Most Important Technique For Digital Photo Enhancement

First I will show you examples of original photos and those retouched using saturation and levels techniques. Then, if you agree that levels is better, I will show you how to work with it.

At the end of this article I will explain what levels are. If you are like me, you want to know what you can do with something before you are interested in understanding the principles behind it.

I could further improve the quality and usability of this photo if I were to remove the slightly disturbing extraneous new flower bud to the left of the bloom and the withering one to the right, and perhaps the irrigation pipes as well. If you want to see how to do that easily and with great results, see my article on Removing Unwanted Features From Photographs.

After you have opened the image you think can be much more successful, open the options for "adjustments" on your photo enhancement software. Somewhere on the list you will find "levels" and you click to open. It should give you something like the screenshot below:

You see two histograms on the levels window. Both of these are currently identical. You will be adjusting either or both by moving the markers on the white-to-black scales to adjust for the amount of light added or removed from the photo.

The top marker adjusts white tones or brightness, the bottom marker adjusts levels of black or contrast and the middle marker adjusts the mid-range tones. Even if you learn basic rules concerning adjusting these levels, no two photograph behave similarly and you can essentially "play around" with both scales until you achieve the results you desire without understanding the science behind it.

Levels refers to the range of tonal values present in the image and it is a measure of brightness and contrast. If the photo is too bright then there is detail lost in the whiter areas; similarly, if the photo is too dark, then details are lost in the darker areas. To some extent, this can be corrected by adjusting the tonal levels.

The histogram shows us the values for the colors, or brightness and contrast, present in our photographs. We would expect the histogram to spread across the entire range from 0-255 with a number of peaks and without being overly lopsided on one side or the other. The exception to this would be a night scene that we would expect to tend toward the dark side and a snow scene where we would expect there to be more overall brightness.

As you grow familiar with using this tool on your computer when enhancing your digital photographs from your last shoot, you will gradually gain the confidence to refer to the histogram in your camera while still taking the pictures. Understanding the histogram will lead you to take better exposed photographs that do not lose the important details that make the difference between a good photo and a great one.