extra bonuses that are only available as a part of this series we got a great tutorial for you let's jump into Photoshop so here's our sample image let's go ahead and load up our levels and curves we're gonna go to layer down to new adjustment layer and levels let's hit OK here and we're gonna go to layer new adjustment layer and over to curves and hit OK so let's start with a little bit of an analysis between the two starting with our levels now we basically have two main sliders with our levels we have our input levels which is right here on the top we have three slider inputs and we have our output levels here on the bottom we have two slider inputs down here now on the top we have our histogram this is basically the light and the color information of your photograph on the left hand side we have our darks and on the right hand side we have our lights and we can see in this photograph there's a lot of light space basically our entire background is pretty light and that corresponds with all this light space that we see here now we also have a spike right up here in the dark areas it's not too dark but maybe like dark right and that makes sense for this area as well as our subject now we can go about editing this information in a couple of different ways both with our input and our output levels so our input levels as we take our black point slider and drag this from left to the right what this does is it takes all the information that's to the left of this slider and it makes it completely black so if I take this lighter and continue to go from the left to the right more and more my image is going to go completely black now the same works the opposite on the right hand side my white point is going to take all the information in my image and make it completely white so more of my information is just getting white white white until as much as possible becomes completely white now we have our midpoint slider that will take the midpoint of our image basically the central values and push them are a darker or lighter okay let's go ahead and reset that so that's our input levels next we have our output levels that's down here on the bottom this will take your black point and actually make it a little bit brighter so now the darkest place in my image instead of being black is more of a light gray and eyes are go lighter and lighter and lighter you can see it on the right-hand side this will take the lightest point of my image and make it darker so the white point gets darker and darker gray and eventually just goes all the way to black so that's basically how the input and the output levels work here in our levels dialog now let's go ahead and jump over to curves real quick so I can give you an explanation of how furs work because it's actually incredibly similar so going back over to our curves we have all of the same information that we had on our levels but instead of two different graphs we just have one so let's go ahead and start with our black point now our black point is here on the bottom left of our curve graph and you can see this is just our histogram as well right the light information on the right and the dark information on the left so I'm a point here on the bottom left now if I take that and make it a little bit brighter what it's doing is it's making my darks a little bit lighter that is the exact same thing is taking the darks and making them brighter here in my levels okay so again right here taking our darks and making them lighter now if I take this point from the left to the right it's actually changing the black point of my image making more my image completely black which is the exact same thing as doing this with our levels back to our curves again we have our white point so if I take my white point and bring this from the right to the left it's making more of my image completely white which is the same thing as doing this going from the right to the left here and if I go back to curves and take this from the top down to the bottom it takes the lightest point of my image and simply makes that a little bit darker same thing is if we do this on our levels so at this point you might be thinking well it looks like they do the exact same thing and for the most part you're right they do do the exact same thing so when you're using curves and levels there's really only one key difference and that's with our midpoint slider so with our levels you have one mid point that you can choose to make your mids either lighter or darker now with our curves we have the same ability I can click here in the middle and go a little bit brighter with my mid-tones or a little bit darker but things change a little bit with curves because now I actually have the ability to add multiple points to my curve so let's go ahead and reset this and I can actually take my light levels and make them a little bit brighter in my dark levels and make them a little bit darker this is in fact enhancing the contrast of my photograph I can do the opposite too I can take my light levels and make them darker and I can take my dark levels and make them lighter this is basically lowering the overall contrast of my photo as I turn it off now you can of course add multiple points and continue to make some adjustments but generally with more than two or three points you tend to get things that look a little bit odd like as we can see here on the Left we've kind of lost some of the information of our photograph and it's not really doing us much favours so let's go ahead and hit reset on that and generally when