Sometimes it’s really frustrating. You try so hard to adjust the levels of your photo with Photoshop but it seems to be impossible to get a satisfying result. Most of the time the reason for this is the RGB color mode, which does not fit the color scheme of your picture. So in this tutorial I will show you how you can get rid of this problem by switching the color mode to LAB. This is my original example image:

This image could really need some more contrast and more vivid colors. Usually, the easiest and fastest way to fix that is hitting the button to auto-adjust the levels (Ctrl+L -> Auto) but this time the result is an image where the original blue colors are lost:

In order to keep the original hue you have to convert the image to LAB colors. If you haven’t done so already, go back one step in the history (Ctrl+Z), then click on Image > Mode > LAB color as seen on the picture below:

Now try auto-adjusting the levels again (Ctrl+L -> Auto). This time you should be able to increase the contrast while preserving the natural blue colors of the image like this:

So, whenever the level adjustments are not satisfactory in RGB mode just switch over to LAB colors and try again. In most cases you should get a much better result.

TIP: LAB mode is great for touching up the levels of portrait photos because skin colors will look much more natural

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Graphics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.