Tip #3501 - Show Your True Colors
Printer Friendly Version | E-Mail This Tip
Show
Your True Colors
Let's say you go on
an awesome vacation and you take tons of pictures. When you are back and
refreshed from all the fun, you sit at the computer and go through all
the pictures. You do this only to realize they aren’t as good as
they looked through the camera’s monitor. Well, don’t be too
disappointed, because today, you will learn how to bring out the true
colors in your pictures that you have taken with your faithful digital
camera. Of course, for this purpose, we will use our trusty sidekick of
Adobe Photoshop.
Go ahead and open
the image that you want to use. I am going to use an image I took on my
last vacation. Here it is:
As you can see, although
the object in the frame is interesting enough, the colors are dull and
the whole picture has a whole "smoky" feel to it. So, let’s
open the image in Photoshop and the first thing we are going to do is
change the image mode from RGB color to lab color. To do this, go to Image,
Mode, Lab Color.
Once you've done that,
go to the Channels palette. Or, you can go to the Layers
palette and click on the Channels tab. You will see four
channels: Lab, Lightness, A and B. We will start by double clicking channel
A (or you can press Ctrl + 2).
Don’t be scared
if your image starts to look weird and grayish. Don’t worry, you
haven’t ruined anything. We are now going to go ahead and adjust
the levels of this channel. To open the levels dialogue box, hit Ctrl
+ L or go to Image, Adjustments,
Levels. We aren’t going to make anything too bright
or too dull. The idea is to keep a balance between the two. So, go ahead
and get the level sliders to the positions given in the screenshot below.
Somewhere in the middle, with nothing too extreme. However, as I always
say, to know how the sliders work, just play around with them and see
what different results you can get.
Now, go ahead and
select channel B. We are going to go ahead and do the
same level adjustment on that. Get the sliders in the same position as
you had on channel A. It will probably look a little weird still, but
don’t worry. The next step is to click on the Lab
channel. Ta da! Your image is ready. Below, you can see what I ended up
with.
You should be able
to see the improvement clearly. This is possibly one of the easiest ways
to improve your pictures and get the true colors out of your existing
images. Also, the fact that it takes hardly any time at all and only a
small amount of effort, you can do it tastefully to a lot of images in
just one go around. A better idea would be to make an action out of it
so that everything happens automatically. To learn how to make an action,
you can search WorldStart's archives for one of my previous
tutorials. So, don’t let the dull images from your camera bring
you down. This is yet another trick you can keep up your sleeve that will
let you take another step toward improving your images.
Happy Photoshoping
everyone!
~ Yogesh Bakshi
Want To Comment On This Tip? Click Here! We'd love to hear from you :-)
Like These Tips? Get 'Em Free In Your E-mail
