Chapter 9: Adjusting Color and Tone

Overview

In This Chapter

• Using Auto Level, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color

• Setting Levels

• Adding color balance

• Correcting color using Variations

• Replacing color

• Adjusting brightness and contrast

• Inverting, saturating, and equalizing an image

• Using the new Shadow/Highlight command

• Using the Dodge and Burn tools

• Saturating and desaturating with the Sponge tool

Eventually, you will come across an image — be it a photograph, scanned image, or image from another source such as a digital camera — that needs to be adjusted. Photoshop CS offers many color correction tools to enhance and adjust the color and tone of an image. All of these tools work in basically the same way — by determining the existing range of pixel values in an image and replacing them with a new range of values. The main difference between the color correction tools is the amount of control you have over the range of values.

This chapter takes you through using Photoshop’s color correction tools, from the most sophisticated ones that give the greatest control (such as Levels) to those that give the least control (such as Threshold, Desaturate, and Posterize). The Levels tools let you make exact adjustments to a layer’s highlights, midtones, and shadows using the lightest and darkest pixels in each individual channel. The simpler tools make adjustments using the combined values of all channels.

All of the commands in this chapter can be applied to a selected area of a layer, an entire layer, or as an adjustment layer (all of which I discuss in Chapter 8). The more complex tools let you see a preview of an adjustment so that you can decide whether the change is what you want before you make a commitment.