White Point Eyedropper in Levels Adjustment Overcorrects and Blows Out Image

Question

I’ve noticed a frustrating change in Photoshop’s Levels adjustment tool. When using the white point eyedropper to set the white point by sampling in the image, the correction is now much more intense and immediately blows out the highlights, destroying shadow details. Previously, clicking a light but not pure white area would produce a subtle, balanced adjustment, preserving tonal range.

This new behavior makes it impossible to maintain shadows while using the white point eyedropper and significantly disrupts my workflow. Is there any way to restore the previous, more forgiving behavior, or could this be addressed in a future update?

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

Just guessing, but maybe what happened is that the target values of the white point tool got changed at some point, unintentionally. If you double-click the white point tool, you can set what RGB values you want the clicked-on pixel to be set to, shifting the entire image accordingly. Maybe it started working right again after settings got reset, or something like that.

Because I think many of us here aren’t aware of any change that has been made to that tool recently. Recent changes to Photoshop have been in other, unrelated areas. I could be wrong but my impression is nothing has changed in the Levels dialog box in over 25 years. The last big change was probably when Auto Color Correction options were introduced in the early 2000s.

D Fosse · Answer

I read the original post again, and here’s what stands out:

“Previously, clicking a light but not pure white area would produce a subtle, balanced adjustment, preserving tonal range”.

That’s not how the white point eyedropper works in Photoshop, and it has never worked that way. As I wrote earlier: It brings the clicked point - whatever values it has! - right up to 255-255-255, in other words, blown out.

So again, this works differently than a white balance tool, such as you have in Lightroom or ACR. This is not a defect; it’s how the tool is supposed to work.

It is possible to get the white point eyedropper to behave like a white balance tool, by setting the sampled layer in Color blend mode.

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