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Simple Color Correction in Photoshop using Curves

Lesson 6 from: From Lightroom to Photoshop: The Professional's Workflow

Jason Hoppe

Simple Color Correction in Photoshop using Curves

Lesson 6 from: From Lightroom to Photoshop: The Professional's Workflow

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

6. Simple Color Correction in Photoshop using Curves

Lesson Info

Simple Color Correction in Photoshop using Curves

other things that we can do with files as well. Especially when we come in Thio going in and working with color If I want to get in and get much more specific with color here, and I want to be able to work with color other than just basic brightness and contrast things. So I'm gonna open this up in camera raw here and just kind of see a little bit of work. Um, I got some great colors in here, too. I may want to go in and just kind of see where my shadows are. Maybe get a little bit more shadow in there. It's just my blacks go in, kind of bring out some of the shadows, their message, the highlights Knocked those down work with this. I can do a little bit of contrast in here, too. And then I'm gonna open this up in photo shop with this. I'd love to be able to go in here and saturate some of these colors a little bit more. So in order to do this doing just a simple levels or curves on my image isn't going to give me what I want. I want to be able to go in and target the specific colors, b...

ut I don't want to go in and put a selection around every single thing in order to make it look really good and vibrant. I'd like to just go in and say, Okay, here it is and I want to target specific colors without having to physically go in and select them. So a great color adjustment that works really nice is going in and using selective color, selective color allows you to very quickly and easily target a specific color range in the image and adjust it without having to have you go in and specifically draw around those areas. So when I do my selective color, I go into my selective color properties. I've got all these different things that I can select from my menu. I can target the reds, the yellows, green sans blues, magenta is whites, neutrals in black and then adjust each one of those based on that color range in the image. So if I was going to go in and target the yellows here, I could go ahead and I could put more scion into the yellows, and you can see that it will go ahead and kind of cool them down. I could warm them up and there's a fair amount of Scion in the background, too, so we could warm it up, kind of changing the time of day a little bit. Cool it down, make it look like it's earlier in the morning, later in the afternoon and is targeting the yellows throughout the entire image. If I do relative or absolute absolutes gonna give me a much broader adjustment range. So when I do that, it's going to change it much more drastically. So if I want a target specific color range here, I can warm them up. I can cool them down little bit. I could make them more yellow. Could take the yellow out kind of make a little more faded as well. And so what? So there's my greens. I can really green up everything. I could kind of take the Scion out, make a little more vintage. I can cool it down by taking the magenta out, adding magenta right there as well and working with each one of these specific colors. Simple and straightforward. And if I ever need to edit the's at any point. Once I close out of my properties here, I can turn that on and off, double click on the thumbnail adjustment and be able to get back to all of my adjustments there at any time. Love. It looks great. That's levels. Mattachine there showed you levels. This is selective color. Show you a couple more here. That can work. Really good. Um, just grab an image that may work nicely. Something that's gonna be halfway decent here. That one's a nice one. These were up in Ah, Alaska at some museum, so And go in, take out my shadows a little bit. Open those up right there. Open that image. And I'm just gonna do some just some nice contrast overall. A little bit more fun with this one. We've done levels levels are very simple curves or something a little bit more complex. We're gonna show you some of the fun stuff with curves here, So click on my half moon, click on my curves adjustment layer I'm going to go in and I'm gonna want to adjust this image overall, Gonna give a little bit of contrast can slide my shadow slider in two or my hissed A gram begins to build, and now I'd like to go in And I'd like to target the sky separately in the grass and things like that and just go in and kind of adjust this overall, Not quite sure where I want to go with us, maybe warm it up a little bit. So one of the nice things with curves that I can use as I can go in. And I can target the specific channel here so I could target my reds, my greens and my blues. And if you're not really savvy about color adjustment curves is kind of one of those middle grounds that allows you to do a lot of things to the image with my curves. I've selected my blue channel here, and I'd like to kind of give a little bit more blue may be warming up, Cool it down a little bit, but I don't know what to do with this whole thing right here. Well, click on your little finger. Scrubby right there. Okay. There's your finger. Scrubby. We're in our blue channel here. I'm gonna take my finger. Scrubby. Come over onto my document Here. Looks like a little eyedropper, and all I want to do was increase the blue or take the blue out. So with my finger scrubby, come over to the blue here and click. See it turns in little finger scrubby. I could go ahead and add more blue or I can take more blew out overall. Pretty simple, huh? Just click and drag right on the image. A little goes a long way so I can add a little bit more blue, and it's going to add more blue overall to the image. Obviously born the predominantly blue areas, I can take it out, which is going to reveal more yellow drag that up a little bit more blue right there. It's like, OK, wolf, it works with blue. Let's try the reds and greens, so I'm gonna go to my Red Channel. Got a lot of iron in here, So if I click on any one of these areas here, I can go and I can drag that up and it's going to add a little bit more red overall to it. I can drag it down. It's going to go ahead and reveal a little bit more green again just a little bit of movement can allow me to go in and color shift that pretty quick going to my greens Here, grab my grass. Bumped that up a little bit more. Drag that down. There we go. Got a question here from the audience. Do you have to be in the specific color channel, or can you do that with the RGB Channel Open and just hit that color? In this case, if I want to target that specific color range, I need to be in that channel. I can still use the finger scrubby in the Composite Channel here. If I do that, then it's gonna just it overall. So if I'm in the Composite Channel and use the finger scrubby and I go in here, it's going to go ahead and is going to lighten and darken the image because it's going to be doing all the channels at the exact same rate. So there was the color adjustment overall, didn't do a whole lot to it, but went ahead and gave little bit more contrast here. A couple of the things that people like to dio make a little bit more vibrant. How do you take the colors and just make them more vibrant. Overall, just a general vibrancy increase. What? We have a color adjustment for that under the half moon. We've got vibrance and we can go in and we can make the whole thing a whole lot more vibrant. Overall. Ramped out, all up. Get those really saturated colors. Makes it look really nice. Pretty simple. It's just a vibrant adjustment layer right there. So there's the original file right there. Where is the one done up? A little bit more vibrance. Totally sweet. Works great on all the images. No matter what it is that you dio a quick little vibrance on any image is going to go and just give it a little bit more bump right there. You see the difference right? There Just kind of does that. And there's the little bit more saturation. This is one of these things that people tend to overdo because it looks so good. It's kind of like chocolate or bacon, you know, just a little bit more. It's gonna work, but totally adjustable. And then you can go back in and dial that in or out to get that right where you want it to be. So those are some of the very basic color adjustments that we can do with our images there. We've got levels, we've got curves. We've got vibrance and selective color just really basic color adjustment overall on the image.

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