| Section
2J: Matching
and correcting colours |
Preparing The Image:
Open or Import (scan) an image in Photoshop. If you are scanning
an image to Photoshop, we may need to some work to the picture
to get it looking nice on screen. The better we can get the
picture on screen the better our print will be
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| Original Photo |
 |
| Scanned Photo |
As you can see our scanned image looks a little washed out in
the shadow areas and also the sky looks a little purple. With
a few adjustments in Photoshop we should be able to get a closer
on-screen match to the original.
Note: All monitors display colors
uniquely.
The first step is to match up the overall contrast of the image.
We'll deal with the sky color later.
Using Photoshop Levels adjustment-
Click Image
menu - Adjust - Levels.
or press (Ctrl+L)
 |
| Here we have our scanned Image
and the levels displayed, before any adjustments |
By adjusting the left pointer (1),
the shadow or dark area of the picture is affected and by adjusting
the right pointer (2) the highlight
or light area of the picture is affected. I personally use the
levels adjustment first on all my scanned images to get the
overall contrast of the image correct. You could also use the
Brightness/Contrast adjustment also found in the Image menu.
Image - Adjust - Brightness/Contrast.
Ok, now we are happy with our image contrast, its time to fix
the sky. We are going to use Photoshop Selective Color adjustment
tool. As the name suggests, with this tool you can select a
color range and only make changes to that color throughout the
image. This is an excellent tool so lets move on and modify
our purple-ish sky.
To bring up the Selective Color
window
Click on the Image
menu - Adjust - Selective Color…
Move the window so that you can see your image.
Place a check mark in Preview
(1)
From the Colors drop down menu (2),
choose the color you wish to adjust in your image, here I have
chosen Blue.
As the sky in our image looked a little on the reddy, blue,
purple. I have moved the Magenta
slider (3) to the left (this reduces
the amount of magenta in our selected color blue or the sky).
Click ok to apply the correction and we're done for this image!
If you have other colors to modify, just repeat the above step
choosing that particular color.
It is essential to understand how CMYK colors are mixed to create
colors even if your images are RGB.
Ok,
our image is ready for the Artainium color correction to be
applied. |
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