PUBLICATION CENTER

By Jon Canfield

Making a Levels adjustment after converting the RAW image might seem odd, and, in fact, shouldn’t be necessary with proper adjustment in Camera Raw. But the Levels control is useful for making adjustments to output levels, particularly for printing situations in which the printer can’t match the shadow and highlight detail of the screen image.

By adjusting the slider below the Levels graph, you modify the black point and white point for the output device. As with all image edits, I recommend using adjustment layers whenever possible to avoid changing the master image. To adjust output levels, Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels.

Figure 1

For most inkjet printers, I recommend setting the Output Levels shadow slider at 10 to prevent shadow detail from blocking up and the highlight slider to 240 to avoid clipping the highlights, as shown in Figure 1. This slightly reduces the contrast in the image and prevents blank areas in the highlights that may look odd due to the paper color, since areas with a value of 255 have no ink and let the paper show through.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Published in August, 2009 by Amphoto Books, Camera Raw 101 explains how to get the most detail from RAW files, whether it’s correcting shadow and highlight detail, fixing white balance problems, or getting rid of noise. Canfield presents essential workflow techniques and compares the Adobe Camera Raw workspace and the Lightroom Develop Module, what the controls are, and how they work on your RAW images. He explains edits done to almost every RAW file, advanced conversion options in Photoshop CS4, and how to automate Camera Raw to convert multiple RAW files.