Give Me Three Minutes and I will Give You the Secrete of Color Correction Techniques
In this article we will speak about some techniques of color correction. We have a gloomy landscape photo and we will try to brighten it up. To achieve our aim we will increase contrast and color saturation using adjustment layers in Photoshop.
Look at the image below. It was taken at cloudy weather, the light is defused and bluish, that is why the photo is low contrast with faded colors. Let’s see what we can do with it.
We will use adjustment layers, as this tool allows to control all what we do and come back to original settings at any phase of our work. You can achieve the same results using Adjustment or History Brush tool, but they do not give the same control. The only disadvantage of adjustment layers is that you will need a powerful computer with large memory, especially if you work with a big image.
1. Our first goal is to make dark areas of an image (branches, bushes, trees in the background) brighter and increase contrast. Click on “create new fill or adjustment layers” in Layers field and choose Levels. Or you can just press Ctrl+L. The Levels Window opened up. 
The slider on the left adjusts shadows or the dark tones in the image, while the slider on the right adjusts the light tones, the middle slider adjusts the mid tones. Try to move these sliders and see how the image will change. Look at the image below, it looks brighter now, but as a result of our manipulation, the sky became absolutely white, the clouds disappeared.
2. Choose the tool Brush, black color and start paint over those areas, which became too white after Levels adjustments. It is advisable to use a 30-60% brush to get soft results. Look, the clouds came back.
3. Now let’s get rid of blue tones in the foreground and make the green color brighter. Choose selective color from create new fill or adjustment layers list. This tool may seem complicated at first sight, but once you understand how it works, you can get astonishing results with it. This tool is indispensable, when you need to get rid of any tone (blue in our case).
Choose Absolute method, move the slider yellow to 20%. In Greens set cyan +15%, yellow +23%, black -15%. By adding blue and yellow, and taking away black, we will get brighter green.
Now let’s make Neutrals warmer by adding yellow and taking away blue and purple: Cyan - 5%, Magenta -3%, Yellow +3%.
4. Now let’s work with the sky. Create a new layer Curves. A curve shows the contrast level of a photograph. Now let’s correct the curves as you see on the picture.
5. Now let’s increase color saturation. Create a new layer Hue/Saturation. Set Hue to -6, Saturation +24. If you choose Master in Edit list, you will work with all colors. 6. In the end, we will add a dramatic effect. Click on Create a new layer in Layers. Choose the purple color, the tool Gradient, from the chosen color to transparency. Now fill the sky of an image with gradient. Change from normal to multiply in Layers. Change opacity to 30%.
That’s it, our image is ready. Enjoy the result.
Technorati Tags: Photoshop tutorials, photography tips, color correction, photo manipulation, photo editing
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