From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced
Unlock the full course today
Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
Highlights, shadows, and midtones - Photoshop Tutorial
From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced
Highlights, shadows, and midtones
All right, that was fun, but it might make Photoshop seem a bit complex, and really, it's such a simple program. Three things you need to know about it. First, it sees every photograph, no matter how colorful, as one grayscale channel at a time. Second, it lives and breathes luminance levels, starting with black and ending with white. And third, it likes transitions, edges where dark turns to light in fairly short order. That last item becomes important in the next chapter. For now, we care about the channel by channel grayscale images and the luminance levels from black to white. There are three ranges of luminance levels; highlights, which are the lightest ones, shadows, which are the darkest ones, and midtones, which are all the ones in between. Photoshop gives you two commands for addressing them; Levels, which gives you independent control over highlight, shadows, and midtones, and Curves, which gives you access to that and more. They both operate on a channel by channel basis…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Contents
-
-
-
-
Highlights, shadows, and midtones1m 16s
-
Introducing the Auto commands7m 23s
-
Adjusting Cache Level settings6m 8s
-
Reading a channel-by-channel histogram6m 21s
-
How the Auto commands work5m 22s
-
Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color7m 7s
-
Blending the Auto results4m 4s
-
Introducing the Levels command6m 15s
-
Using Levels as an adjustment layer3m 12s
-
Applying custom Levels adjustments6m 8s
-
Understanding the gamma value7m 39s
-
The futility of Output Levels2m 55s
-
Selections and adjustment layers5m 47s
-
Opening up the shadows3m 40s
-
Previewing clipped pixels4m 51s
-
The black, white, and gray eyedroppers5m 7s
-
Gray card tips and tricks6m 5s
-
Making channel-by-channel adjustments7m 29s
-
Introducing the Curves command7m 44s
-
Curves dialog box tricks7m 16s
-
Curves adjustment layer tricks5m 45s
-
Correcting an image with Curves5m 32s
-
Filling in the highlights5m 42s
-
Neutralizing casts and smoothing transitions5m 37s
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-