Tonal & Color Correction
Tonal correction to the blacks-whites-grays usually comes before color correction but there are ways to do them simultaneously.
Use Camera Raw Plugin
- You can also set up Photoshop to open .JPEG files in the Camera Raw plugin, which provides cropping, red-eye control, detailed tonal & color correction, sharpening, and conversion to black-and-white within one operation.
- Camera Raw Plugin includes how to set up Photoshop for opening JPEG's in Camera raw
- Camera Raw adjustments & what they do
When you open an image in Photoshop, this is the default workspace with the toolbar set to one column on the left
- A. Document window holding file you are editing
- B. Tool Options bar allows you to configure the tool selected in toolbar
- C. Dock of panels collapsed as icons
- History panel
- Actions panel
- Tool Presets panel
- Brushes Panel
- Clone source panel
- Character panel
- Paragraph panel
- Layer Comps
- D. Navigation /Histogram /Info panel dock
- Color / Swatches / Styles panel dock
- E. Layers / Channels / Paths dock
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1. Tools panel on the left
- 2. Move tool
- 3. Marquee selection tools
- 4. Lasso / polygonal lasso / magnetic lasso tools
- 5. Quick Selection / Magic wand tools
- 6. Crop tool
- 7. Slice / slice select tools
- 8. Spot healing brush / Healing Brush / Patch / Red Eye tools
- 9. Brush / Pencil / Color Replacement tools
- 10. Clone stamp / Pattern stamp tools
- 11. History Brush / Art History Brush tools
- 12. Eraser / Background Eraser / Magic Eraser tools
- 13. Gradient / paint bucket tools
- 14. Blur / Sharpen / Smudge tools
- 15. Dodge / Burn / Sponge tools
- 16. Pen / Free-form pen / Add Anchor point / Delete Anchor Point / Convert point tools
- 17. Horizontal Type / Vertical Type / Horizontal Type Mask / Vertical Type Mask tools
- 18. Path Selection / Direct Selection tools
- 19. Rectangle / Rounded Rectangle / Ellipse / Polygon / Line / Custom Shape tools
- 20. Notes / Audio Annotation tools
- 21. Eyedropper / Color Sampler / Ruler / Count Tools
- 22. Hand tool
- 23. zoom tool
- 24. toggle foreground / background colors
- 25. Foreground / background color pickers
- 26. Quickmask / edit in standard tools
- 27. background choices
Use Photoshop tools
Before you start correcting anything, figure out what you want to emphasize in the image and concentrate on that part of the image. For example if the image is a portrait, you might want to make sure the face, particularly the eyes, are particularly visible.
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Auto Adjustments In the Image>Adjustments> Pop-up menu:
There are 3 automatic adjustments that sometimes work (and if you are processing your vacation photos, are worth trying).
- Auto Levels works with each color channel & changes the lightest color to white and the darkest color to black. The grays get stretched out between. It may correct color casts or introduce ones that did not exist.
- Auto Contrast - adjusts composite image. The lightest tone in each channel becomes white, and the darkest tone black. Auto Contrast preserves the color balance and does not introduce a color cast.
- Auto Color - neutralizes image highlights, midtones and shadows, and restores blance to both brightness values and colors.
If these auto adjustments do NOT work, there are other adjustments methods that give you more control.
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You can make tonal and color adjustments to the image in a layer OR you can set up a separate adjustment layer and make the color adjustments in that layer. The advantages of an adjustment layer are:
- Tonal corrections are applied to the original image data at once, which reduces undesirable color shifts and banding (posterization) that can occur if you make multiple changes to the image in its own layer.
- You can isolate each tonal correction
- You can modify or delete any that don't work without changing the image
- Changes in an adjustment layer affect all the layers below it.
- You can move adjustment layers up or down the layer stack
- You can change the opacity of a layer
create adjustment layers
- Open the Layers palette (Windows>Layers or hit <F7> function key)
- Right click on the background layer, and select Duplicate Layer on the popup
- Click the New Fill/Adjustment Layer symbol at the bottom of the layers palette that looks like a yin-yang symbol
- OR click Layer>New Adjustment Layer and then choose the type of adjustment layer on the popup menu.
- Always click on the background copy layer to make an adjustment or to sharpen the image, because adjustment layers do not contain any pixels.
OR, if you are using an older version of Photoshop and there are no adjustment layer settings available for a color corrrection, you can create a duplicate layer, name it according to the type of color adjustment, select it and apply the color adjustment using the menu bar
To save the layer data in an image, you need to save it as a PSD (Photoshop) file
- Photoshop actually saves each layer as a separate document, which greatly increases the size of the PSD file
- However, the PSD version lets you revise the image later, if necessary. Once you flatten the layers and compress the image, it's very hard to take it apart again. Saving the PSD version can save you a lot of rework.
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Histograms
View the histogram for an image in the histogram palette in Photoshop. It is a bar graph depicting the number of pixels in each of the 256 brightness values in the image.
Black is at the left, white at the right. The height of each bar tells the relative distribution of darks and lights in the image.
The image below has very few pixels in the light range, and most pixels in the mid-tonal range. You can lighten this image up, but it would lose it's wintry quality.
The next image has very many light and very many dark pixels but few in the mid-tonal range. It has the same effect as taking a portrait of a person in front of a window with light coming in.
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You can expand the histogram palette (click the little right arrow in the upper right corner of the palette) and see a histogram for each color channel. Click Show Channels in Color to see each color channel histogram in its own color.
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