How to add punch to your digital photos with the Levels and Curves tools

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

A common complaint from new DSLR owners is that their cameras leave their images looking rather dull and washed out: not like the punchy, eye-catching images they used to get from their cheaper compact camera.

The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.

Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.

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