The Digital Matte Painting Handbook

Levels and Curves in Color Correction

With your reference photos in hand, you’ll quickly discover that they’re in different color spaces. Before you begin to work with the photos, they will require color correction. The following is a primer on Levels and Curves, the indispensable tools of color correction.

Anatomy of Curves and Levels

You can’t use Curves and Levels at the same time, but they share many of the same controls. By pressing Command/Ctrl+L to open the Levels dialog box, or Command/Ctrl+M to open the Curves dialog box, you access control of the open image’s entire range of tones and colors.

Let’s look at the similarities. On the left side of Levels is the black point input control that matches the black point input on the left side ...