Using Levels in Photoshop

I recently did a review over on silverorange Stuff that required a few photos of my camera. The camera is discontinued and photos were simply not available online from the manufacture. I set out to accomplish this myself.

I realize there are probably a number of better ways to do this and also methods to achieve better results but based on my knowledge of Photoshop, this is what I attempted. I look at a number of Photoshop tutorials every week, so here is my first attempt at one.

Let me know if it's useful or if I should be trying something else.

	I couldn't take a picture of my own camera so I got Dan to take a number of photos with his Pentax Optio S. The background was on white paper with 2 light sources. Natural light from a window above and an over head lamp. No flash.
	In photoshop I added a new levels layer. From the bottom of the levels pallet, click "adjustment layers" and then "levels". I moved the the middle arrow to the left to increase the brightness with fewer dark levels.
	I added a second adjustment layer for levels and used the eyedroppers. There are 3 of them. Set the white point, black point and then grey point. By telling Photoshop what areas of the image should be the brightest, Photoshop will try its best to adjust accordingly.
	This was looking good although I still had a number of textures around the camera. Instead of deleting/erasing or masking out the unwanted image, I added a 3rd adjustment layer for levels and washed it completely out with white. This destroys almost all of the details but created a nice white background. (I suppose I could have also just added a new layer of white and masked that.) Each layer adjustment has a mask associated with it. When white, its transparent. When black, the effect is hidden. When 50% grey, 50% of the effect will happen.
	I took the brush tool (press B on the keyboard) and set my colors to black and white (press D on the keyboard). Increase your brush to a good size according to the image (press [ or ] )and start painting back the part of the image you wanted to keep. Make sure you are in the mask section of the layer. By using black, you are hiding the 3rd layer of adjustments to the painted area. You can also paint softer edges by pressing shift plus [ or ] on the keyboard.

My Final Image looked like this:

My Final Layer Pallet:
My finished layer pallet

Another example:

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