Photo Retouching - Colour
With Photoshop Elements
Here I thought I'd go through my thought process when retouching an image for colour. So here I'm not talking about cloning out things or banging out dents in people's faces, but just plain colour adjustment. We'll need an example shot:
Here's the example shot just as it came from the camera. Matrix metering, no compensation. Not too terribly hideous to begin with, but underexposed and lacking a bit of contrast. The first thing I always do to an image is just bring it up and see what auto-contrast [Enhance | Auto Contrast] and auto-levels [Enhance | Auto Levels] do to it. Often in a shot with low contrast (snow scene, for instance) auto-anything just screws it up royally, but in a shot like this with lots of mid-tones it should work well. So I ran auto-contrast then auto-levels and this is what I got:
Quite an improvement already, but not quite as dramatic as I might like. I'd particularly like to darken the sky to enrich the colours, but I don't want to darken the trees any more. How do you do that? Magic. Magic wand, that is. You can select the magic wand from the toolbar, or just press "W" to select it. Since there are no blue/white colours in the trees I was able to set the magic wand for a high tolerance - 50 - so with two single clicks I was able to select the whole sky. I made sure that the "Contiguous" box in the tool info bar was *not* selected, so that the magic wand would select the bits of sky peering through the gaps in the trees, not just the main part of the sky. So far so good. Once you have the sky selected you can run a levels adjustment that will only affect the selected object - in this case, the sky - and the settings for the rest of the image (the trees, in this case) won't change. Great stuff. So by selecting [Enhance | Adjust Brightness/Contrast | Levels] and raising the gray-point a bit I was able to darken the sky to enrich it. Don't run auto-levels on just the sky, though, as there isn't enough contrast... it will end up looking freakish. You can give it a whirl, for giggles, but in the end you'll want to just use the manual levels adjustment to increase the gray-point of the sky by a few percent to richen the colour of the sky. Once that's done I just inverted the selection [Select | Inverse] so that now I had the trees selected instead of the sky, and I adjusted them manually the same way I adjusted the sky, using [Enhance | Adjust Brightness/Contrast | Levels]. Now the picture looks like this:
There's certainly a whole lot more drama in there, now. It would have been nice to have more oomph in the trees... maybe I can pump up those spruce cones.... Using the magic wand with a much lower tolerance - 20 - I selected the cones. Now, selecting the cones one at a time would suck, but since the magic wand isn't in "Contiguous" mode it selects every cone when I click on just one of them. I wasn't too fussy about whether the whole cone was selected, or whether I had wee bits of other parts of the tree selected... I just made a few clicks until most of the cones were generally selected, then I opened the colour adjust window [Enhance | Adjust Colour | Hue/Saturation] and played with the hue adjustment slider. By reducing the hue adjustment by 10 points I shifted the orange towards red. Had I adjusted by increasing the hue adjuster the orange cones would have shifted towards yellow. I wanted red, so I shifted in that direction. I didn't go *too* far because I didn't want the cones to look like Christmas tree ornaments. Here's what I've got now:
At this point I'm reasonably happy with the colour in the shot. Note that normally I'd be doing this after cropping the image, and I'd be doing sharpening and whatnot, but as far as colour goes, this is okay in my books.
As a reminder, so you can see both on one page, here's the original.