Photoshop Color Correction: Techniques to Train Your Eye

Let's talk about color correction. Over a series of videos, I'm going to show you different ways to correct for color. But before we get into any particular way, I want to talk about color in general, and so that we can understand and we can approach color correction in the right way.

And part of this is going to be to start to train your eye and to train your mind to notice things that maybe you've never even noticed before or never even thought of before. So I remember back when I was studying photography in college, and I made my first color print. I showed it to a photographer friend of mine, and I was so proud.

I'm like, look at my color prints, right? And he looks at it, and he's like, that's crap. That's horrible. Of course, I was crushed.

I was like, I worked so hard on that. But he's like, OK, I'm going to take you back into the dark room. We're going to fix this.

So we went back in, we did some color correction, we came back out. And when I compared my print to the one that we created together with the proper color balance, I looked at mine, and I said, you're right. Mine was horrible.

I didn't even notice it. When I was looking at my color print, I knew what the colors were supposed to be. So my mind said everything looks fine.

But in reality, it was really red. It was more like this, where it was super, super red, like really red. My mind didn't even see it, because I had not trained myself to look for color imbalances.

Color imbalances are where you're more one color than the other. So these are some examples of that, where in the middle here, this is kind of a neutral color gray. But when you go around here in the color wheel, where you have things that are more blue or more magenta, which is kind of pinkish, more red, more yellow, look at how different the color can be across all of them.

Now, if you were only to look at one of these by itself, your mind might know that those are gray koalas. And it might say, oh, they look fine, until you start to train your eye to look for those color imbalances. So the human eye and the mind kind of look at a white and say, I know that should be white, so that even though the sun might be making something warm and it's kind of a yellowy color, your mind white balances.

Kind of like in a digital camera, there's white balance as well, where it just says, I know that should be white, so mentally, I can look at that and say, I know it's white, even though it's very yellow or very red or whatever it is. So we have to first look for those color imbalances and work against our mind. And we need to train ourselves to look for those things because your mind wants to tell you it looks fine.

And so you need to make sure you're kind of working against that. I mean, you're looking for these things. So this was just a screenshot of like an old feature that doesn't exist anymore.

I just wanted to show you some ideas of how different color can be on the same image, just how different it can be. And so now let's see, how could we approach this, right? Also, one thing I'll point out too is we're gonna be looking at the color wheel and notice how blue and yellow are opposites of each other. So one is more cool, one is more warm.

And the idea is that you can't be cold and hot at the same time. You can be neutral in between. You can go hot and then cold.

You can have hot flashes and go back and forth. But in terms of temperature, whether it's visual or otherwise, it's like a slider. And the more cool you get, the less warm you are.

Or the more warm you are, the less cool. So these are about opposites. Green and magenta are opposites.

Cyan and red are opposites. And so you go one way or the other. If you make something more yellow, you are less blue.

If you are more blue, you are less yellow. So you go in the direction you want to move to compensate, to kind of cancel out a color. Another way to think about this as well is I've got this color wheel here.

And this is something to kind of keep in mind, this color wheel. And this is the color wheel that you just saw. We've got a neutral white in the middle and we've got yellow and blue being opposites, magenta and green being opposites, and cyan and red being opposites.

And the idea of this in an RGB color environment is this is an additive process in the sense that we are adding light. So these are the primaries of light, not pigments. So here you're in a pitch black room, there is no light, so everything's off.

And then you start to shine a light, you start to shine a blue light, and then you shine a green light, and then you shine a red light. And the more light, the brighter something gets, right? And so white is actually the presence of all the light. And what's interesting here is the opposites.

And that's really what I want you to take with you here is the opposites. Remember these three pairs. Blue and yellow are opposites.

Red and cyan are opposites. Magenta and green are opposites. You can remember those three.

Sometimes in the Photoshop interface, they're gonna show you those, but sometimes they don't. So you have to memorize these because they might tell you RGB, the red, green, and blue, but they don't tell you the CMY, the cyan, magenta, and yellow. So we're gonna see that the first way I'm gonna show you how to color correct is actually not the way that I normally color correct because there are more powerful ways that we're gonna come back to later and we're gonna see.

But this first approach using color balance is gonna help to train your eye. And it's gonna remind you of what that color wheel is so that you don't have to memorize it right away. So this image here is that koalas image, just a higher res version of it.

And it's not that this is a horribly wrong color image. Like it's a little bit warmish, it's a little bit reddish, but you might not have noticed that. And this is where training your eye comes into play, that the more you do this, the more you look for those color imbalances and you kind of, I call it calibrating your eye.

You wanna see kind of too far in one direction, too far in the other direction. So you can try to find the neutral mid ground and this will help you to try to see what's possible. So let's see this.

Now, when I go to make this change, I wanna work non-destructively. And there are a couple of ways we can do image color correction. So if I go up to image adjustments, these are destructive image adjustments.

So if I do, let's say, just as an example here, if I do brightness contrast and I crank up the brightness and I just obliterate detail, that is permanent. If I saved and closed the file, I would never get that detail back. Even if I try to go to image adjustments and I try to bring it back, first of all, it's starting from where I am right now.

It does not remember where I had been. It says from this, let's just make it darker again. But look at what happened here.

