I have a picture opened here that has a lot of shadows and kind of darkness down here on the grass. I also have a shadow up here and I’d like to get rid of those shadows to kind of lighten up the picture. So to do so, go ahead, and you first of all need to select the layer from the layers palette that you do want to adjust. You have to do one layer at a time here which adjusts my background picture. So I’m going to go ahead and click to select my beehive layer. Then I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to go up to my image menu. I’m going to go to adjustments and then levels. And I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to get my levels dialog box. Go ahead and move this so I can see what’s going on with my picture.

Now, over here we have different parts of this dialog box that does different things. So over here on the left, this triangle that I have down here, this is going to adjust my dark tones in the picture. I can go ahead and move this and it actually is going to make those tones darker, which I do not want to do in this case. Now, I also have the middle one and this is my middle tones and I can make these darker or I can lighten these up depending on which way I adjust this. So this is one way that I can really lighten up that grass. And then, I also have this right triangle and these are my lightest tones in my picture. I could go ahead and I can adjust this to make it even lighter.

I also have this output levels down at the bottom and the left triangle is going to be the contrast of my image. This is what I can do to change my contrast. This is how I can help get rid of this shadow right here, is by using the contrast. And then my right, this is going to be the highlights in the image, so I can go ahead and I can move this and it’s going to adjust the highlights.

So that’s a quick way that you can adjust to get rid of any shadows or any bright spots in your photo. If you’re not happy with this, you can go ahead and click cancel and it will return you to your normal picture or you can click OK and it will go ahead and it will apply the level settings that you just adjusted.