I don’t share many photography tips because there are so many better resources out there & I usually keep things really simple with my editing. This one tip is too good not to pass up, so I thought I’d share how I took this boring, hazy, low-contrast photo from the window of an airplane to….
…a bold & beautiful shot of some spectacular scenery that I enjoyed during my long flight. I generally only edit in Lightroom & take my pictures into Photoshop CS5 to make collages or run actions on them. Once I started doing this to a few of my photos, I had to do it to all of them.
Opening up a picture in Photoshop, in the layers pallet click on the little half-white & half-black circle at the bottom to create a new fill/adjustment layer. When the menu pops up, select “Levels….” and this will create a new layer and open the levels adjustment that I have shown above. The histogram (the black & white graph) shows that I’m not using very much of my range. I can capture/show color all the way from the blue to the orange arrow, but all the information in my photo is bunched up in the middle (the black hill).
There are tiny triangles at each end of the levels curve & all you need to do is take and drag them in towards where the actual information (black hill) is on the histogram. Above, I moved the black and white targets to the very edge of where the black hill is starting on the histogram to re-map all my pixels to get the most color and contrast. That’s it- Smile at the results and save!
Here are a few before & after photos to illustrate how using a levels adjustment can add pop & dynamic range to a photo. This was just departing the airport in LA & turning over the Pacific to head back east. The foreground is a little saturated & warm, but I didn’t have time to do a gradient balance on the sky/mountains in the background.
I found that this tip worked wonders on all the desert landscapes as we flew over the great southwest. It really made all the colors and textures pop out- including saving this (originally awful) photo of the Grand Canyon.
I really wish I’d thought to do this sooner on some of my earlier photos from airplanes, but I’m excited that I know have this little trick in my arsenal.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I’m headed to Atlanta & Birmingham today, so maybe I’ll catch some more exciting stuff in the sky.
