Level and Colour adjustment.

As we know I have slightly underexposed the background of this image, so I will have to do something about that. First I will check and adjust the levels. For this I like to have my histogram and layer palette open so I can see what is happening to the graph of my image. ( I use an action to recreate all these steps – see later) To adjust the levels I go to the menu and select

Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels ((or simply press Ctrl + L).

This creates an adjustment layer above your background layer and opens your levels palette. Now we know from when we looked at the RAW image there are some areas that are being clipped, so it would be useful to see them while we make the level adjustment. Looking at the graph we have a gap on the right which we would like to close, but will this cause more clipping? The way I do this is to hold the Alt button down then, as I grab the right slider, the image will go black and the clipped areas will become bright. I want to adjust the slider until I get a balance of closing the gap and not overexposing any more of the airframe. This graph is about right for me but I can come back and adjust it later if I want.

Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation
I only want to add 10 units of saturation, so I move the saturation slider to +10
Sometimes I may decide I don't want any saturation at all - I can review that later and remove it as necessary.

Now I want to make the dark areas slightly lighter but keep the bright areas as they are. This is a great action to have and once you have recorded it you will use it a lot!. Ok here we go…

1. Select your background layer on your layer palette
2. Now go to your channel palette and, holding your Ctrl button down (you will see a little square box on your curser), select the RGB channel. This creates an alpha channel mask on the RGB channel. What is an alpha channel mask? It selects the whole image and creates a mask that at the moment will let 100% of the adjustment be made to the white areas of the image going down to 0 for the black areas. For our purpose here that is the wrong way round, so we need to make the selection inverse.

Select > Inverse

Now our adjustment will be made to the dark areas and the bright areas will not be affected. This is non-destructive as you can not blow out any area through the mask. We should now have a screen like this

Now go back to you layer palette and make another adjustment layer.
Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves
This will open the curve box and also you will notice that the selection appears to have gone, but if you look at your layer palette you will see the mask being displayed. I don’t like to wang the curve about at random, as this would be very hard to replicate and I like precise adjustment. So place your cursor right in the middle if the graph. The output and input should both read 50. Now click in the output box and, holding the Alt key down, press the down arrow. Holding the Alt key down makes incremental changes of 10, not 1, so making the change more visible. For this image I will settle for an output of 30.

Here I will add a value of +10 contrast and select OK.

We should now have an image like this

I can make an adjustment to any layer I want now just by double clicking on the adjustment layer I want to change. If you click the eye next to any other layer or group you can toggle the view of that layer or group. When I am happy with all my adjustments I might want to save this image as a psd file – this allows me to save all the layer detail. For now I am going to carry on to get my image ready for the internet. So next I will merge all the layers back to one single layer:

Layer > Flatten Image

Next I will resize my image to its finished dimensions. I know that the aspect ratio of my image is correct, so all I need to do is set the width of the image to the size I require - in this case 1200pixels - and I know that the height will be correct. So all I do here is
Image > Image Size

Check all three tick boxes bottom left are ticked. I use ‘Bicubic Sharper’ - this is the algorithm used in the size reduction. Change the Width to 1200 and press OK.

Now I have an image almost ready. All that is left to do is sharpen the image.