Tuesday Tips – Color Correction

A while ago, we talked about white balance and how is makes a big difference in the color of your photographs.  Today, I would like to touch a bit on color correction and how it can make a nice photograph transform into a photograph that really pops!  Here’s an example:

This is SOOC (straight out of camera).

He looks pretty good.  The lighting is nice and his uniform has a nice red color.  But something is just not quite right, and it has a lot to do with skin tone.  Even when all the other colors look good, the skin tone is the one that really tells us something needs to be fixed.  Can’t see the problem?  The human eye has difficulty spotting subtle color variations because our brain compensates for the inaccuracy.  Our brain tells us this is a boy, so logically his face and arms are skin colored.

Now let’s compare our original with a color corrected version:

Do you see the difference now?  We had a bit of a bluish cast to all the colors.  Even the red looks redder and the greens greener.  Whites are whiter and the blacks look crisp. And what a difference in the skin tones!

Here’s another one:

All by itself, the photo on the left looks pretty good.  But do a bit of color correction and WOW!  The second photo hits a home run!

So,  just how do you color correct photographs?  Isn’t setting your white balance to the correct setting good enough?

First, let me say that both of these photos were taken with the white balance set to auto.  But, even if I had done a custom white balance using a white or warm card, this photo would still need some color correction.  White balance gets us close, but not perfect.

Second, there are several ways to correct the color on a photograph.  Consumer software, like Picasa (from my previous post), offer the beginner a way to do some simple color corrections.  You might find that it works pretty good for you, but it’s hard to get it really accurate in Picasa.   Most professional photographers use Photoshop or Lightroom to make their corrections.  I use Photoshop CS3 and do my corrections using a curves adjustment layer.

If you are interested in learning how to color correct your photographs using curves in Photoshop and taking your photos to an even higher level of perfection, please contact me for a private lesson.