by Ted Padova and Don Mason
The Fun and Easy Guide Color Management For Super Photos
 |
| Color Management for Digital Photographers For Dummies |
Ted Padova first began his interest in amateur photography as a Peace Corps
volunteer in Venezuela. He toured five Latin American countries, collecting
shoeboxes of slides he hopefully will one day sort out. Upon completion of
his two-year Peace Corps tour, he attended the New York Institute of
Photography in Manhattan when it was a resident school, earning a diploma
in Commercial Photography.
In 2004, he retired from his Digital Imaging Service Bureau and Custom Photo
Finishing Lab after 15 years of owning and operating three facilities. He has
authored over 25 computer books on Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop,
Adobe Photoshop Elements, and Adobe Illustrator. Today, he spends his time
writing and speaking nationally and internationally on Acrobat PDF and digital imaging.
Don Mason is a graduate of Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara,
California. He has been a professional photographer for more than three
decades and works in virtually every aspect of commercial photography. Don
first started using a computer in 1999, when he didn’t believe that digital
imaging would ever replace his wing lynch system used for processing all his
E-6 film and his darkroom where he made his own C-prints. After 4 years of
intensive work in Adobe Photoshop, he abandoned his analog film lab and
went completely digital. Today, he divides his time shooting professional
commercial photography and printing art prints for a wide range of clients on
his two, oversized Epson inkjet printers.
Authors’ Acknowledgments
Our sincere thanks to the following people who graciously allowed us to use
photos of their delightful children: Claire Lahorgue and her children, Michael
and Sarah; and Jennifer Randle and her children, Cody, Calico, and Becky.
We’d also like to thank Courtney Creasy, Joel Berkovitz, Karen Krulikowsky,
Lisle Gates, Carole Murray, Dan Mancini, Mark Young, Cheri Zadarski, Nicole
Saint-John, and Kortney Penrose.
To the AOL Photo Chat gang — your input helped keep it real.
Introduction
You rarely find a photo you can take with a digital camera or scan on a
desktop scanner that doesn’t need some kind of brightness, contrast, or
color correction. Taking pictures with your camera is only half of your job
when you want to print pictures or host them on the Web. The other half of
your job is editing in your digital darkroom.
In this book, you can find out how to get color just right by setting up a digital
darkroom in your home (or wherever you work on your digital photos)
and using the plentiful and robust tools in Photoshop Elements to correct tone and color.
About This Book
In this book, we try to provide a comprehensive view of tone and color correction,
using the tools available in Photoshop Elements versions 4 and 5. We
stick to what Elements provides you in the application without using thirdparty
products designed to overcome limitations in the program. What
Elements offers off-the-shelf is all you need to create the pictures you want
with proper brightness, contrast, and color.
Who This Book Is For
If you’ve had problems getting brightness and color correct on your pictures,
this book is for you. This book is also meant for Photoshop Elements users.
If you’re a Macintosh user, you’ll find this book equally as helpful as Windows
users do. We use screen shots from the newest release of Photoshop Elements,
which is available only in Windows, as of this writing. However, just about all
the techniques, the dialog boxes, and almost all tools are the same in a Mac’s
Photoshop Elements 4 as those found in Window’s Photoshop Elements 5.
If you’re a Photoshop user, we recommend our book Color Correction For
Digital Photographers Only (Wiley Publishing) rather than this one because in
this book, we limit the coverage of color correction to working with Photoshop Elements.
Conventions Used in This Book
We point you to menus where you’ll frequently access commands throughout
the book. You need to know how to decipher the references for where to go
when we detail steps in a procedure. First off, you need to know how we
show accessing a menu command. You might see something like this:
Enhance➪Adjust Color➪Adjust Color for Skin Tones
When you see commands such as these, we’re asking you to click the
Enhance menu to open that menu, then click the menu command labeled
Adjust Color to open a submenu. In the submenu, select the Adjust Color for
Skin Tones command. Many of the menu commands we talk about then open
a dialog box where you perform your editing.
