Click
on IMAGE Menu -> Adjustments and hold. You will see the dialogue box shown
at the right.[Return to Start]
[Lesson 1: Opening] [Lesson
2: Assessing] [Lesson 3: Cropping]
[Lesson 4:Rotating] [Lesson
5: Fixing Blemishes] [Lesson 6: Adjusting
Color ] [Lesson 7: Sizing/Printing]
Lesson 6: Color Adjustment
Adjusting the color of an image is one of the most difficult processes to master. This lesson will be only an introduction to color adjustment. It will focus on what to do and what not to do.
Click
on IMAGE Menu -> Adjustments and hold. You will see the dialogue box shown
at the right.
1. Do NOT use any of the "Auto" functions ... Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Color. While use of these automatic adjustments will often improve the color, each of them loses information in your image file, information which can not be recovered!
2. The best adjustment tool for most photographs is "CURVES".
3.Open
the sunset image and then go to the Image Menu, -> Adjustments -> curves.
When you do, you will get the following type of dialogue box:
The light to dark bar with the two arrows at the bottom in this Curves dialogue box represents all of the pixels in this image from the lightest [at the right of the barn] to the darkest [at the left of the bar].
When you click on and move the line up and to the left, the pixels in the entire image will get lighter.
A pixel of initial darkenss shown by the lower arrow now has a lighter shade as shown by the arrow pointing to the left.
Changing this line shifts all the pixels on the image towards lighter which is just what we want to do with the sunset image.
Click on the line, and a black box will appear. Click again on the box and try shifting it small and large amounts in either direct and observe the effect on your image.
When your image has a basically good color composition, you will only need to shift this line a small amount to either lighten it or darken it to make the image one that is no longer 'too light' or 'too dark'.
However, photoshop can not put colored pixels into an image where the image is washed out ... where everything is white. So, a washed out image generally can not be easily color adjusted. There are other more advanced techniques that can be used to fix such an image which we may deal with later.
As
a next step, click on the Channel "RGB" button and you will see that
you can select one of the three main color channels of which your image is composed,
red, green and blue.
If you don't know this already, all photo images are a blend of the three colors: red, green, blue.
Note that by selecting one of these color channels, red for example, you can color adjust just the reds in the image, making them brighter or darker.
Click on each of these channels and again, play with making the pixels lighter or darker.
At this point, you might be asking yourself, what's the correct final color balance in this image? What did nature really show us when we were out there taking this photograph? The answer is, we don't now. Our eyes have lenses which filter colors -- each of us has different lenses. Our camera has lenses which shift the colors and brightness, for example, when we use a polarizing filter or a skylight filter. When we print a negative or slide, the chemicals and films pick up different colors ... film a will emphasize reds, while b will emphasize blues, etc. And, when we scan or digitize an image, the scanning software will shift the image's colors. And, now we are deliberately shifting and adjusting the colors with photoshop as a tool. And, by the way, I'm working on a Macintosh monitor. If you're working on a Windows PC Monitor, your image is darker than mine ... our computers are also shifting the colors of this image.
So, iIn the end, it's up to you ... your eye, what you like. And, of coure, other people will tell you what they see ... whether your image looks right to them.
Want to see my final sunset image? Click "Ray's Final Sunset Image". Some of you may send an email complaining that image is still too light or dark ... this may be the differences between our eyes, our preferences, our monitors ... you may be right and I may be right. At least we can agree perhaps that the image is cropped better. Or can we? That too is a matter of taste although there are some 'soft rules' that suggest that horizon lines don't usually work well at the exact centre of the image. Well, can we agree that getting rid of the blemishes and straightening the horizon line was a good idea?
Questions or Issues? Did the instructions work for you? If not, drop me a line and tell me about where you got stuck.