Improve your Photoshop skills with this comprehensive tutorial that covers color correction techniques like color balance and brightness/contrast adjustments.
This exercise is excerpted from Noble Desktop’s past Photoshop training materials and is compatible with Photoshop updates through 2020. To learn current skills in Photoshop, check out our Photoshop Bootcamp and graphic design classes in NYC and live online.
Note: These materials are provided to give prospective students a sense of how we structure our class exercises and supplementary materials. During the course, you will get access to the accompanying class files, live instructor demonstrations, and hands-on instruction.
Topics covered in this Photoshop tutorial:
Creating adjustment layers for color correction, Adjusting color balance, Adjusting brightness/contrast
Exercise Preview
Photo by Dan Rodney
Exercise Overview
There are many ways to improve a photograph with Photoshop’s powerful color correction tools, some of which are easier to understand than others. This exercise will introduce you to a couple of the more intuitive techniques like Color Balance and Brightness/Contrast.
Intro to Color Correction
-
From the Photoshop Class folder, open koalas variations.png.
This file is a good visual aid to help beginners wrap their heads around color correction. It takes practice to start knowing which colors need to be adjusted in an image.
Take a moment and notice which examples look better and which colors need to be added or removed.
Close the file when you’re done.
Adjusting Color Balance
Open koalas.jpg.
Go into Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance.
-
Click OK.
The Properties panel will open with the Color Balance settings, as shown in the preview image at the beginning of the exercise. The default values are all zero.
You may have noticed in the example image that the More Cyan square looked better. Let’s start by adding more cyan. Drag the Cyan/Red slider to the left and set it at −40.
-
Now it’s looking a bit yellow. To remove yellow, we have to add blue. Drag the Yellow/Blue slider to the right and set it at +10.
The highlights are still a little warm, so let’s cool them off by adding blue.
From the menu next to Tone, choose Highlights.
Drag the Yellow/Blue slider to +20.
Adjusting Brightness/Contrast
Let’s brighten it up a bit. Go into Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast. Click OK to create a new layer.
On the right, in the Properties panel, move the Brightness slider to the right and set it to 10.
Click the eye
next to each of your adjustment layers a few times to view the difference. These koalas look much healthier now!Do a File > Save As and name it yourname-koalas.psd, making sure to set Format (Mac) or Save as type (Windows) to Photoshop.