From all the books I have read, and other Photoshop artists I have had the pleasure to meet everyone has a slightly different perspective of the perfect histogram. Every image or piece of art has a personality of its own. Whatever pleases your eye is the perfect histogram, but many books must be read, tutorials must be followed, and classes should be taken to master the Adobe Photoshop program.
The original RBG histogram has a solid but uneven shape.
The Red Channel was really washed out the histogram has all the data on the right. I manually moved the sliders to line up with the area that contains the data in the histogram. I did not move the center slider until all three channels had been adjusted.
Larger Image use Back Button to return
The Green and Blue histogram's are completely opposite to the Red Levels. I moved the sliders in the same fashion. I still have not moved the center slider. There are other methods the setting the color zone, on new images I use the eye dropper to set the shadow and highlight, but that method did not work on this transparency restoration.
After I had all the Levels adjusted I looked at the RBG Levels histogram and clicked the OK Button. The reason I opened the Levels as a mask you can open and adjust the Levels and change or tweak what section Red, Green, or Blue anytime you need too. In the Layers Pallet the Levels mask should be above the image you are working on, just double click on the circle that is half black and white. If you had Video LUT Animation checked in Preferences you could see the image change on screen. This is where I set the final RGB Levels for each Channel. Move the center slider in the Red Channel of Levels to the right, you will notice the red looks good, but the grass is almost black looking. Move to the Green Channel of Levels to the left until you get green grass. It's still not right? Move the Blue Channel in Levels to balance out the grass and concrete color. You still have some adjusting to do, but the transparency is starting to look a lot better.
The final RGB Levels has a lot of gaps between the histogram, but there are still some areas of solid black. For a transparency in that bad of condition, this final histogram is acceptable. There is more to be done so head back to the Family Dog page.
