Lessons

Lesson Info

Fixing a Stubborn Color Cast

So if everybody's clear on levels, I'm gonna pop open another image and show you how to get rid of a really stubborn color cast that cannot be eradicated any other way, which is a useful thing. Sometimes on portrait of people, you can end up with a lot of our snapshots. Rather, you end up with a lot of red in the skin tones. Be really hard to get rid of. Sometimes if you're shooting under fluorescent lights, everything will end up looking to yellow. That's really hard to get rid of. And it turns out, if you're shooting at night in Portugal, everything's going to be yellow, too. So we're working with the cleverly named final Number 18 Stubborn color cast. For those were following along, go ahead and click open to pop open that image. So in this image we have a pretty nasty yellow cast. And let's say that you can't get rid of it with a levels adjustment or any other view do you may have learned in this workshop this is a surefire way to get rid of it. A yellow casts and blue cast and red...

classed are easy to get in camera and even easier to get rid of the elements. So we're gonna get rid of it by using a hue saturation adjustment layer. So we're going to click the half black, half white circle with the bottom of the layers panel, and we're gonna choose hue saturation. Now, a good way to remember that you're after hue saturation is to think about what you're doing. If you're trying to eradicate a sovereign color caste, then it might make sense to choose an adjustment layer that has something to do with color. And hue is another word for color or pure color. Rather. So if we choose hue, saturation elements is gonna pop open the adjustments panel automatically. And what you want to do is to choose the offending color from the pop up menu above those sliders. So we're going to give it a click. And in this case, yellows is our problem. Okay, evidently, all the lights and Portugal at night or yellow. But if your problem were reds, which is prevalent in snapshots of people, you can get a lot of red tunes that are hard to get rid of. You could choose reds instead are blues. Whatever problem you're color is so we're gonna choose yellows and you want to drag the saturation slider to the left to get rid of the cast. So we're gonna click and hold down, around spent in and then dragged to the lift rather slowly because you really don't want to de saturate past the point where the color, you know, becomes tolerable. You know, if you drag the slider all the way to the lift, you're going to take that color completely out of your image, which could be a unique way to get a partial color, partial black and white image. So what we've done is we've taken all of the yellows and we've drained the color from them. So if I don't want to create that kind of effect, I'm gonna come back to the middle, and your starting point is always zero. Okay, so I can just slowly drag the slider to the lift until I eradicate that particular cast, and I'm going to say about here looks pretty good to me again. I don't want to take all the color out of it. So much of it is yellow. I just want to get rid of that when you first see the image Oh my God, it's yellow. And of course, that works on any of these different colors. And it's important to remember that if you're saving your file is a Native Food Shop Elements document. You can always get back in and fine tune that setting after you printed or give it to a client. So the way you do that is, you choose the file menu the very top of your screen, and then you choose save as. And that's gonna bring up a dialog box. That asks if you are using elements database component, which is called the Organizer, and we're not. I'm not a fan of the organizer, so I'm gonna go ahead and click OK to dismiss this dialog box and then in the Save as dialog box, you want to make sure that you choose Photoshopped from the format Minion that's going to save the file as a native Photoshopped Elements document, and it carries the file extension of PSD or stands for photo shop document. Okay, so exact same extension you get from the expensive version Photoshopped. But in doing this, Photoshopped Elements is gonna remember all of your layers and therefore all of the adjustments you've made with those layers, you can always get back to them and fine tune them if you need to. You, if we were to save this file is a J peg. Excuse me. Elements would squash all those layers and we'd never be able to get back to them. We have to start over. Okay, So the only file format that supports layers is Photoshopped format. So when you start editing, the minute I make another layer is when I do this, I choose file save as and I make sure I've got Photoshopped chosen from the format. Poppet. Minion that way. And when I'm choosing save later on, I'm saving that PSD file. I'm not overriding my original J pig because even if you don't change the name of it and you just give it a different extension by choosing something else from this file format menu, the name changes. So you're not overriding the original, okay? And there is no quality loss with the foot of shot file format, so that's a good argument for always saving your editing file as a native photoshopped file. So go ahead and click Cancel. So let's say that we had closed this image and saved it is a PSD. And then we printed it and we wanted to come back in and fine tune the edit suite has made. How do you get back to all those sliders? It's really simple. You simply double click that layers thumbnail. And no matter if the adjustments panel was open or closed or wherever, Once you double click that layer, thumbnail that edit will come right back up. Now you'll notice right here that everything is set to zero. So where is your edit that you just made? Well, look at what the pop up menu says. It's still set to master, and you know that the change you made a moment ago was in the Yellow Channel. And so if we choose the Yellow Channel, then we will see that at it. So we're gonna go ahead and click this pop up menu cheese, yellows, and sure enough, there's the change that we made. So if we took out too much yellow, we could simply drag the saturation slider back to the right to reintroduce a little bit of that yellow that was there Any time you're working with adjustment lawyers like this, that's the way to reopen. The adjustment itself is to simply double click the layer thumbnail of that layer, and this will pop open with all of its inherent settings automatically so you can see the change that you may before and continue to fine tune it or throw the Dagon layer away and start over. Any questions on that part? Sorry quick question from Studio 12 Smiles. Lisa mentions not using the organizer tool. What do you use for your database? Images use light room. Indeed, I use Light Room is like a database with the image editor piled on top, much like I photo is a database with an image editor piled on top. Well, the organizer is is Elements database, and I'm not really fan of it. It's been around the window side for a long time. Mac folks got the organizer in this version and version nine, so I'm just not accustomed to using it. But I import my pictures either using