Tweak The Levels

This tutorial is going to cover tweaking your colors, the wonders of AdjustmentLayers, and bringing out and sharpening up the details in your texture.

For the sake of demonstration, I used a texture kindly provided to me by Scarykitties over at the TTLG forums. Since this tutorial is more a show and tell, less a precise hands-on exercise, you can use any texture you want to follow along.

First, we'll cover the verymost basic tweak you'll apply to all your textures: Levels.

The best way to explain levels is to say that it's a way to optimize the colors in your textures. When you first fire it up, you'll have a graph showing where the colors in your texture strongest, and where they go weak. Any high point on the graph represents colors that are bolder and more solid. Anything low is erring more towards grey. Scarykitties' texture has a narrow range of strong color, mostly along the red channel, and a lot of weaker color space dragging down the vividness of the texture as a whole. If you go to image/adjustments/levels, you'll get this graph here...

              

See those 3 little arrows along the bottom? That's what you use to determine the range used by your texture. The leftmost one tends to make the colors skew dark the farther right you drag it, the rightmost skews your texture lighter when you drag it left. The center arrow allows you to tweak the base color lighter or darker within the range of the other two pointers. Think of it as the overall black and white levels, and the grey in between. Play with it a bit, and you'll see what I mean. The end result is your colors will pop out. Anything that looked sorta neutral and washed out will be bolder afterwards. Like the dirt texture is sort of a paleish brown by default. Leveling it out makes it a vibrant baked earth red when you adjust your sliders to narrow on the higher ranges. Such as...

                                   

The red was already there, we just brought it out by playing with the levels slider. All other colors will pop as well, giving it more contrast, and will look better overall. Game engines in general seem to be able to do more with textures that are vibrant and contrasty, as opposed to pale and neutral. This is a good example of the difference a simple level application can make to a texture...

                                     

                                    

Much better, right? But what if you like the vibrancy, but still preferred the older, browner color of the original? We'll get to that later. For now, lets take what you learned about levels, and apply them through the wonderful magical oh so very handy...