Color Correction in Adobe Photoshop (and/or Elements)

Melanie-Pearl said... oh geez! you have downstairs neighbors? haha. it's a good thing you stick with metal clays! if you get a stump be sure it was cut awhile ago or leave it out to dry for awhile. otherwise it will mold on your floor.

thanks for all of your photos ideas and for sharing your secrets! i would never have known what a difference this stuff makes without seeing it illustrated on your blog. i am still amazed.

as usual, one hobby leads to another...guess I get to learn more about color correcting, etc. now.

Well, I’m glad I have something that I can share with people. I’ve picked up so much from the internet, books, classes, etc.

But wow… that photo on your October 8th blog entry. What a gorgeous creation!

Anyway, here’s a bit of how I do my color correction.

As mentioned in a previous post, I put a small, stark white piece of “something” into the frame of each jewelry photo I take (in the example photo, I used an earring card).



I have done nothing to the above photo other than make it a size that fits here. Otherwise, it’s raw, straight from the camera.

I do CTRL+L, which brings up a “levels” pop-up box. If it’s in the way, you can just grab the top and move it over out of the way.



You can see three eyedroppers on the right-hand side of the pop-up. The left eyedropper represents black, the middle one is gray, and the far right one is for white. White is the one I use most often.

Click on the white (far right) eyedropper, then click on an area in the photo that is supposed to be white. I often try a few different spots, while keeping my eye on the jewelry, reminding myself that what I’m after is for the jewelry to be the same color and shade in the photo as the jewelry that is right there next to me at the computer with a good light (preferably OTT) on it so I can see it clearly and accurately.



The rest is just cropping and adding a watermark, etc.

Here’s what before and after look like together.



The concept behind “color correction” is that you are putting something into the photo that you can tell the photo software exactly what color it is. So instead of having to tell the software exactly what shade of yellow that bead is. You just say, “See that? That is white. Make THAT white and everything else will become properly colored according to it.”

Make sense?