dealing with backgrounds

[neil groves]

How are backgrounds best dealt with?   after pushing up curves to get my luminance and adjusting levels to get a pleasing coloration , I am finding my background is too light?.....can someone point me in the right direction here or at least direct me to a site that explains this procedure........it's been quite a while since I did any processing and i'm out of touch lol.

 

thanks

Neil.

[ollypenrice]

The routine to follow is generally called 'Levels and Curves.'

You'll lift the Curve to brighten the image, mostly in its fainter parts, then you should go to Levels (Ctrl L) to adjust the black point. You move the left hand slider to the right. Be very careful how you do this. Don't make the background too dark. Keep an eye on the background brightness by using the colour sampler eyedropper to put a few markers on the background. During processing keep it high, maybe 28 in each of R, G and B. Right at the end you can clip it back using the right hand slider in Levels to maybe 23/23/23.

Here the black point slider has been brought in too far and faint data has been clipped.

But here the histogram in Levels has a healthy flat line on the left and the background is at a reasonable level.

Olly

Edited February 3, 2016 by ollypenrice
Typos as usual!

[neil groves]

Thankyou Olly....I need to reprocess