Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Adjusting Brightness

After you have achieved good contrast, your image might look too bright or dark. The middle slider in the Levels dialog box can fix that. (Techies love to call this slider the Gamma setting, but we plain folks call it the midpoint.) If you move the middle slider to the left, the image will become brighter without messing up the dark areas of your image. Black areas will stay nice and black. Or you can move the middle slider to the right to darken the image without messing up the bright areas of the image. White areas will stay bright white (Figure 5.23). This is the one setting that is a personal choice. I can't tell you how bright or dark your image should be.

Figure 5.23. Effects of the middle slider.

If you want to ...