Sometimes you might forget to set the white balance on your camera according to the actual shooting conditions. You get really yellow or blue colorings in the image. Sometimes it's just that time of day. They call it golden light. It's right after sun rise and right before sun set. It can be beautiful and warm and all glowing.
This is Nick and Lynn in Europe. Too cute. I wasn't there so don't know the time of day but I am guessing it was in the golden light time frame since it is outdoors. Their skin tone has a yellow cast, which isn't too bad. There is a filter if you prefer it to be more skin colored.
In Photoshop, Image>Adjustment>Photo Filter gives you a drop down menu. The first are golden colors which are useful when you have an image with a blue cast. But scroll down to the cooling filters and try one of the three. Just use your sense of correct to choose and manipulate the intensity of the filter with the slider.
Here is my adjusted image. Still cute!!! Which do you prefer?
Photoshop is my first choice for post processing. It is so feature rich that after 10 years I am admittedly still learning this software. I started with PS Elements and it can amazingly do a lot. I migrated to Creative Suites at version 3 and now use 5.5.
This post is about Levels adjustments, which is always my first step.
I always begin with a levels check, no matter how the photo looks. Levels is in the Image pull down menu, Image>Adjustments>Levels. The short cut is Control L in windows and Command L on a Mac. It pulls up a histogram that basically indicates the Exposure adequacy.
Here is an example of an image:
and it's Levels histogram
A perfect histogram would be a bell shaped curve with the most data (black) in the center. As you can see, this image has too much dark and not enough light hitting the surface. Moving the white slider, which is right above the number 255, to the left just to the point where the data is beginning to appear (black blob), will vastly improve the image. It has the effect of making everything lighter, both darks and lights. In this case I nudged the black slider as well and usually find that I need to nudge both. Depending on how the photo looks after these adjustments, I sometimes need to move the middle one as well. The middle slider adjusts mid tones. If you make a photo too light, it often takes on a smoky look. This midtone slider will improve that.
Here is the histogram moves I made and the resulting image. You can see the lights are brighter and the edges of the leaves become crisper, more defined against the dark background. If I had moved the white slider even more, I would have picked up some of the detail in the background but don't want that. It subtle and very natural looking but markedly improved IMO.
I took this image of Caite with her cousin's little girl. The image is so-so. The lighting is not great. The background is too busy and too sharply focused. The framing is not top drawer either. How do you salvage the memory and make it into something more interesting. In the film days it would be set aside. Not so in the digital world of Photoshop.
This is a more artistic rendering of the girls. Extracting them from the distracting background, converting to B&W and reducing the saturation produces this image of the girls. Playing around on the layer beneath by adding brush strokes of small dots and them clipping a gradated color to the brush strokes produces the oh so gentle color I have achieved.
I like the end result a lot more than the original. And your take please...
There are several step I take when I get an image into my PC. Using Photoshop, the first is always a levels adjustment. Control + L gets you there. You will see a histogram of data. When photos are too dark or too light, moving the sliders inward on each end to where the data (black in the histogram) begins will adjust the lightness or darkness of the image. The center slider is for all the midtones and I usually tweak it ever so slightly either left or right to see the outcome. One or the other generally appeals to me.
Here is a SOTC image of my nephew. It was taken under a pavilion and so he is in shadows. The backdrop is much lighter especially with the white car. The subject is under exposed. I also don't like that the telephone pole is coming out of his shoulder and the wire from his forehead.
The adjustments I made were:
- a levels adjustment to lighten the subject
- the self healing brush to remove both the pole and the wire
- I then used the magic extraction brush, which is one of the selection tools, to separate Paul from the background. This is fairly easy to do since their is so much contrast. I set the feather factor (in the extraction box options) to 3 in order to soften the edge of subject and background.
- After extracting him and while he was still selected, I put him on his own layer. Layer-New-Copy. This places just the subject on a layer above the entire photo.
- To further camouflage the healing brush actions and the white car, I gently blurred the original photo which is only serving as the background . Filter-Blur-Gaussian=6.0
Here is the final result. The changes are subtle but significantly improved.
The order in which things are done is important. I could have first extracted Paul and then only lightened him.It is a choice to be made. In all. these adjustments took only a few minutes. Photoshop skills are worth having.
