Adobe Photoshop CS2 - Introducing Variations

Learn How To Use Variations in Adobe Photoshop CS2

In this lesson, we are going to touch relatively briefly on the topic of color correction inside the Photoshop CS2. And just how you go about solving some of the most common color correction problems is kind of a way for you to get your feet wet with color correction. It is a big topic. We are going to revisiting it in a line of detail inside the couple lessons in Part 3. But for now, I want you to open up this image right here. It is called rock climber, istockphoto.jpeg. And it is inside the Lesson 6 folder, which is inside the Part 1 folder, which is inside the Project Files folder of course that you have copied from the DVD to your hard drive. Now, this image comes from iStockPhoto website. The website is www.istockphoto.com and it is just a great place, you really awe it yourself to check it out. Sort of an eBay of stock photos really. So, none professionals you know. Amateurs and semi professionals sell their wares basically. Anybody can post an image and you can by the images much less expensively than in a standard stock photo site. But, you also may encounter images that need a little bit of correction, a little bit of help like this image here. What it looks like to me is that this image did get corrected. I do not think this is the actual raw image, the original image from the digital camera. I think it has been corrected, but just not necessarily well corrected. But what we have is an oversaturated photo. The colors are too vivid and the rock formation over here does not look rocky to me. It looks scarlet. Much, much to red and rocks tend to be more sort of in the brown, which is sort of the yellow orange range, so a lot to fix inside this photo. This photo comes from a guy name Mads Fredrickson by the way. Obviously in accomplished mountain climber, I would gather -- I mean he is above the clouds. I would not do that. What a crazy guy. Now, the easiest way to go about solving an image that has color balance problems is to go up here to the image menu, choose adjustments and do not choose -- remember good old show all menu items, well go ahead and click that because I have hidden that command, I do not want to show not to choose. The command that you do not want to choose is the one that is really obvious, color balance. And it is not that it is necessarily a bad command. Unlike brightness contrast which is by the way your imaging enemy; it is not a good command. Color balance is an awful or anything. It is just not as good as the command that I want you to choose. All right, I will show you color balance. It allows you to change the balance of the image by using the slider bars right? So red -- obviously, red is not the way you want to go because these rocks where too red in the first place. You want to go more cyan right? And that is starting to look good, all right. So, we are starting to tone down those mountains a little bit, that little slobber that you can see there. And maybe, we do not want it to be so magenta, we want it more blue, maybe we do not want some yellow or some more green -- I do not know. It was just a bunch of slider bars in these meaningless values up here. That is what I do not -- -41 what? +16 what? Well, you know what? So, not the way I prefer to work. It is not a bad command. It is just that there is something so much better inside Photoshop that we are going to take advantage of instead. So, I am going to cancel that. What I want you to do is choose the image menu. Go to adjustments and go down here to variations, which as you may recall in Lesson 3, I gave a keyboard shortcut if you loaded D keys, you will have a keyboard shortcut Ctrl B or Command B on the Mac, which was here 24 assigned to color balance. I have reassigned it to variations instead because variations rocks! Basically, the same sort of functions as we will see but expressed graphically, so check this out, when you choose the variations command, it brings up this enormous graphical dialog box. And so instead of presenting you with what seems to me to be meaningless numerical values that do not really help me out very much. Instead, I am seeing graphical representations of each one of those colors that we saw before. So, let me just sort of briefly tour you through the dialog box. We have the original version of the image, and then we have the current version of the image subject to any color modifications that we may have made. Now, so far, we have not done anything. So, original and current pic looked exactly the same. We have color modifications that we can make in the central lower portion of the dialog box. Over here on this right hand strip, we have some lighter darker modifications, luminosity modifications that we can make. We can specify which colors that we want to modify. We can either change the midtones, which are generally the way you want to go, we will come back to that in a moment. Or you change the darkest colors, the shadows or the lightest colors the highlights. So the midtones are the massive colors in between the lightest and darkest values. And then we can change saturation, how vivid the colors are. We will come back to that one as well. Then you have this fine course slider, which allows you to make slider adjustments, that is slighter adjustments. If you drag it toward fine or course your adjustments that is more intense adjustments if you drag it toward course, and you can really the difference down here if you look at these color thumbnails in the luminosity thumbnails. So, that is course. That is fine; barely any difference at all with fine. I typically leave it set somewhere in the middle because course is obviously way too much, and find and so find you cannot see what you are doing. So, in some place in the middle tends to work best especially when you are coming to terms with this dialog box when you are first using it. All right, let us hone in on these color adjustments here.