Step 10; The Fancy Bits
Here is the image obtained by straightening and cropping. Are we happy with the colour, contrast etc? Maybe, maybe not.
I am going to tweak the colours slightly. To do this I do not use the usual buttons and levers such as "Automatic Levels" or "Auto Contrast". I use the manual method. If I click on Image (menu at the top of the page), then on Adjustments, then on Levels, I get a little box with a couple of arrows and a fancy looking graph (histogram if you are pedantic). In this case, I am going to move the slider from the extreme left hand end of the graph ever so slightly toward the right. The picture immediately begins to darken, except it isn't really darkening. What this does is to move the reference point for "very dark" (black actually) so that those areas that are supposed to be black will indeed be a "proper" black, none of that wishy washy grey stuff. The slider on the right hand end does the same thing for the white reference. If you start sliding this one to the left, you will see the white levels going up until they get so bright, you will go blind. With this picture, the white levels are fine just as they are so no need to touch. What about the middle slider? Well, that is for adjusting mid-tones. I suppose you could sum it up by saying adjustment of the left and right sliders is a bit like tweaking the contrast.
