Photoshop tutorials and design.: Color Correction

I’m going to start off with something simple. As I do more and more tutorials, they will get more and more complicated. For starters though, I want to be sure that you understand the concepts behind what you are doing rather than just following the steps.

For the first tutorial I’m going to show you how to color correct an image. Sometimes to get good color correction all the way through out an image you have to correct pieces of the image separately from other pieces. Here is the image that we are going to color correct.

Here is what it’s going to look like when we’re done.

So, let’s start off by selecting the part of the image that we want to color correct. In this case it’s everything except for the actually screen of the monitor.

Select your Polygonal Lasso Tool.

This tool will allow you to make a selection on an image in a straight line. Start off in the bottom left corner of the screen on the monitor.

If you need to zoom in you can do so by using the zoom tool.

With Polygonal Lasso Tool selected, we want to create a selection around the screen of the image like so:

If you click once in the bottom left corner then move your mouse up to the top left corner, you’ll notice that it creates a straight line for you. Click in the top left corner, then the top right corner and so on until you have the whole area selected. Now you have the screen selected on your monitor. However this isn’t what you want selected.

Now do a Select > Inverse.

This reverses your selection, so instead of having the screen selected, the rest of the image is selected. This is what we want.

Now we’re going to go to our Layers Palette. If you’re Layers Palette isn’t open, click Windows > Layers to bring it up. Notice at the bottom of your Layers Palette are some buttons. One of them is your adjustment layers. Your adjustment layers allow you to make modifications to the image as a layer that can be tuned on and off or edited. Therefore you don’t alter your original image. Click the adjustment layers button and click Levels… in the list that pops up.

In the Levels dialog box you will see a graph like thing. I can’t really explain what exactly this graph thing means, but lets look at it like this… consider it color information. So let’s start color correcting our image. At the top select Red from the Channel pull down. Then lets take the right slider and move it over to the where the graph information starts. You should notice when you do this that your image turns a red tint.

Now we want to do the same thing for the Green and Blue channels. On the Green channel, we also want to take the middle slider and move it to the left until your middle input level says 0.91. What this does is we are removing some of the green out of the image, because the picture has a slight green tint from florescent lighting.

Now that the color is set, hit OK.

You should notice an extra layer in the Layers Palette. If you double click on this layer you open up the adjustment layer again and can edit it further if you wish. However for this tutorial, we won’t need to do that.

Here is what your image should look like so far.

Now we want to replace the image for the screen. Take an image of your choice to place on the monitor. For this tutorial, I’m going to use a screen grab of my website. Once you open up the image of your choice in Photoshop, select the move tool and drag and drop the image into the image that we are editing.

Now do an Edit > Transform > Distort.

You’ll notice that the image that you just dropped in has a box around it with little squares in the corner. If you click on one of the little squares and move it around, notice what happens. You can adjust and create different perspectives for your image. Now take each corner of the image and place it in each corner of the display on the monitor.