Happy Tuesday everyone!
I told you this week was going to be harder. And believe me it is! Todays tutorial tuesday is about Color Correction!
When I studied color correction, color management, and color space in college I drank a lot of coffee and my eyes twitched a bit from all of the studying.
For today were just gonna focus on color correction. They are all very different - If you have time though I definitely suggest googling color management and color space and getting some facts! You may think you don't need all of them but they are definitely good to know ;)
Nerd Moment: What is Color Correction exactly? - Modifying the color balance of an image, usually to produce a more accurate representation of the colors in an image. Maybe you have a color cast in your image, your white balance is off, or maybe you just want a "pop!"
And yes it is different from color management, and color space. (see why I was twitching?)
Ok, it's best showed with an example and I am going to show you the way I do it - which is totally easy! There are several different ways to do it, but this is the way I like to!
Here is a before and after:
Completely different right!
Ok this is how you do it:
Step 1: Open your photo in photoshop - make any adjustment in RAW that you would like and then open.
Step 2: First your going to select your color sampler tool in your tools panel, and then make a THRESHOLD adjustment layer. Looks like your histogram right?! That's cause it is.
Step 3: In the threshold adjustment layer move the slider to the highlights. Everything but your highlights will turn black. And you want it to where you see the brightest highlights. So, go as far as you can go into the highlights before turning everything black. Then using your color sampler tool click on your highlight on the image. You will see a number 1 pop up, this is your first sample.
Step 4: Same thing but to the left for your darks/shadows. And this time everything will be white but your darks. Again go as far as you can without turning everything white. On my image I have lots of dark spots so I just moved the slider all the way to the left. Then again, using the color sampler tool sample the black area. Now you will see the number 2!
Step 5: Now simply delete the threshold adjustment layer. Your color samples will stay behind.
Step 6:Add a LEVELS adjustment layer and turn your CAPS LOCK on!
Step 7: Look at the red arrow in the example below. The eyedropper tool is for the highlights. Click the white eyedropper tool.
Step 8: Now that you have the caps lock on the eyedropper tool will look like a circle with a dot in it, just like your color sample! With the white eyedropper tool line up your circle with the circle with the number 1 beside it and click. That easy! See the difference already!
Step 9: Just like the highlights for the black we are going to select the black eyedropper tool. Again with the caps lock still on.
Step 10: Again, take your circle and line it up with the number 2 circle and click! You are all done and color corrected! :)
Step 11: Finish it up! Flatten your image and then with the color sampler tool selected go to the top menu bar and select clear. This will remove your samples so you don't have any numbers hanging around. Don't worry though if you forget they won't show up on the saved image. :)
You are all done!!
You can also correct the white balance in camera RAW using the white balance tool and just click on a neutral area. Meaning a true gray/white area. That's where it's difficult though and that's where you get into numbers and stuff that I get confused with.
But take a look at this:
Big difference! The one on the left is with the white balance only adjusted in camera RAW. And the one on the right is with no white balance adjustment only the threshold adjustment in this tutorial. The one on the right is the truest to the original image. We all know that a krispy kreme box is white, and I used a flash on that pic. So, to me its perfect!
And when you get the threshold color correction down pat, it takes seconds. Literally seconds.
I hope you guys enjoyed todays Tutorial Tuesday and of course any questions put them down there in the comments or send me and e-mail at Lovingmemoriesphotos@yahoo.com
Thanks everyone! Love y'all!
Amanda