Another convention we use relates to using keystrokes on your keyboard.
When we mention some keys that you need to press on your keyboard, the
text looks like this:
Shift+Ctrl+M (Shift+Ô+M on Macs)
In this case, you need to press the Shift key, the Control key in Windows (the
Ô key on a Mac), and the M key at the same time. This keyboard shortcut
opens the Adjust Smart Fix dialog box.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is divided into logical chunks (parts). Chapters that discuss
related topics are grouped together in five different parts.
Part I: The Basics of Color Editing
The first three chapters in the book are devoted to understanding color, calibration,
and the essentials you need to do to prepare your color editing environment.
We talk about terms and concepts you need to know for any kind of
color correction and tonal editing. Be certain you understand the concepts in
these three chapters and, in particular, make sure you get your monitor calibrated
for proper color viewing.
Part II: Image Brightness and Contrast Corrections
In almost all cases, color correction begins with tonal corrections. In the
three chapters in this part, we talk about all the methods you have available
in Photoshop Elements to get the proper brightness and contrast in your pictures.
As you can discover for yourself, doing these corrections first makes
the job of color correction much easier.
Part III: Color Corrections
This part relates exclusively to color correction, and it’s by far the largest
part in the book. We cover color correction techniques for a wide variety of
image problems related to color reproduction. You can find out all that
Elements has to offer for professional color-correction methods, and we
avoid using menu commands and tools that just don’t measure up when you
want to create quality images.
Part IV: Finishing Work
This part is limited to color printing. We talk about what you need to do to
get your output to look like your monitor and how to print your pictures with
color profiles. We cover several, common, consumer-grade printers and how
you print your files to these printers.
Part V: The Part of Tens
We wrap up the book with the Part of Tens chapters, where you can find
tips for better tone and color corrections. After you gain experience with
Elements and the techniques in this book, if you become curious about
upgrading to Photoshop, we provide a chapter that offers an overview of
Photoshop’s additional features for correcting brightness and color.
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Product details
Price
|
|
|---|---|
File Size
| 25,277 KB |
Pages
|
339 p |
File Type
|
PDF format |
ISBN
| 978-0-470-04892-4 |
Copyright
| 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc |
Contents at a Glance
Introduction
Part I: The Basics of Color Editing
Chapter 1: Understanding Color
Chapter 2: Controlling Lighting
Chapter 3: Calibrating Your Monitor
Chapter 4: Color Profiles and File Formats
Part II: Image Brightness and Contrast Corrections
Chapter 5: Making Tonal and Brightness Corrections
Chapter 6: Correcting Contrast
Chapter 7: Using Adjustment Layers
Part III: Color Corrections
Chapter 8: Identifying Color Problems
Chapter 9: Color Correcting Skin Tones
Chapter 10: Using Levels and Color Variations to Make Color Corrections
Chapter 11: Advanced Color-Correction Methods
Chapter 12: Camera Raw Color Correction
Part IV: Finishing Work
Chapter 13: Printing
Chapter 14: Soft Proofing Color
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 15: Ten Tips for Better Tone and Color
Chapter 16: Ten Reasons to Upgrade to Photoshop
Index
Table of Contents
Introduction....
About This Book............
Who This Book Is For .......
Conventions Used in This Book .....
How This Book Is Organized.............
Part I: The Basics of Color Editing ..........
Part II: Image Brightness and Contrast Corrections ..
Part III: Color Corrections ..............................
Part IV: Finishing Work ...........................
Part V: The Part of Tens..................
Icons Used in This Book...........
Where to Go from Here.....
