Colors play a major role in our lives and so do they in the digital technology. Photoshop is wonder software in which you can take complete control over the colors and create something really exceptional out of dull images. Adjusting colors, tones, hues and removing color casts are few things that are done outstandingly in Photoshop.
Working with Colors
It might seem a little challenging to work with so many color options but once you get a grasp of it, nothing is more interesting than playing with colors for different images. While working with colors, always create a duplicate layer or else the original image will never be retained. Color options and adjustments are used to give the neutral effect to the images where you can create any atmosphere. To convey mood, represent atmosphere or show emotions, colors are the best way.
Rich images are an epitome of quality so let me walk you through the color choices in Photoshop.
Curves
Curves are the most important tool in Photoshop that gives you control over the image color. You can make the changes by modifying the RGB channels. To adjust the brightness and contrast of an image, curves come in handy. Every image has three channels like red, green and blue which you can work on individually with the curves.
To work with curves, here are the steps:
- Open any image in Photoshop
- Go to Image>Adjustments>Curves and a dialog box will appear where you can see the RGB channel. From the drop down, select the channel which you want to work on. Next, click on the curve and slide it up if you want to increase the channel color input and vice versa.
- While adjusting the RGB colors, the opposite colors i.e. CMYK also get manipulated.
This is all about how to work with curves on an image. For your information, if you decrease the amount of red color, the cyan color gets increased automatically. Also, the curves are perfect to correct the colors if an image has dull or bad colors.
Check out Hue and Saturation
To boost the colors, hue and saturation controls in the image adjustment are perfect. Like for an example, you have an image of grass in which there is more yellow color due to some camera setting. Now to correct the color and make the grass look green, it would be great to boost the yellow color towards the green one. For that, simply go to the Image and choose Hue/Saturation to locate the yellow color in the drop down under Master. If you don’t find the right location, pick the color using eye dropper tool.
Auto Color
Apart from both the above techniques, Auto color works out pretty well. It adjusts the color of an image automatically and you don’t have to do anything yourself. Just open the image, go to Image>Auto Color and Photoshop will do the necessary color corrections.
NOTE: Work on the duplicate layer so as not to lose the original image.
