Hello everyone! This is Chad West a.k.a. still descending on You Tube the mio and vio. This is the fifth video on my Photoshop CS3 tutorial series. And this week I have two mini tutorials for you. Before I get started though I have to make one thing clear, that is that these videos are meant for beginners only. I’ve received a few comments from viewers wondering why my videos are so simplistic, and why I do things the way I do, and the answer is because these videos are meant for beginners only. Clear enough? Okay.
The first of the two mini tutorials is a color correction tutorial. I’m rehashing color correction because I received a comment on You Tube under my first color correction video saying that the method of color correction I chose to show you was not the best way to be color correcting a photo, and that there are other more precise methods available. And this viewer was absolutely right. The reason why I chose to show you the quick and dirty method in the first video was because when you’re editing a smaller, low resolution files to be published to the internet, it’s kind of overkill to be editing finer details that you can’t really see in the picture to begin with. Color correction is the same way. However, when you’re going to be editing a larger high resolution file for print or for presentation to a client, you’re going to need to pay more attention to the finer details, and you’re going to need to use more precise method of color correction.
Here is a higher resolution version of a photo I had used in previous tutorials. This is un-retouched RAW as it came out of the camera at 8x12 at 300 dpi. So, to get started with the first method of color correction, I am going to hit control J to duplicate my background copy. And I’m going to, under the filter menu, select blur and then average. And this gives us an approximation of the color cast present in our photo, which in this case is a brownish-red kind of color cast. So, in order to correct this color cast, I’m going to need to invert this layer, so Photoshop can tell me which color I need to add to eliminate this brown-red color cast.
So I’m going to do this by hitting control I on the keyboard. And now we see I have a blue kind of color. So, this is where the precision of this method comes in, this is Photoshop telling me which color I need to use to eliminate my color cast. I’m going to blend this in by selecting overlay as my blending mode, change from normal to overlay. And when I do so, we see that I now have a darker kind of blue cast to my photo. It’s actually going kind of overkill and made my image a little bit too blue. So, in order to compensate for that, this is where the in-precision comes in. I’m going to need to adjust my opacity slider down from 100 to something I see as more visually appealing. Again, I’m kind of eye balling it. And anything in the 25-35% range would probably suffice. I’m going to settle on 30%. And now in order to examine my changes, I’m going to hide the top layer, and we can see how much of that red-orange color I brought back in. And it’s as simple as that, that’s the first method of doing color correction.
The second method is similar, so we’re going to start by again, creating a duplicate, and averaging it. This time thought I am not going to invert. I’m simply going to choose my standard eye dropper tool by pressing I on the keyboard. I’m going to sample this color, so with that color now sampled, I’m going to hide the top layer, and focus on my background copy. I’m now going to add in a levels adjustment layer which is accessible via the half black, half white circle at the bottom of my layers palette. So, choose the levels, and now at the bottom right hand corner of this levels dialogue box here, you see three eyedroppers, the first is the set black point eyedropper, the second is the set gray point eyedropper, and the third is the set white point eyedropper. Now these are the tools that we can actually use to perform some more advanced color corrections. But for our tutorial here, we’re only going to use the middle one, which is the gray point eyedropper. So if that tool selected, I’m now going to go over to my one column tool bar here and sample that kind of red-brown color that we used to get with our standard eye dropper tool. So when we sample it we see that our color now changes to a bluish-green color kind of cast, so accept those changes by pressing okay.
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