light rumor I photo when I was writing, I photo the missing manual on imported them with I photo religiously, but I use light green more often than not, um, Lisa warned. Ready had asked If you want to keep your editing files of PST but you also need a J peg. How would you do that? Well, if you are when you open your image from your digital camera, you're probably working with a J pig. Even if it was a robber the time it hits elements, it's now J pig. Okay, so and that's gonna have some kind of name. It could be DSC underscore nine or nine or 1 to 5. You know, that kind of thing. Or you could have given it a special name when you imported it. So when I import my pictures, I import them into a folder that lets me know what that event waas. So when I get back home, these pictures will go into a folder cleverly named Seattle. And inside of that folder I will have another folder called In Process. And that's just my own naming scheme that it could be editing files for editing or anything you want that let you know. That's where the files that you're messing with, they're gonna live. So I have that folder inside the Seattle folder and that's where I save my PS D's. But the so I've always got that original Jay paid to go back to you if I need Teoh for any reason. And I've also got that PSD file to go in and find Team the edits. And if I need to export JPEG from the PSD file, that's very simple. So let's say that we like the look of this image now say it's is correct is we're going to get it and we're gonna email. It's somebody you're posting on the website or what have you? We could choose file either save as or safer Web was safer with you. Get a preview of what the J. Peg is gonna look like, and we talked a little bit about it yesterday. J. Peg is a lossy format. It was a little bit of fine detail gets tossed out because JP compresses the final to make it smaller inside so that it's more easily transferred via email and onto the Web. Things like that, well, you can control the level of compression in this safer with dialogue box here in the reason I like it is cause you get some nice big previous. So you see the original up next to the J pig and you can choose your file format. Using this little poppet menu over here on the right can change it to J. Peg. And then once you do that, you get a pop up many of different quality settings. That's the level of compression, and you simply choose one, and you can see the difference between the J. Peg and the original that you're working with. And elements also shows you the file size of what you would get should you choose to go with that level of compression. So we've got 168 K vs three megabytes, so one of them would be emailing Will one of them, he ought not email such a large file. So that's the way I get my J pegs from my master editing file. But she always wanna have that PSD That's your master editing files. You can always go back to that and finding what you've done, and if you use the kind of work flow that I do, where I'm importing into a folder with the name of the place I was, and then inside of that folder. I've got a folder full of files in progress. You never gonna have to worry about overriding one one to the other. And you'll always be able to get to whichever one you need. You know, maybe you've crop this image. You decided you want to get back to the original UN cropped version. And that would be easy way to do that. Yes. See anything that actually said because it's chosen safer Web is supposed to save as you didn't have to choose 72 dp I anywhere on that screen. It automatically does that, um, kind of changing resolution. Right. Okay. Now you cannot change resolution within the safer with dialogue box. You can only change the image size. So pixel dimensions. Yeah. So image resolution really only comes into play when you're sending an image to print. And that's something that we way Talked about it yesterday. Quite in depth. Image resolution is the measurement that controls how big your pixels are. How small the orcs pixels can be honking big or they could be microscopic. If they're microscopic, you cannot see them. If they're honking big, your image looks like it was made from Legos, OK, Probably not a good thing. Even Resolution really only comes into play when you're printing the image. So if you're just doing things for email or you're exporting a pictures of J. Peg to save it on a website, you don't have to worry about resolution at all. It doesn't even come into play. Well, you need to worry about it's what size. You want that picture to be in pixels because resolution again determines how bigger, small those pixels are. Okay, right. I'm just used to knowing that for for web that it's usually 72 DPR for viewing, cause that's you're not gonna see anything right. But you don't even have to worry about it. Because if your image is only gonna live on screen, you can forget about resolution completely. All you're worried about is pixels by width and height. That's it. So if we really were gonna email this image, we could choose file safer with, and if we wanted to resize it to make it physically smaller, so it would transfer faster. We could change the size of the image right here. So the good size for email, you know, I would never I would never email a photo that was above 800 by 600 pixels just cause that that's massive. That's gonna fill up if they've got images turned on in their email client that's gonna fill up the whole bottom half of the email client. So I could write here, say, 800 by 600 Um, or if you don't know the actual dimensions, you want your picture to be used to know that it's honking big, and you need to make it small for email. Then you could change the percent of the size here. You could say, OK, I want, you know, 50% of its original size. But when you're working for the Web or anything, that's on screen, that's why there's no resolution measurement anywhere in here, because it absolutely does not matter. I mean, it does not matter. Not one hill of beans so we could say apply. And now our image has changed size and we can see, um, the different file size that it would be. Should we have chosen to do that? Okay. Thank you. Any other questions on that? Yep. A question from Jim D 206 is when you save PST PST file from elements. If you pass it on to a full photo shop user, can they continue to use it? Absolutely. And that's the really great thing. Is so many of these techniques. And in fact, every single technique we've done today say for the black and white converter filter and the the effects panel. When we double clips to get the sepia, every single thing I've showed you is identical in the big version of photo shop. So that means that all these adjustment layers are exactly the same. They work the same way you access is in the same way, and you will absolutely see them. If you took this file and opened it up in photo shop CS Fire or if you created a final info shop, CS five, and opened it up in elements, you would see all of those adjustment layers. Now, if you've created an adjustment layer over in photo shop, it doesn't exist in elements. You'll still see it. You won't be able to edit it, but everyone that I've showed you today lives in both programs