Basic Color Correction in Photoshop

For the time being, we will only apply primary color correction to our photos, which means that the whole photo is affected with editing. In this tutorial I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop CS4 but the described features can be found in the earlier versions of the software, as well as in any other decent photo-editing application. And an important tip before we begin: make sure that you apply all the adjustments on a separate adjustment layer so that you can easily change or discard any adjustment that you have made.

The Original Photo

So, the photo that we’ll be adjusting throughout this tutorial looks like this:

A Monochromatic Look

A monochromatic image is the term that refers to images that consist of the shades of only one color or hue. Images that consist only of shades of grey are called grayscale or black-and-white images. So, the first thing that we need to do is make our image black-and-white by applying the Black & white adjustment layer like this:

Next, apply the Hue & Saturation Adjustment Layer and check the Colorize box. For my monochromatic photo below, I set the Hue slider to 295. You can set this slider according to your needs. Make sure you do not exaggerate with the colors, but it’s always a nice idea to make your colors pop! Voila!

The Sepia Look

If you want to apply the Sepia look to your photo you’ll need to do exactly the same steps as for the monochromatic image and instead of setting the Hue to 295 or whatever, you’ll need to set it somewhere around 35. After you’ve done that, you can adjust the color brightness of your image by tuning the sliders in your Black & White adjustment layer. However, to perfect the Sepia tone, adjusting only in the Black & white adjustment layer is not enough. You might want to ad the Curves layer and really fine-tune the contrast of your Sepia image:

Silver Tint

In actual film producing, this technique is used to bypass the bleaching process. The image is given a kind of a silver tint and it looks like the original image was blended with its own black-and-white clone. That is precisely what we’re going to do!

You will notice that the image now has a lot of contrast, which is the characteristic of all bleach-bypassed images. You can now apply the Curves adjustment layer to your photo and adjust the contrast curve.

Once again we start by adding the Black & White adjustment layer to our image. As we mentioned it just now, we need to blend the black-and-white “clone” with the original, so we need to change the blending mode of the “clone” from Normal to Overlay.

Bear in mind that the contrast adjustments should be as slight as possible in order not to overexpose or underexpose any parts of the already high-contrast image. See the screenshot to get the idea of what I did with my contrast curve. And the photo turned out like this:

A Fashionable Photo

Since this is the technique often used in fashion photography, it implies adjusting the colors of a photo that contains skin colors. So you must be careful not to make the skin of the people in your photo green or magenta, etc. Having in mind the examples of how the Curves adjustment works, you might experiment with your photos depending on the general tone of your images.

First of all, we need to apply the Curves adjustment layer on our photo. From the dropdown menu, switch from RGB to blue. What we want to do is increase the blue in the shadows. We manage this by moving the lower end of the diagonal line upward. Then we might want to decrease the blue in the highlights by moving the upper end of the curve downward – increasing the yellow in the highlights to stay true to the skin tones in the picture. Then you might need to take out the purplish tone that the image has just got. You can do this by raising the shadows in the green channel.

You can now go back to adjusting the blue channel in order to enhance the skin tone of the people in your photo. When you do that, go to the RGB or the master channel adjustment in the Curve adjustment layer and correct the contrast and brightness of your image. Usually, you would have to lower the shadows a bit.
In order to avoid getting your image flooded with color, you might need to add the Hue & Saturation adjustment layer to your photo and drop saturation to anything between -8 and -15.

Bronze

In this method, the colors opposite the bronze should stand out and the lights and darks should get a new bronze look. This method is similar to Sepia but it is not monochromatic, since the mentioned colors are clearly visible.

First, you’ll need to apply the Photo Filter adjustment layer to your photo and select Sepia from the filter color menu. Set the density between 90 to 100% and make sure to check the Preserve luminosity checkbox. After that, add the Hue & Saturation adjustment layer and Desaturate the photo anywhere between -10 and -50 Saturation. Then, add the Curves adjustment layer and make a suitable contrast curve. This style usually looks good with extra contrast.

A nice little thing to do now would be to add a little diffusion to your image. You can do this by duplicating your Background layer (Ctrl+J) and make sure to keep it under the adjustment layers. Apply Gaussian blur to the duplicated layer and change the blending mode to Overlay. The proper amount of Gaussian blur in this case, as well as probably in most of the other cases, is 2.5 pixels.

To prevent the image from getting too soft, set the Fill of the blurred image anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. You might need to adjust the contrast a little, which you’ll probably want to do with your Curves adjustment layer. There you go!

Conclusion

I feel obliged to mention that the described methods are not the only way of achieving these results. Every photographer uses his or her own methods and adjustments.
You should also bear in mind that different photos will react differently to these adjustments so feel free to experiment and adjust the mentioned figures and values according to your own preferences.

A tutorial by Bonifacio Cruz