Digital Diversity

I’m sure we have all had those days when you have taken a lot of pictures, got home, then low and behold you have used the wrong white balance setting or got the exposure wrong. Luckily, with Photoshop on stand by, this really isn’t a problem to fix.

This can be done in practically any version of Photoshop. The best thing about it is that you can leave your camera set to auto white balance and not worry about it.

White balance

I managed to find one of the shots i had taken a few months ago and realised it was a rather cold. The white balance is clearly all wrong on this one.

To fix this you only need one adjustment layer. That is a Photo Filter adjustment layer. Add one by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter.

From the adjustment options you can choose several correction filters from the drop down menu. In this menu should be 3 warming and 3 cooling filters as well as many other coloured filters. This image is a bit cold (blue) so we need to warm it up a bit. After trying the three warming filters I found Warming Filter (81) gave the best results. Simply move the density slider about till your happy.

That’s it, your done.

Using this filter you can add or remove most types of colour casts.

Correcting exposure

If you have the full version of Photoshop (CS) then this is easily done with a single adjustment layer.

First we need an image to demonstrate on.

Now you need to add an exposure filter. Go to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Exposure.

On the adjustment layer options you should see a slider called exposure. Simply slide this to the left to reduce the exposure and to the right to increase it.

Elements doesn’t have this adjustment layer but, as always, there is an alternative method.

Again we need an image.

Now right click the layer and click duplicate.

With the new layer selected, click on the drop down menu in the top left of your layers window as circled in the image below. This is your layer blending mode. It’s a way to change how the layer works to allow it to blend with layers below it. To lower the exposure of an image change it to multiply.

You should notice the image gets darker. Now tweak the amount by changing the layers opacity (transparency). The opacity is in the top right of the layers window.

To increase the exposure change the blending mode to screen.

You should notice the image has got lighter. Again, adjust the amount by changing the layers opacity.

Simple when you know how.

You can combine this technique with the masks tutorial to correct exposure only on the parts of the image that need it.

Tags: colour correction, colours, duck, ducks, elements, highlights, layers, lighting, masks, panasonic fz28, panasonic lumix fz28, photo editing, photography, photoshop, shadows, tutorial, tutorials

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 13:52 and is filed under photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.