I'm using curves and levels I'll stick to one or two points here in the curves or with levels we'll just stick right here in the middle so at this point you might be wondering well which one of these should I use because they look pretty similar well the answer is whichever one feels more comfortable to you with curves you're gonna get a little bit more variation and a little bit more control so if you desire a little bit more control curves are the but honestly levels can do so much and primarily I tend to switch back and forth between them so there is no right or wrong answer here being comfortable with both is great but if you just used curve sort of the rest of your life or just levels for the rest of your life you really wouldn't be missing out so that's a basic introduction to curves and levels but there are a lot more features that make these tools even more robust here in our levels adjustment layer we have these eyedroppers here on the side a black point our great point and our white point so if I click here I can actually decide what I'd like to be my black point in other words I can choose what I want to be the darkest area of my image for instance if I go ahead and click right here it's gonna make that area completely black and it's going to adjust my image accordingly now I can set my white point here as well for instance if I want to say this area I want to be completely white it'll adjust my entire image and it looks like that pretty much was white but maybe this area that's not white I can click there and it's gonna adjust my entire image there as well let's go ahead and hit reset you can also use your gray point to get proper white balance for instance if you were to shoot with a grey card you'd simply click on your image right on your grey card and you would get perfect white balance now you have these same tools within curves as well so we're gonna go back to our curves adjustment let's go ahead and just turn off levels to make sure it didn't do anything we have our black point again I can choose anywhere in my image everything darker than that will become black all right we'll hit undo there maybe just go back to our subjects here and our white point we can click right up here so we're adding a little bit of contrast now here with curves we have a few different options we have basically the ability to just create the points of our curve as we see here or we can go ahead and draw them in if I want to just draw a really fun looking curve check that out at any point you can kind of draw in the curve that you want and you can create some really interesting things that you really can't do with levels let's just say that it's something that's going to help your image but hey if this is this sort of style that you want to do well have a lot of fun just kind of like drawing in areas with your curves it is pretty cool but getting back to a little bit more useful I find it actually nice let's go ahead and turn that off I've actually nice to use this little hand tool up here which will allow you to click and drag any area of your photo this way instead of relying on different areas of my curve I can actually use my photograph to decide where I want to be lighter or darker for instance if I want this tonal range of my image now I'm not talking about this section of the road I'm talking about this level of dark if I want this a little bit brighter I can click there and drag it up and you can see basically it corresponds to that area of my curve and made that area a little bit brighter Taman my sky to be a tiny bit darker I can click on the sky and make that a little bit darker and I can take maybe my mid-tones and I can make those a little bit brighter as well so using this little hand tool does give me the ability to make some changes to different tonal areas of my image so as we can see again curves are a little bit more full-featured than levels but pretty much they still both do just about the same thing so up until now we've been using curves and levels to just affect the light and dark information in our photo but you can also affect color and here's where these tools get really really powerful so let's start off with our levels going to our levels adjustment right now we're on RGB which is a combination of our red green and blue channel if I go to just my red Channel now I can actually remove some of the Reds for my photo or add some Reds my photo I can do the same thing from my shadows remove red from my shadows or add red to my highlights and of course the opposite with my output levels I can add red to my shadows or I can remove red from my highlights now I have the same thing with my other color channels green we can see the opposite here is magenta and with blue we can add blue into our shadows and pull blue out of our highlights which will be adding yellow we can do the same thing with our curves so if I go to my red channel oh sorry I meant to click on curves if I go to my red channel I can actually add red into my shadows or if I pull it to the right it's gonna remove red for my shadows and I can even create points right over here which give me a mix of the two and I can pull this down as well to give me a little bit more of an interesting photograph so we have a lot of variation and of course even if you move those things you can still add a midpoint here to change how your image looks okay the same thing is to true with our green Channel we can increase the amount of greens in our shadows or magentas in our shadows we can increase the greens in our highlights