Setting the White Point in Photoshop

[sonofcoco]

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but how do you guys go about setting the white point in a shot when you're doing the levels in Photoshop where there's no obvious white point to select? Have a shot at the moment I'm working on and it's quite a dark photo with no bright lights etc anywhere to choose as the white point. Choosing the brightest part of the photo just results in it being blown out.

Do you normally just adjust with the slide bar as you see fit or is there another technique to be used?

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

[ricktas]

i assume you are talking about the slider bar on a levels adjustment layer? I just visually drag it back till it is close to the start of the graph incline

[sonofcoco]

i assume you are talking about the slider bar on a levels adjustment layer? I just visually drag it back till it is close to the start of the graph incline

Yes that's the one, thanks very much! That seemed to be the common sense approach, but I thought I might have been missing something

[saratoga]

Your white point should be the lightest area with detail. Don't use the brightest part of an image, which is often a specular highlight.
I normally use a threshold adjustment layer to find the lightest and darkest points, shift click on them with the eyedropper and then when you use a curves adjustment the points you marked will appear on the curve. For printing something I normally set the white points to around 245-247.