On the bottom of the curves window, you’ll see 3 little eyedropper buttons called “set black point”, “set gray point” and “set white point." The goal is to click each eyedropper in the blackest, grayest, and whitest parts of the image as you remember them.
Click the left “set black point” eyedropper. Find a point on the image as close to pure black as you can and click it.
Click the right “set white point” eyedropper. Find a point on the image as close to pure white as you can and click it.
If you can find something on the image that is gray (like 128,128,128 RGB) use the middle eyedropper. If you can’t find anything gray in the image, look for concrete or try the off-white part of a subject’s eyes. If you can’t find anything gray you’ll have to depend on the “auto color” feature, and that is a gamble.
What you are doing is telling Photoshop to ignore your monitor, ignore the image RGB values, and to balance every color in the image against a known black and white to set the density and a known gray point to fix any color cast.
The curves eyedroppers doesn’t always give the results you want. Sometimes you have to delete the curves layer and start over again. But the results are almost always better than the “auto levels," “auto color," and “variations” options in Photoshop.
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