Making a Photo Look Great

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In the next few videos we are going to discover another way of making our photos look beautiful this video is brought to you by our Appy Pie's Academy and for that we are going to use two adjustment layers which are called threshold and levels they sound very technical and maybe even a bit scary but trust me they are going to help us a lot and they are so so much fun and there's so much is so easy that you actually learn and use and if you need a story behind this photo well I will give it to you it's a photo that I took from my summer vacation in Montenegro and this island right here is an island consent Steven and it's one of Montenegro landmarks and I got to tell you that the view is spectacular but this photo is not not right in terms of white balance in terms of colors contrast and this is what we are going to fix with this model with trust me some simple tricks some simple techniques and simple transformations so I'm gonna start with duplicating my background layer you can see that it's locked right here so I'm just gonna go with ctrl J on my keyboard you can go with command J.

If you're on a Mac so the first thing that we have to do right here is we need to find the darkest spot in our image and the lightest spot in our image so we can tell Photoshop from which it should take its information about the darkest spot and from which spot in the image it should take its information about about what's the lightest in the spot in the image was the lightest piece of information inside this image and to find it we will use them the the adjustment layer called threshold and it's right here in the adjustments panel and it is this guy right here it's the third one from the left in the bottom row right here so I'm just gonna simply click it and you may see that our image starts to look just black and white but it only has white and it only has black and you can also see this this panel this preview box right here with the something called the histogram and histogram is simply very tactical and technical term for displaying your information or how much shadow are much mid-tones and how much lights you have in your info and ideally it would be if we had like an even amount of information in on the left which would be our well the darker well the the dark information.

Let's go like that the information about the dark colors in our image inside we will have the information about the mid-tones and on the right we would have well we do have information about the light you can see that in this case we only have some information in the middle which means that we have information only about the mid-tones so how can this all help us in establish in the darkest point in mark in our image and the lightest point in our image well simply if I move this slider to the left you can see that this threshold level is decreasing and our image is starting to have more and more white and less and less black and if I keep going to the left you can see that this spot right here this guy here in the bottom as well well is the darkest let's call it like let's called like that it's the darkest so if I just simply zoom in just like that and by the way I'm using a very handy shortcut of ctrl or command if you're on a Mac plus the spacebar that will it temporarily initialize your your magnifying glass so right now since I know where my darkest placing my image is and I'm simply gonna go to the tool that is called the color sampler tool which is this guy right here and it sits under the eyedropper tool this guy right here so I'm gonna just initialize the color sampler tool and what I can do with it is I simply can mark the spot where my where my darkest place is on simply going to click on it and you can see this little number 1 being shown right here so right now we have our darkest but established and marked so let me just go back to the full screen view what we need to do right now is we need to find the lightest spot in our image and to do that I'm gonna go back to that threshold layer and I'm simply going to double click on this symbol right here to bring back the threshold properties and what I'm gonna do right now is I'm just simply going to drag this slider to the right to the right till I find my lightest spot but notice that in here we got 2:55 value 255 which means and actually we have some pure white information in our image and honestly it's not that good because it means that if we just sample this this white color right here and I can simply quickly turn it off so if I just sample this roof here of this of this well building that I'm actually not gonna pick up any information because it's just pure white there is no info right here so what I would advise you to do is to simply let me just go back so what I would advise you to do is to simply you know decrease this number in order to to maybe like nothing sample the pure white color but something that is just a bit a bit of white something like a very very very light gray.

If I turn off the the threshold off you can see that we could sample maybe some of these some of these very very light gray colors right here so I'm simply going to going to go to that to the color sampler tool this guy right here and this time maybe I'm going to mark maybe this guy right here so now we have established our our lightest and our darkest spots in our image so how does this all help us what can we do with it I mean we we will we established the lightest point and the darkest spot but we still don't see any any results of what we just did well we need to right now turn the layer levels adjustment layer on actually we have to add it so I'm simply going to click on this eye icon right here and what we can do right now is we if I just turn the threshold level threshold layers of what we can do right now is we can actually and pick up information about the darkest and the lightest point from our image so we can now tell Photoshop which which spot on our image which part of our image we wanted to consider as the darkest and we wanted to we want to tell which spot on our image we want to we want Photoshop to consider as the lightest so how can we do that you can see that we got three color samples right here so this guy the first one right here is going to allow us to establish the black point and this guy is going to allow us to establish the light point the white point actually so the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm simply going to click on this guy on this sampler right here and note that we need to have the threshold layer off and that if we just sample a sample so information from the threshold layer we are not actually gonna get to if we're not gonna get good results so I'm gonna turn the threshold layer off and be sure that this layer is off and now we can simply zoom into our first first like color sample right here so remember that this guy was our our darkest point and as soon as I click on it with this color sampler.

So I'm just gonna click on it right here you can already see some color shift in our image so now I'm gonna go back on the well I'm gonna go back to my to my lightest point I'm simply going to quickly find it I believe it was somewhere here and now I'm gonna grab this this bottom the sampler sampler and I'm simply going to sample this guy this color right here just like so and I hope you noticed is very very slight shift in the colors as well I'm simply going to go back to the full screen mode full screen view just like so and if I now turn the levels off you can see on our original image and these are our and our adjustments but if you're still not happy with the result although I think that it made a huge difference in our image we could always just double click on this symbol right here to enter our our levels adjustment layer and remember that I said that it would be ideal that our that the information that we can see right here that our histogram would be evenly distributed between these well between the left part the middle and the right part we can now actually bring this slider a bit to the left and notice that the darkest spots in our image as they are getting even darker so we are actually increasing the contrast just by some simple sliding just by some simple sliding and I can do the same with this right and a red slider to make the lighter in this case and the the see a bit lighter some even more increasing the contrast just like so so this is how you can easily make make your photo look great color correct the cars contrast and the white balance but I know that it might be a lot information especially to all you new ones or are you new to photoshop so we are actually going to repeat the whole process in the next video.