Part I: The Basics of Color Editing ..................................5
Chapter 1: Understanding Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Understanding Calibration Basics .................................................................7
Getting to Know the Language of Color ........................................................9
Hue ...........................................................................................................9
Saturation ..............................................................................................11
Brightness .............................................................................................11
Color space ...........................................................................................13
Color gamut...........................................................................................13
Clipping..................................................................................................13
Mixing Colors..................................................................................................14
Understanding grays............................................................................15
Understanding channels......................................................................16
Why are there 256 levels?....................................................................17
Understanding Color Modes.........................................................................17
RGB.........................................................................................................17
Index color ............................................................................................17
Grayscale...............................................................................................18
Bitmap....................................................................................................18
CMYK .....................................................................................................19
Converting Color Modes ...............................................................................19
Chapter 2: Controlling Lighting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
Understanding Color Temperature..............................................................22
Using Balanced Lighting................................................................................23
Going for Neutral Gray ..................................................................................24
Building a viewing booth.....................................................................25
Employing viewing booth alternatives ..............................................27
Chapter 3: Calibrating Your Monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
What Is Monitor Calibration?........................................................................29
Working with CRT versus LCD Monitors.....................................................30
Calibrating with Hardware Devices .............................................................32
Adjusting Hardware Controls on an LCD Display ......................................33
Using Calibration Software ...........................................................................36
Using Adobe Gamma............................................................................37
Calibrating with just RGB controls on a Mac....................................42
Calibrating LCD monitors that have brightness
and contrast controls.......................................................................47
Calibrating monitors that have white-balance,
brightness, and contrast controls in Windows.............................52
Calibrating monitors with just white-balance
controls in Windows.........................................................................53
Calibrating Mac monitors that have white-point adjustments.......54
Chapter 4: Color Profiles and File Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55
What’s a Color Profile? ..................................................................................55
Understanding the Different Types of Profiles ...........................................57
Monitor profiles ....................................................................................57
Workspace profiles...............................................................................57
Output profiles......................................................................................58
Working with Workspace Profiles in Elements ...........................................58
Defining your color workspace...........................................................58
Embedding the workspace profile .....................................................60
Managing Print Colors with Output Profiles...............................................61
Acquiring device profiles.....................................................................62
Installing profiles on your computer .................................................65
Using output profiles when printing ..................................................67
Choosing and Changing File Formats ..........................................................69
Which formats support profiles?........................................................69
When can you change a file format? ..................................................71
Understanding Bit Depth...............................................................................73
Understanding dynamic range ...........................................................74
Where you get 16-bit images...............................................................75
Part II: Image Brightness and Contrast Corrections ........77
Chapter 5: Making Tonal and Brightness Corrections . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
Checking Out Your Images............................................................................80
Fixing Tone Problems ....................................................................................81
Using the Levels Dialog Box..........................................................................84
Getting to Black and White ...........................................................................88
Adjusting Gamma levels ......................................................................89
Correcting a low-contrast file..............................................................92
Correcting an underexposed file ........................................................93
Correcting an overexposed file...........................................................94
Correcting a high contrast file ............................................................95
Finding the first real black and white pixels .....................................95
The Levels black-and-white preview option .....................................97
Breaking the Rules of Editing......................................................................100
Knowing when to break the rules.....................................................101
Breaking the rules for white-point adjustments.............................102
Breaking the rules for black-point adjustments .............................105
Chapter 6: Correcting Contrast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111
Correcting Image Contrast..........................................................................111
Fixing Contrast Problems with the Auto Contrast Command................114
Working with the Brightness/Contrast Command...................................117
Modifying Contrast with Adjust Color Curves .........................................121
Using the Shadows/Highlights Tool to Adjust Contrast..........................124
Traveling Back in Time with the Undo Command ...................................131
Chapter 7: Using Adjustment Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .133
Adding Adjustment Layers to Your Editing Arsenal ................................134
Creating Adjustment Layers .......................................................................134
Working with Adjustment Layers...............................................................136
Changing the opacity of layers .........................................................137
Moving adjustment layers between files.........................................137
Choosing a layer blending mode......................................................139
