It’s no surprise that color correcting your digital images can be difficult. Trying to decide what needs to be adjusted in your image is almost as confusing as figuring out which tool you’ll need to fix it. There are automatic color fixes in many different image-editing programs, but these “one-size-fits-all” adjustments often don’t meet your needs. Photoshop has one of the most intuitive and efficient tools for making color corrections to your images. The Variations command is a quick way to adjust your images according to your own tastes, in a visual format that makes it easy to make the right choices. By using this image-editing tool, you’ll be able to see what doesn’t look quite right in your image and correct it, as we did in Figure A.
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While the Hue/Saturation command’s main purpose is to help you with color correction, it also allows you to combine grayscale imagery with color imagery in Photoshop. This technique is great for creating dramatic images with dominant focal points, similar to that shown in Figure A, where we desaturated a color image everywhere but in the one area we wanted to accent with color. We’ll show you how to create this effect quickly and easily using the Hue/Saturation command.
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No matter how good your digital camera or scanner is, you can improve or enhance nearly every image by adjusting its color balance. While Photoshop is known for reality-bending editing tools, color correction is probably the most common day-to-day task for which it’s used. The importance of color balance is clearly shown by the number of tools Photoshop has for manipulating it. While many of these seem to be different methods for accomplishing the same goal, the Curves command stands out as the most versatile.
Why use Curves instead of Levels?
Photoshop has a variety of color-correction tools, but the Levels and Curves commands are most precise. You can achieve good results with either tool, but they perform the same task in different ways.
The Levels dialog box displays a graphic, known as a histogram, of the pixels in an image or color channel. Three sliders below the histogram allow you to adjust the highlights, midtones, and shadows. This intuitive dialog box is easy to learn, but its design limits you to just three control points.
The Curves dialog box is a bit more complex, but it’s also much more precise. By plotting points on a line graph representing pixel brightness or ink density, you can modify up to 16 variables per color channel. You’ll probably never need that much power, but having it under the hood gives the Curves command more control over the tonal range of an image than other color-correction tools in Photoshop.
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