Photoshop
Colour and Tonal Adjustments
Overview
An important skill when working with photographic images is the ability to adjust the colour or brightness within an image. In this section we will take a look at the available adjustment tools in Photoshop. Some of these can be used to create special effects.
Here is a summary of the topics in this module:
- (1) Adjustment Layers
- Adjustment layers give you the flexibility to try out colour and tonal adjustments on an image without changing the image itself.
- (2) The Histogram
- Before you correct the colour and tonal values in an image, you need to analyze the image's tonal range. We'll discuss what that means and introduce you to the Histogram: a tool that will help you evaluate your images.
- (3) Levels
- The Levels adjustment lets you expand and improve the tonal range of an image with great accuracy.
- (4) Curves
- A Curves adjustment allows even greater control over an image's tonal values than Levels.
- (5) Other Tonal Adjustments
- The remaining commands for adjusting an image's tonal range are Auto Contrast, Equalize, and Brightness/Contrast.
- (6) Colour Wheel
- An understanding of the colour wheel will be valuable when it comes to making colour corrections so we'll present a little colour theory in this lecture.
- (7) Colour Sampler Tool
- In this lecture we introduce you to the last tool in the Toolbox: the Colour Sampler. This can be used to sample colours in an image, like the Eyedropper tool, but its values can be stored in the Info panel for future reference. It's quite helpful when adjusting an image's colours.
- (8) Colour Balance
- The Colour Balance dialog is relatively straightforward to use and is effective in correcting colour imbalances. We'll work through a practice exercise to correct a waterfall image. We'll also resurrect our cat image one more time to fix up the tint problem with the tips of its fur, as promised. You'll get some insight into doing spot touch-ups with the painting tools.
- (9) Other Colour Adjustment Options
- There are a number of other colour adjustment options available. Some are more selective than Colour Balance (and more complex to use), some have limited effectiveness, and others are geared more towards special effects. An overview of the Desaturate, Hue/Saturation, Selective Colour, Replace Colour, Variations, Channel Mixer, and Auto Colour commands will be presented in this lecture.
- (A) Creative Image Adjustments
- This lecture covers the remaining adjustment commands: Invert, Threshold, Posterize, and Gradient Map. These are used to create special effects rather than as tonal or colour correction tools because the resulting effects are extreme.
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