From the course: Digital Matte Painting: 4 Texturing

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Using Levels and Curves

Using Levels and Curves

Now that you know the anatomy of Levels and Curves, let's actually use them on this photo. Open up Curves and let's take a look at the histogram. This is the kind of histogram I like to see for a photo. Notice that the two ends aren't jammed up with tone. And they trail off in a curve, indicating that the darks and lights will both have detail in them. Let's do some color correction or what are called moves now. First, lets pull the white point into the left, what this has done is taken all of the tones before the point and made them white. This is a very harsh correction and will always increase contrast and saturation of the original. Let's make the same move in levels, pull this white point slider to the left and this is the exact same color correction that we did in Curves. Now, let's pull the black point in, this takes all of the tones that were from here to the new location of the black point and turns them black. Again, this is a very harsh correction and it will darken and…

Contents