Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Color Correcting Photos / Getting Started with Brightness/Contrast
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Color Correcting Photos / Getting Started with Brightness/Contrast)
Ready to get color correcting an actual real photo by hand, not using Photoshop's Auto Commands? Well, what I've done here is I closed out of all of the copies that you and I had created of the View.jpg file and I'm all the way back to the original View.jpg file so extra copies here. This is the original and what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you started with probably the simplest color correction tool that we have available to us here inside Photoshop. He's called Brightness Contrast. So what I'm going to do here is I'll head up to the Image Menu and then down to Adjustments and by the way, as a quick aside, the Adjustments Submenu lists out most of our color correction tools that we have available to us but bear in mind at this point that all of these color correction options are destructive, including the Auto Commands that we ran. In other words, if I was happy with Auto Tone for example and I saved the file, that's it. There's no way to go back to the originalright? And the same goes for the items that I see underneath this menu. For example, there's our Brightness Contrast and we have Levels and Curves and Vibrants and a whole pile of other guys and there's some neat special effects down towards the bottom as well but needless to say, I'm going to get going here with Brightness Contrast and I'll show you in a little while how to non-destructively adjust the color inside your images. So I chose Brightness Contrast and that of course brought me into the Brightness Contrast Dialog Box. As I say, it's the simplest color correction tool to use here inside Photoshop. I'm given two sliders obviously; Brightness and Contrast, hence the name. Now imagine the Brightness and Contrast Sliders here inside this dialog box are the brightness and contrast knobs on your television set. It works exactly the same way so there's not a whole lot here in terms of control. So I can use the Brightness Slider to increase or decrease the amount of brightness inside my image. Maybe I want to make my image a little darker or maybe my image is too dark and I want to pull up those dark pixels. In other words, shift those darker pixels towards the white point, towards the lighter side of my image there and then of course the contrast, I can increase or decrease the contrast inside my image. Again, so if I want to make it look a little bit more dramatic perhaps. So let's say for example maybe I wind up somewhere here, which to me doesn't look bad. Maybe it's a little too dark but you get the idea here. Now, a couple of neat things that I want to point out inside this dialog box as well. Of course we have a Preview Check Box there underneath the Cancel Button. Make sure that your Preview Check Box is always turned On inside the different dialog boxes that we'll be seeing here and you'll see this Live Preview inside your document window, which is great. But the other thing that I can do with my Preview Check Box here is I can turn it off and this'll give me sort of a before and after view of my image. So I uncheck it and this is where you and I started and then I turn my preview back on and I see how my image would look if I applied the Brightness Contrast. So just kind of a neat thing you can do there, again, before and after. Don't forget, at any point inside these different dialog boxes inside Photoshop I can hold down Option or Alt there on the Windows side and that will switch my Cancel Button to a Reset Button so maybe I've gone and done something kind of crazy and I don't want to have to cancel out and then start all over again. I can just hold down Option or Alt, click on Reset, resets the entire dialog box and then I can of course go ahead and make my changes and then when I'm happy, of course click on OK. Now, once again, don't forget. This is a permanent change on our image.
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 |
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