Adobe Photoshop Image Restoration Tutorials
Basics / Select Color Range
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop Image Restoration / Basics / Select Color Range)
In our previous lessons we saw how to brighten or darken an image as a whole, using the curves dialog box or the levels dialog box. But now what do you do with an image where part of the image is exposed correctly but the other part of the image is either too dark or too light? That is a very easy thing to address in Photoshop and I will show you how to do that right now. Now by way of background, this is a shot of Yosemite Valley, of Yosemite National park, of Half Dome, and then of the foliage surrounding Sentinel Bridge here, and this shot was taken in mid-November right after the peak of the fall colors but there was still enough color in these particular trees that I felt like this was still a pretty good shot. But as I framed my shot with a two hundred millimeter lens, it became apparent that I was either going to have to expose for the face of Half Dome here or expose for the foliage, which meant that Half Dome would have been too light. What you do not want to do is try to recover color information from an overly exposed image because brightness and overexposure tends to lose color information, it is very hard to recover, it does not look good. But when you've got a darker area of the image, the color information is still there, it just needs to be brought out in Photoshop. It is still intact, but it just needs to be brightened and enhanced if you did not lose it. So I exposed for Half Dome, the granite face of Half Dome here, I wanted to take the clouds and all the detail in the clouds and so on, which came out real nice, knowing that we were going to adjust this later. So let us show you how to segregate this area and adjust only the foliage in this particular shot. We are going to make a selection, we are going to create a selection here, if I go to select and then color range, and you will see this image right here, which is a black and white representation of the tonal range in this particular shot. You take a medicine dropper and for a web demonstration if you wanted to adjust Half Dome, then you click on Half Dome, and there is your selection. If you wanted to adjust the sky, click on the sky and there is your adjustment. But for our purposes, we are going to use the foliage only and we left-click and hold down and drag this medicine dropper around until the exposure looks about right. There you go, just try that. Alright, so we've got our selection, that is what is going to adjust when we start tweaking and we are going to hit OK, and we will notice the marching ants that are established around this photograph and those are the areas that are going to be adjusted. So this looks better, we are going up here to select feather so that it blends in with the other areas of the image that were not adjusted. So we go to five pixels and then once that is established, we go up here to the background layer, right-click on it and and then go Layer via Copy and then you have established a layer that has only that part of the image that we are going to adjust. So you will bring this back so that you can see the results of your adjustments. We are not going to use an adjustment layer because if we use an adjustment layer on this one layer alone, it is also going to adjust the background image below it and we do not want to do that. So we are going to select the layer and then we are going to go to image - adjustments and let us start with our levels dialog box. Hit auto and it does not do much, which I didn't think it would, so we will go back to the adjustment levels and you can see by our histogram that the brighter areas of the image are indeed missing, as we pretty much already knew, which is why we are here in the first place. So let us see what this looks like, that might give us a good result; we move the slider over until we are within this area here, and it looks much better, see how much more balanced that exposure is now, all blends together, looks kind of natural. Well that is how to brighten certain areas, certain segregated areas of your image. Notice as we make these adjustments, the Half Dome, the granite on Half Dome, the bluish area here is not being adjusted at all and so we got a much better balanced shot. Now we are going to keep that and I want to make one observation to you and I really think that this area of the tree here and here, here and here are a little overly bright, they look a little unnatural and we will adjust that later, but this area here looks great. This area right here looks really, really nice as does this up here, I will get the detail in the reflection in the river. The bridge, the grasses here, all that looks really, really good. We are going to adjust these yellows here down just a bit in subsequent lessons, but that is how to adjust segregated areas of your image.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop Image Restoration |
| Author: | Phil Hawkins |
| SKU: | 33473 |
| ISBN: | 1932072705 |
| Release Date: | 2004-01-27 |
| Duration: | 4.5 hrs / 77 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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