Levels Adjustment explained - Affinity Photo

Key Takeaways

hello my friends it's time for another essentials video for affinity photo and today we're gonna unlock the secrets of the levels adjustment my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer and I want to thank all my patrons who support me and make these videos possible that is super important thank you for that let's get started I have already the levels adjustment open here and you might think you know how this works and how to use that but you might be surprised at what it actually does so let's get into that I will close this real quick and delete it so I can show you where I get the levels adjustment because that's the first and most important part so down here you have this little button for adjustments the list pops up and the uppermost is the levels adjustments which tells you how important that is what we see now is on the upper part this little box has a histogram in it the histogram means it tells you from the different channels of your photo how the pixels are spread out over the picture like a statistic basically so on the left side you have the dark values and on the right side you have the bright values in your image by the way this doesn't really update life so I prepared a little test palette here and you can see the histogram doesn't change so you have to close it and reopen it and now it's updated so that's also an important part to understand I will close it again and remove the picture in the background because this is a really good way to show you what the level adjustment actually does so you can see now in the histogram I have these values here like a line because they are completely just in that value and you can see from the fields here the one on the right is 100% white and then diminishing the white part by 20% with each bar until there is no more white left and everything is just black observe what is happening if I move this upper lever which says black lever when I move it to my first in the histogram you can see that now also the 20% part is completely black in this progresses when I move my lever over what you can also see and this is very important is that also the other bars are getting darker and this is really important to understand as the difference between the levels adjustment and the curves adjustment because the level adjustment will always adjust all the values in your image not just the dark values so you might think this will just change the dark values but it changes all of the values throughout your pictures and makes everything darker you can see until you go down here it doesn't change the white well user though when you do the same thing with the second lever which says white levels it does the same thing it makes everything brighter until we are completely white unless the only thing that stays black is what is already a hundred percent black then we have the gamma value as you know gamma is brightness so we can move this and you can see that this will also influence the values so it moves basically the values not just them more to the dark side more to the bright side and by the way as you can see here when I go to the left things are not getting darker they are getting brighter and when I go to the right things are getting darker not brighter although I'm moving it into the area where the brighter values are but you have to imagine it as a way like you have a rubber band and you are pulling the darker values over to the right side or you're pulling the lighter values over to the left side so this is a good way to imagine it good now we have these values below output black level what does that mean you have to think that your screen basically delivers colors to you so it gives you an output all the time and you can adjust where this output ends so when you move the black lever over you will see that the black levels cannot output the darkest black values anymore and the more you move this over the brighter again all of the dark values get so you can see it gets brighter and brighter and brighter until everything is completely white and the same happens on my white level lever if I push this in all the values are getting darker so you can use it like that two limits basically the way or the ability of your image to output completely white colors and brighter colors and completely black colors and darker colors next we come to a really important part of the levels adjustment and you probably didn't even know you can do that you can look up here you see it says master when you click on that it pops out a list and it says red green and blue which are your color channel so if you click on red observe what happens again these are just great values so if I move in the black level it starts to become more blue or if you want to use the professional term this color is actually called cyan so you can see here 80 percent value this is cyan so that's interesting when I move in the white level it has to become red the bright values start to become a red that's interesting right and if I move my gamma when I move it to the left becomes more red move it to the right becomes more cyan now we have talked about the output black level output wide level think about a second what you guess is happening if I move in the black level here is what is happening if I move it in the darker values are starting to become more red and when I move in the output white level the brighter values are starting to become more cyan it's interesting right so how can I use that I adjust my pictures let's switch over to the picture here we have it and can see now black level I move that in and the darker values in my picture become cooler so I can for example use this to adjust my shadows and make the darker areas a little bit cooler then if I move in the white level the brighter values are starting to get warmer so I can use this to warm up the highlights in my picture and the brighter values but if I want to do if I want to go the other way if I want to have warmer shadows warmer dark values what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go down to my output black level and move that in you can see now that the darker values are getting warmer it's interesting right and if I move in the output white levels my highlights my bright levels in the picture are getting cooler so that is pretty useful for adjustment but we have more channels we have also the green one and we have the blue Channel and they also change values in your picture but with other color results so if I move in the black level it becomes more pink the pink is actually called magenta in this case and if I move in the white level it becomes more green interesting right and of course with the output level the opposite happens black makes the dark value screen and output white makes the white values more magenta let's go to the blue channel and here the black will add yellow to the values as you can see here yellow and if I move in the white levels you can see that the values are getting blue it's interesting right so of course with the output levels the opposite is happening and there is a little trick to remind you of the name of the levels and how they work you can just open up your color balance adjustment and here you can see the exact same thing cyan versus red magenta versus green and yellow versus blue the very same thing that we have seen just a second ago so this is a little visual reminder very helpful but we are not done yet there's even more to look at because of course you have the blend modes and you can play around with them I really want to invite you to experiment with that so you can see here even if you haven't adjusted anything if the all the values let's click on reset here if all the values are original still this has an effect with the blend mode on your pictures you can do some pretty cool things for example just using the levels adjustment and without changing anything setting it to soft light gives you a very quick bump a very quick like pop effect for your picture gives a bit more contrast makes the colors more intense so this can be a very easy trick to use and of course you can adjust the opacity on how strong you want that effect to be in your picture so try out the different blend modes and what they bring to your picture to your adjustment and of course also try them out with the different adjustments that you have in here I hope this brought you forward in your journey to become a better photo editor thank you very much for watching and see you in the next video bye