Look at how I just lost all of that detail that was there because it went out to just pure white and it couldn't bring anything back from pure white. So I am not going to do image adjustments. Let me undo that.

Instead, I'm gonna do adjustment layers. So we're gonna go into layers and we're gonna do adjustment layers. Now you can do those through the layer, new layer adjustment here, or normally I just go down here to this little button here.

I call it the black and white cookie. If you know those little black and white cookies where it's half black, half white, kind of looks like that, right? So I can click on that to create a new layer. And these are my adjustment layers.

Also fill layers here, which we'll talk about in another exercise, but these are my adjustment layers. And for this one, I wanna start us with color balance because we can get a sense of that color wheel and we can play with the balance of color, right? Because we're doing color correction, meaning trying to correct it to be a natural color. The nice thing about this color balance is that it shows you the color wheel that I was just talking about, how you get the red and cyan, the magenta and the green, the yellow and the blue without you having to remember.

So it's a great first place to start with and let's start to kind of calibrate our eye here. Let's go more towards the red and look at how red it can get. And then let's go opposite of that.

Let's go towards the cyan and let's see how cyan we can get. You wanna go too far in one direction and too far in the other direction. So you're starting to get a sense of like, yeah, that doesn't look very good.

Yeah, that doesn't look very good. Okay, so what's the neutral mid ground? What is natural? Not too far cyan, not too far red. And see, I think even at zero, we're still too far red.

I think I have to go a little bit more towards the cyan, which cancels out the red because the cool is kind of toning down the warmth. Now, I don't wanna go too far, but I wanna find what I think is that kind of sweet spot in the middle. Now, if I hide and show this layer, it's a subtle change.

This is the before where it's too warm. This is the after where it's a little bit more cool. Now let's keep going.

Let's go to the next one. Let's go more towards the green. Yeah, not looking good.

More towards the pinky magenta. Again, not very good. So you wanna find the neutral in between where you don't want it to be too greenish.

You don't want it to be too pinkish. So what is that kind of neutral mid ground? This doesn't really need to change much because it wasn't very pinkish before. It was more reddish.

And then finally, the yellow versus blue. I can go too blue. Yeah, not very good.

Too warm, too yellow. Yeah, not very good. But notice the more warm I get, the less cool I am.

The more cool I get, the less warm I am. So what's that sweet spot in the middle here where I'm trying to look for like a neutral gray in them? So here I think, now look, this is the before. This is the after.

Look at how warm it was before. It was warmish and reddish. Now, you might aesthetically like that, but also part of it might be just because that's what you were used to.

When it comes to that these are actually gray, like neutral gray koalas, that original photo, as much as you might have liked it, was not color accurate. And color correction tries to say, let's correct the color and go to a correct color, right? Color correction, right? Now, you can always do whatever color you like. If you wanna make it more warm, by all means.

If you like that aesthetic, you can go that way. But we're trying to go to something that is color neutral, color correct. And actually this before and this after, look at how much more neutral those grays have gotten.

And hopefully now you're starting to see how going back and forth, and let's say looking at the white areas, are they truly white? Or is there a color cast to them? Are they warmish, right? How far do I need to go to do a more neutral gray, correct gray, right? So this image wasn't wildly inaccurate, but it was a little bit too warm in not just a yellow, but also a reddish way. And actually if you think about red and yellow make orange. So together that is a warm color.

So it was kind of orangey, reddish. I would say more red than anything to begin with. So ultimately there are other ways you can correct color that are gonna use the same concept that give you even more control than color balance does.

But I like starting with color balance so that you can see the color wheel. And then we're gonna tie this into other techniques like curves later, where we're still doing fundamentally the same thing, but we have more control over the way that we do this. Now, also while we're talking about this, maybe if I wanna change the brightness while I'm at it, this layer here is gonna do my color correction, right? My color balance.

But maybe I wanna do another layer, maybe just to brighten it a little bit or maybe add some more contrast. So I could add another adjustment layer to do my brightness and contrast. So I will do just for simplicity's sake, a brightness and contrast.

Normally speaking, I'm gonna do something where I have more control like curves, which we'll take a look at in the next exercise. But for right now, just out of simplicity, I can make something a bit brighter if I want to. If I want more contrast, I can add more contrast, right? And then again, I can see the before and the after.

So this is just, actually I ended up changing out the brightness. Let's make it a little brighter. So it's a little brighter and there's more contrast.

Or you can go even less contrast, but I like some punchiness to the shadows. I like some darker shadows. Now, what I lack control over here with brightness and contrast is maybe I'm blowing out my highlights now, which I don't like.

So what if I wanna add contrast in a way where my highlights are fine, but my shadows need to be darker? The problem with this is adding contrast brightens the brights and darkens the darks, but I just wanna darken the darks. I don't wanna brighten the brights. So hopefully you're seeing how you don't have the most control over brightness and contrast while it's simple because there's only two sliders.

It doesn't offer you the most control. It is kind of intuitive really quickly for somebody to get started with, but ultimately you're gonna have more control if you have something like curves. Curves is just not as user-friendly to get started with, but that's why I'm gonna introduce it in another exercise.

In this one, I just wanted to get you started with hopefully trying to calibrate your eye a little bit here and starting to notice these color imbalances. So go ahead and do exercise 2C in the book to try this yourself.