Presentation of artwork is no less important than creation of artwork itself. This may sound controversial, but is true to a large extent: you may get a chance to have unmistakable proof when you see one of your own works on display in an exhibition, framed and lighted, against the broad wall ¡ it will seem quite different from how it looked back at home.

Unfortunately, the easiness of exhibiting pictures on the Internet also means the equal easiness to abuse it, and a great lot of the artwork seen online is simply badly presented. Laying aside the cases when the images are displayed unaligned, uncropped, with spiral binders visible, and even the outrageous case of landscape-oriented pictures whose creators apparently expect the viewers to tilt their heads 90 degrees to the side because they neglected to rotate the images after scanning, — one major vice remains which plagues the whole range of artists from wannabes right to many skilled ones. It’s posting the raw scans.

This is so frequently seen that it’s not even a problem anymore — it’s a real pestilence. It is most evident on the scans of sketches and pencil drawings, which are of much lower contrast than, to say, ink works. A fine example of that is our illustration (courtesy of Paul Mason; thank you Paul). Gray lines on gray background, accompanied by creased paper, finger blots et cetera. (I have even seen scans that were practically black: their brightest value was no brighter than 30% gray.)

Of course, it’s a pity, because it’s only the matter of seconds to clean the scan up and make it look presentable — if only the artist knew a tiny trick. Which I am going to show right now.

Scanners, naturally, are imperfect tools, even though many of them come with foolproof software which automatically adjusts them to the original’s brightness and contrast. Yet, the stuff that even the better scanners transfer to the computer is not the best we can get from the image: it always needs cleaning up. The primary problem of all scanners is the value range error.

Ideally, the value (brightness) in the image should vary from the maximum (100%) at the whitest point to the minimum (0%) at the blackest point. In scanner output, however, it is practically never so, especially with low contrast originals (i.e. graphite on paper). You are more likely to get something like 83% at the whitest point and 12% at the blackest point, which means you’ve lost almost one third of the brightness range, and both your “white” and your “black” are really rather gray. The primary task in cleaning the scan and making it presentable is driving the black and white to their places. Fortunately, Adobe Photoshop™ contains a tool designed precisely for this task ^(*).

Enter Levels command.