Digital Outback Photo and Glenn E. Mitchell II have teamed up to write an excellent sereis of articles about how to get the best out of your shots. Part 3 looks at using levels and curves to adjust tonal range, contrast, and brightness.

“In the previous tutorial, we took a brief look at the features in Adobe Camera Raw II (ACR II) for adjusting tonal range, contrast, and brightness. For some images, all you need are a few adjustments with ACR II and your global adjustments are complete. You can even do capture sharpening and noise reduction in ACR II.

Some images present greater challenges. The Gerber Daisy in Figure 1 is an example. I took the shot in bright sunlight. I was afraid of burning out the saturated yellows, so I underexposed the image: rather severely, it turned out. I should have paid more attention to the histogram and less to the image on my Canon 10D.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Developing Photos That “Pop” Part 3