Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Color Correcting Photos / Understanding Black Point & White Point
Visitors to VTC.com will be able to view all introductory videos for each training course.
Free Trial Members will gain access to first three chapters for each training course.
Full Access Members have full access to VTC.com�s entire library of video tutorials.
Learn More
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Color Correcting Photos / Understanding Black Point & White Point)
Now, I'm sure you're anxious to get going on color correction, color correcting your photos and making them look their best but you know, there's one more thing that I want to explain here in addition to understanding the color modes and their channels palette and RGB and CMYK and that is understanding black point and white point inside Photoshop and you know, I didn't know about this stuff when I first started getting into color correction. Like most people, I just jumped in with both feet and I just wanted to make my images look their best and I didn't really understand exactly what black point and white point were all about and how they function. So hopefully I'll be kind of setting you down the right path here by explaining all of this up front and it will only take a few minutes and I think it'll make a world of difference and the example that I'm going to create here with you, we're going to create a little experiment here inside Photoshop, is really simple and I think it'll really help to hammer home this idea of black point and white point. So what I'm going to do with you here is I'm going to create a brand-new blank Photoshop file. Go ahead and hit Command N or Control N there on the Windows side and I've already set up my dialog box here. What I want to do is I want to create a 300 pixel in width by 100 pixel in height image. Your resolution doesn't matter so much but make sure that your color mode is set to Grayscale as well and then we should be good to roll here. Go ahead and click on OK. Alright, I'm going to zoom in here just a little bit on my image and the next thing that I want to do is I'm going to double click on my background layer and I'm going to convert him to a regular, old Photoshop layer of course and then what I want to do is I want to get rid of all of the white pixels inside my image. So I'm just going to hit Command A or Control A to select all and then hit Delete on my keyboard. That's all there is to it. Go ahead and Deselect there. So now we have a document that is completely filled with the checkerboard pattern, complete transparency of course. Now, next up what I want to do is I want to create three rectangles inside the image and we're going to fill these rectangles with different percentages of gray and then we'll get Photoshop to show us the black point and the white point. So here's what I'm going to do. I will hit the M Key on my keyboard to switch over to the Rectangular Marquee Tool Make sure it's the Rectangular Marquee Tool that you are on inside the Toolbox there and what I'm going to do is I'm simply going to click and drag out a box, maybe about this big, taking up about a third of the document, maybe just a little bit wider, something like that. And what I want to do is I want to fill this with 75 percent black or 75 percent gray really is, is what we should say. So over inside your Swatches Panel, make sure you have your Swatches Panel open. Just hover your mouse over top of these gray swatches and you should get a little tool tip showing up. I got lucky. I hovered right over top of 75 percent gray. That's the guy that I'm after so you might have to hunt around a little bit for this guy but go ahead and click on that guy and what that does, by the way, is that loads the swatch that you just clicked on into your foreground color swatch down at the bottom of the Toolbox. Perfect. Do you remember how to fill with your foreground color? I hope so. Hold down Option or hold down Alt there on the Windows side, hit Delete on your keyboard. Perfect. That's all we need. OK, next up. I'm going to move my selection over towards the right just a little bit, something like this and you know, I'm still on my Rectangular Selection Tool so I'm just moving marching ants at this point so hopefully just fine. In fact, if you overlap your previous square just a little bit, that's just fine, even something like this is fine. Alright, now the next selection that we have here, the next block that we're going to create is going to be filled with 35 percent black so same story. I'm going to head back to my Swatches Panel and look for 35 percent black. See where we are here. There's 50, there's 35 on the top row. Single click on that guy and then same story. Alt or Option and hit Delete on your keyboard. Perfect. OK, one more to go here. I'm going to move my selection over, something like this, perfect. And this guy's going to get filled with just ten percent black. So look for your ten percent there inside your Swatches Palette. There he is, the second gray color swatch there. Hold down Alt or hold down Option and hit Delete. OK, perfect. Go ahead and Deselect. Now, just as point of interest, I'm going to flip over to my Info Palette and make sure your Info Palette is open. Again, you might have to head back to your Window Menu and what the Info Palette does by the way is he gives us color information and different details about where our cursor is currently placed and what's sort of happening inside our document. So if I hover my mouse over top of the lightest block inside my experiment here, in the top-left corner of Info Palette I have K and I can see there that I have ten percent. Now, I hope you have the same thing here. Now, if you don't, let's head to the Info Palette's Option Menu and then choose Panel Options and make sure that your second color readout, let's do this together, is set to Grayscale. So second color readout mode, make sure it's set to Grayscale. Go ahead and click on OK and now when you bring your mouse over top of that first color block, either in the left or in the right corner, but definitely in the top right corner you should now see K ten percent, bring my cursor over top of the center block and it say K 35 percent. I'm looking in my Info Palette. And then finally K 75 percent for the right-hand block. So what the heck is all this about anyway? Well, here's what I want to do. What I want Photoshop to do is I want Photoshop to take my darkest pixels inside my image and make then pure black and take my lighter pixels and make them pure white and then take the midtones, the center pixel if you will and shift it just a little bit as well. Now, the reason why I'm showing you this is in a lot of the different color-correction tools that you'll see in the coming lessons, a lot of them deal with this thing called white point and black point or dark point and light point and of course midtones as well. And again, this is all the stuff that I missed up front so that's why I'm kind of giving it to you here. Now, I'm going to give you a really simple example here. I'm going to get Photoshop again to take my darkest areas of my image and make them pure black and the lightest areas and make them pure white and then I'll show you a real-world example on an actual photo and you'll see how this works out. So I'm going to head up to my Image Menu and inside the Image Menu we have a set of Auto Commands. Now, Auto Color is grayed out for me right now but I have Auto Contrast and Auto Tone. Go ahead and choose Auto Tone. Alright, now what happens is my darkest gray now became pure black. How do I know it's pure black? I hover my mouse over top of it, I move my eye up into my Info Palette, top-right corner, it now says K 100 percent so that is pure black. So it shifted the color. It shifted the dark point from 75 all the way to a hundred. So this is what we would call a shift in the black point or a shift in the dark point or a shift in the shadows. You could call it that as well. Over to the right-hand side of my image and it's now shifted that from ten percent all the way to zero. So it pushed all of the light-colored pixels from ten percent all the way to zero, so it shifted the color in the opposite direction and then as far as the midtones goes, it just shifted them a little bit. It went from 35 to 38. So really what's happened here is a shift in the black and the white and also a little bit with the midtones. Now again, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense until we actually see black point and white point being shifted in real photographs, so let's do that next.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
