You’ve take the perfect shot. You’re so excited to see what it looks like on a 21” monitor instead of your camera’s little 2” display.

You download the photo and pull it up. Ugh! It’s so dull! It’s nothing like the beautiful flower you took a picture of! What happened? How can you fix it?

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

For most photos you are going to want to use an adjustment layer. This option can be found by going to the bottom of the layers palette and clicking on the little half black, half white circle.

Adjustment layers are usually better than using the other options from the Image>Adjustments menu because they will remain editable, unlike the menu option, which, once applied, cannot be undone later on.

Let me clarify, you can still undo (Ctrl+Z) the menu adjustments, but once you get further along into your editing, you can’t undo without undoing everything else you’ve done up to that point; you also won’t be able to undo once you close the file and the history is deleted, or you go beyond your maximum undos.

Using Levels

Many options will come up from the adjustment layer icon and first off we want to choose Levels. The purpose of Levels is to create a pure black point and a pure white point. Many photos will not have these initially; this is sometimes called adjusting the tonal range. You could simply look at the RGB histogram (those black “mountains”), but you’ll get better results by going into each channel individually.

In each channel (red, green and blue), you’ll want to drag the black and white sliders in to the point where solid data starts to appear. Start by going in to where the color channel has a significant amount of data, not just a little line of black. You can always fix it later if it’s too much.

Once you’ve adjusted each channel, it may be necessary to go back and bring the sliders out a little more or push them in. You want your colors to look true to the original subject. There is no exact science to this part; it’s up to individual preference and your opinion of how the colors look may change from day to day (which is another reason it’s nice to have the option to change the adjustments later on).

Further Adjustments with Levels

You can also adjust the middle (grey) slider to add or subtract colors:

• Red Channel: >1.00 image will gain red, <1.00 image will gain cyan
• Green Channel: >1.00 image will gain green, <1.00 image will gain purple
• Blue Channel: >1.00 image will gain blue, <1.00 image will gain yellow

If you want an image to be warm, add some red and take away some blue (which will give you more yellow). If you want the image to be cooler, pump up the blue and take away some red (gives you more cyan). To make yellow more golden, take away some green and blue and add red. To saturate foliage, increase the blue and green while taking away some red.

Multiple Level Layers

The other nice thing about the adjustment layers as opposed to the ones from the Image>Adjustments menu is that you can put masks on the adjustment layers. So you have a section of flowers you want to be warm and you want to make the greens more brilliant? No problem! Do an overall adjustment layer for the image and then create two separate adjustment layers, one for the flowers and one for the leaves and just paint the mask on one. Then copy the mask to the other and invert (Ctrl+I) it.

To get around not having adjustment layers in programs like Photoshop Elements, simply duplicate your original layer, apply the permanent adjustment and apply a mask to that layer. Paint out the areas you don’t want the adjustment applied to.

There are other things you can do for your image, like Curves adjustments, Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation. Let’s go over those next time.

Technorati Tags: Design, Graphic Design, Color Correction, Photoshop