What are levels? The heart and sole of your imaging software. All high end software will have a levels control box ( Photoshop, Paint, as well as camera software ). If you do not have levels, it would be a smart investment. You can pick up Photoshop Elements ( a stripped down and lower cost version ).
First here are a couple terms, you will need to understand.
BLACK POINT- the point where a color and or tone saturates to black.
WHITE POINT- the point where a color and or tone desaturates to white.
GRAY POINT- 50% gray. the point in the middle of black & white.
Histogram- don't freak out it's just a Bar chart.
So Lets start by understanding the histogram. Remember, what your looking at is a bar chart. In Fig.1 the top box shows the histogram of the art work above it. There are only three tones in the art work, BLACK, 50% GRAY and WHITE. So the histogram shows three lines 0- black. 1.00 gray and 255 white. The reason there are no numbers up the side or along the bottom of this chart, is because we are dealing with 255 MILLION colors and tones.
The bottom box shows a normal photos histogram.
Fig.2 Shows the controls we will be looking at. The raw photo is there just so you can see what the histogram is showing.
Don't worry about the eye doppers. Their use is fairly specialized.
Fig.3 Before we look at this example. Understand the markings that are in color are not part of the dialogue box. They are my markings to Illustate where I'd move the sliders too.
Fig.4 How to change your color balance.
Now you may not want to mess with the B&W points in the color channels. It gets a little tricky. But if you have set the B&W points in the RGB channel first, all you will need to do is just adjust the Gray point slider. Start out with small adjustments. The fastest way to learn is to mess around and see what happens.
Fig.5 How to adjust Contrast and Brightness. In this example, I have set the B&W points way to far into the histogram to illustate the point.
Fig. 6 Examples of photos and what their histograms look like. Can you figure out how to fix the top four?
In the example SWEET ! ( this is what the histogram looked like after the editing process. ) you will notice white lines in the histogram. That is missing information. That would be a bad thing if there were too much missing. But 25 missing colors or tones out of 255 million is pretty good. I think I can live with that. LOL
There you go, not that complicated. Here are my steps when I edit a photo.
Step 1 set B&W point for each color channel.
Step 2 adjust color balance.
Step 3 set B&W points in the RGB channel ( contrast ).
Step 4 adjust Brightness.
step 5 click OK
Play around and good luck.
Scott