or magentas and the same thing with our blue channels so more blue or less blue and here we have the same thing more blue or less blue so different charts and different ways of basically doing very similar things so with all that said and done let's go ahead and give you a practical example of how we're gonna use this to add a little bit of a solar flare to this image so what I want to do is basically just add like a really nice red flare coming from the left like a red orange so we're gonna go to our red Channel and I'm gonna take my shadow levels and kind of bring these up add a little bit of red into my shadows okay there we go and bring this area up as well so I want us to be orange right but there's no but right it says red green and blue it doesn't say orange anywhere but orange is basically a combination of red and yellow and yellow is the opposite of blue so we're gonna be using a red Channel and then we'll go to our blue channel so our blue channel basically we want to just take our midpoint here and drag that down a little bit and that's going to be our yellow so we can see turning this off and on there we have our yellow maybe I went a little bit too far something that that actually looks pretty good and I'm gonna take this down a little bit and tastic that looks really nice now as of now this covers our entire image which might be a little bit too much so we're gonna click on our layer mask I'm gonna hit ctrl or command I to invert this and then we're gonna use our gradient tool well it's it g4 the gradient tool we're going to go to our gradient editor and I'm going to choose the foreground to transparent option so I want my foreground color to be white and it's gonna go to transparent so we have a black layer mask completely invisible at this time so we want it to be white transparent so it's going to make this layer visible to invisible and we're gonna choose our radial gradient so basically what we have here when I click and drag out it's gonna go from visible to invisible with this color that we made with this adjustment layer so let's go ahead and try it we're gonna click here on the top left and drag this out there we go basically making it more visible here on the left and kind of fading out now if I hold alt or option and click on my layer mask this is what the layer mask looks like so it's most visible here slowly fading and getting less and less visible now the great thing about any adjustment layer is I can adjust this at any point in time I can just double click right here on the adjustment layer and I can decide you know what maybe I want this to be slightly different maybe I want to go to my blue channel there we go bring my point up here maybe I want a little bit more blue or maybe I want a little bit less blue okay all of these adjustments are available to us at any time I'm gonna go to my green channel and add just a tiny bit of greens cuz I feel like it needed to balance out there all right I think that's looking really really nice so let's see if I can do something similar with levels so let's go back to our levels adjustment layer okay and again we want to go to our red channel I want to just bring some red into our shadows so we're gonna do that here and we're gonna do the same thing with our mid-tones so add some red into our mid-tones and then go to our blue Channel and then pull some blues out of our mid-tones basically replacing them with yellows well invert our layer mask by hitting ctrl or command I and then click and drag from left to the right with our gradient there we go and we can see we've basically color tone very similarly and in this case I'm gonna go back to my RGB and we're just gonna make it a little bit brighter as well so not only is it getting that looks nice not only is it getting a little bit warmer but it's getting a little bit brighter let's go to our green Channel and we put a little bit of green and then I want to put a little bit more red as well there we go so we have a really nice sunburst that already was present in my image we just except exaggerated it a little bit ok so we have a little bit more red I chose a little bit more red with our curves and here we have a little bit more yellow with our levels so once you get to know and understand both of these tools that are incredibly powerful and you can use them not only to affect your light and dark information but color information whether you want to do that on your entire image just within a selection or like we've done here with the gradient to enhance a light source so personally I tend to switch between the two they're both incredibly powerful and as long as you have a good understanding of how they both work you can choose whichever one you feel most comfortable with thank you so much for watching I hope you're enjoying 30 days of Photoshop if you haven't already done so go ahead and sign up you can do that right here down below it's absolutely free you get to hang out with me and go from beginner to pro in 30 days thanks again I'll see you tomorrow hi everyone [Music]

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 117,414

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, levels, curves, 30 days, photoshop curves, adjustment layer, how to use curves in photoshop, what is the tone curve, color grading, photoshop basics, photoshop tutorial for beginners, photoshop tutorial, adobe photoshop (software), curves adjustment layer, levels adjustment layer, photoshop levels tutorial

Id: dvbnPi52GX0

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020