Levels is the way to start out color correcting your photographs in Photoshop, but sometimes it isn’t enough.
What do you do if your darks aren’t rich enough but the overall color is a little too bleak? What if the white balance is off?
There are many, many more options beyond levels to color correct photos.
Remember, all these options should be created as new adjustment layers so that you can edit them later. Look for the half black, half white circle icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette (
). Click it to get a menu of adjustment layers.
Brighten It Up with Curves
With almost every photo, my next step after the initial color correction with Levels is to add a Curves adjustment layer.
Curves can also be used similarly to Levels to fix the tonal range of a photograph, but it is more difficult to tame this beast than it is to use Levels. Most people who use Curves for color correction say you’ll get better results if you can master it, but it will take time. And incidentally, I haven’t made it yet. If you’re interested, check out these tutorials from Cambridge in Color and Zuber Photo Graphics.
The simple way to use Curves is to adjust the RGB channel. Adding a simple S curve will pump up the highlights and deepen the shadows. What I like to do is just bring up the highlights, though—nudge the curve up just a little. Then…
Deepen Darks with Brightness/Contrast
The Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer gives photos that extra little pop that really makes them look fantastic. I use Brightness/Contrast to brighten the highlights a little more than with Curves, but more importantly to make those dark areas extra rich. I only ever use the Contrast slider.
It’s always up to personal preference to determine how much to boost the contrast, but be especially aware of how it is affecting your skin tones if you have people in a photo. Generally with human subjects, you don’t want to increase the contrast more than a couple of points—I find I don’t like to go above +6.
Restore White Balance with Hue/Saturation
Is your photo too yellow? Maybe a flash was used with florescent lighting so the background has a yellow cast to it. Never fear! A Hue/Saturation layer will fix that in a flash.
Select the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette. From here you can either use the overall Hue/Saturation channel to move the colors slightly towards the red, or you can go into the Yellow Channel (select it from the drop down menu at the top of the dialog box) and move it towards the red and even desaturate it a little. Voila! No more nasty yellow tone.
What other techniques do you use to optimize the colors in your photos? There are so many different functions and tools that can be used that there is no one right or wrong way to do it! Why not share your color correction tips and tricks with us in the comments!
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Technorati Tags: Design, Graphic Design, Color Correction, Photoshop
This might sound mega dodgy, but sometimes I like to duplicate the photo layer and set the duplicate to overlay (or soft light or hard light, depending on the photo). Then I tweak either the lower layer or the overlay layer to get it the way I want it. I find it seems to sharpen the image, enhance colours, define shadows a bit more… I dunno, I just like it. Sometimes a part of that process involes the things that you just did as well (I like your process by the way).
Kristarella,
No way! Why would that be dodgy? Any method is valid in my opinion; it all depends on the desired effect you want the image to have on the viewer. I like images that are bright with high contrast, which is where my process comes from. I’ve not tried that way you mentioned, will have to see how it looks!
Nice work with the photos, Lauren. I too use all the techniques you’ve described, plus also quite often I apply filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask and play with the settings there.
Btw, congratulations with such an impressive number of RSS feed count for such a young blog as yours. Way to go!
Vivien (inspirationbit),
Thanks for sharing your tip about the Unsharp mask. I read some interesting and impressive stuff about sharpening photos in the Real World Photoshop book I have. I want to write about it, but I’d like to become more familiar with the techniques first.
Thanks for the congrats
I’m quite pleased (though it’s nothing compared to what John’s done with iLT!! Holy cow! We started our blogs at the same time, too!)
Haha, yeah I guess anything goes in the end :P
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[…] However, when I was playing with these fireworks photographs I found that changing the levels increased the noise in the image. So I tried Colors > Curves instead. Curves had enough fine tuning to add more contrast to the image without increasing the noise. Have a look at LaurenMarie’s usage of these tools in photoshop. […]