Correcting Image Contrast with a Curves Adjustment Layer.................139
Increasing image contrast .................................................................140
Reducing image contrast...................................................................144
Part III: Color Corrections ..........................................149
Chapter 8: Identifying Color Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .151
Identifying a Colorcast.................................................................................151
Discovering Memory Colors .......................................................................153
Getting Familiar with Color Saturation......................................................155
Chapter 9: Color Correcting Skin Tones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157
Correcting Skin Tones..................................................................................157
Using the Hue/Saturation Tool ...................................................................164
Understanding the Hue/Saturation dialog box...............................164
Editing Hue/Saturation ......................................................................165
Removing a Colorcast..................................................................................173
Chapter 10: Using Levels and Color Variations
to Make Color Corrections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179
Using Levels for Color Correction..............................................................179
Correcting color by using Levels......................................................181
Analyzing the Levels adjustments....................................................184
Working with Color Variations....................................................................185
Correcting color with Color Variations............................................188
Darkening and lightening images .....................................................191
Saturating images with Color Variations .........................................191
Chapter 11: Advanced Color-Correction Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195
Cleaning Up the Whites ...............................................................................195
Examining color channels in Levels.................................................198
Using Auto Levels...............................................................................199
Setting White and Black Points with the Levels Eyedroppers ...............204
Fine-Tuning with the Hue/Saturation Command......................................212
Correcting Overexposed Saturated Files ..................................................216
Correcting Color by Using Levels ..............................................................221
Understanding the effects of adjusting color in Levels.................222
Color correcting a file with Levels ...................................................223
Chapter 12: Camera Raw Color Correction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227
Understanding Camera Raw .......................................................................228
Using the Raw Converter ............................................................................228
Making Adjustments in Camera Raw .........................................................233
Working with Camera Raw Defaults...........................................................239
Part IV: Finishing Work .............................................241
Chapter 13: Printing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243
Preparing Files for Printing .........................................................................243
Printing and image resolution ..........................................................244
Changing image resolution................................................................246
Cropping images.................................................................................248
Converting Color..........................................................................................250
Printing to Epson Inkjet Printers................................................................251
Using automatic profile selection.....................................................252
Selecting a printer profile manually.................................................259
Printing with a printer profile in Windows......................................259
Printing with a custom profile ..........................................................261
Printing to HP Inkjet Printers......................................................................262
Printing to HP printers in Windows .................................................263
Printing to HP printers on a Macintosh...........................................264
Printing to Canon Printers ..........................................................................265
Printing to Canon printers in Windows...........................................265
Printing to Canon Printers on a Mac................................................266
Renaming Color Profiles..............................................................................268
Printing Contact Prints................................................................................268
Choosing Paper and Inks.............................................................................271
Chapter 14: Soft Proofing Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273
Understanding Soft Proofing.......................................................................273
Converting to an Output Profile .................................................................274
Converting color in Windows ...........................................................274
Converting profiles by using operating
system tools on a Macintosh ........................................................277
Viewing the Soft Proof .................................................................................279
Part V: The Part of Tens .............................................283
Chapter 15: Ten Tips for Better Tone and Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .285
Calibrating Your Monitor ............................................................................285
Using a Gray Card.........................................................................................286
Or Using the GretagMacbeth ColorChecker .............................................287
Shooting Pictures in Proper Lighting.........................................................287
Shooting Photos against a Background.....................................................288
Using Curves Adjustment Layers...............................................................288
Shooting in Camera Raw .............................................................................289
Editing 16-Bit Images ...................................................................................289
Editing for Content.......................................................................................290
Using Filters ..................................................................................................290
Chapter 16: Ten Reasons to Upgrade to Photoshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293
Using the Curves Dialog Box ......................................................................293
Using the Channels Dialog Box...................................................................297
Changing Bit Depth ......................................................................................298
Improving Dynamic Range ..........................................................................300
Working with More Color Modes ...............................................................300
Converting to a Profile.................................................................................303
Proofing Color...............................................................................................304
Embedding Profiles ......................................................................................304
More Options for Using Camera Raw ........................................................305
More Selection Tools ...................................................................................306
Index........................................................................309
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