Photoshop Tutorials: Fix Tone and Color with Levels In Photoshop

Step 10: Adjust The Center Slider To Brighten The Midtones If Needed

Often times, after you've corrected the highlights and shadows, you'll find that your image is looking a bit too dark. To brighten it up, in the Levels dialog box, click on the Midtone slider (circled in red below) and drag it a little to the left:

Keep an eye on your image as you drag the Midtone slider. The further you drag to the left, the more you'll brighten the midtones (dragging to the right darkens the midtones), but you usually don't need to drag the slider very far in order to get good results. If you do drag it too far, your image will start to look washed out. How far you drag the midtone slider is strictly a visual call on your part and depends entirely on your image.

Once you've brightened your image with the Midtone slider (if your image needed it), click OK in the Levels dialog box to exit out of it and accept all the corrections you've made.

To cycle between the corrected and uncorrected versions of your image to see how much of an improvement you've made, simply click on the Layer Visibility icon (also known as the "eyeball icon") to the left of the Levels adjustment layer in the Layers palette to turn the layer on and off:

Step 11: Remove The Target Markers

Finally, now that we're done with our target markers, we can remove them. To do that, select the Color Sampler Tool from the Tools palette. It's hiding by default behind the Eyedropper Tool, so click and hold your mouse down on the Eyedropper Tool for a second or two and then select the Color Sampler Tool from the fly-out menu that appears:

With the Color Sampler Tool selected, if you look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, you'll see a button that says Clear on it. Click on the button to clear the target markers from the image:

It's not vitally important that you remove the target markers, since they won't print if you forget to remove them, but they do get saved along with the image so it's a good idea to remove them once you no longer need them.

And with that, the overall tonal and color correction on the image is done! Don't worry if the first couple of times you go through these steps, you feel like you're stumbling through them and it seems to be taking longer than it should. Once you've gone through this process a few times with different images, it will start to seem like second nature to you and the whole thing shouldn't take you more than a minute.

Here's my original, uncorrected image once again for comparison:

And here is the image after completing the overall tonal and color correction using the Levels adjustment layer:

The only thing we didn't look at in this tutorial was color correcting the midtones. We brightened them using the Midtone slider, but we could have also tried to color correct them using the gray point eyedropper in the Levels dialog box (the eyedropper between the white and black point eyedroppers). There's a couple of reason why we didn't. The first reason is because often times, color correcting the highlights and shadows takes care of any color problems in the midtones as well. The second reason is because it's not as straightforward as correcting the highlights and shadows. In fact, it usually involves simply guessing where the neutral gray point in the image is supposed to be, and several "trial and error" attempts at it usually follow. Plus, not every image even has an area that's supposed to be gray, so trying to find what's not there is a bit pointless.

However, there is a trick to finding the neutral gray area in an image (if one exists) and color correcting the midtones, and we have a complete tutorial on it, An Easy Way To Find Neutral Gray, which you can access here.

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