Colour Correction in Photoshop

I was doing some regular site maintenance this morning for a non-profit and was reminded of just how crucial a tool Adobe Photoshop truly is when it comes to serious colour correction work.

I’ll admin that a good 80% of the simple colour correction/optimization work that I do, I typically do in Lightroom or Fireworks. Both of those applications like the quick and dirty approach to photo editing, and when I am short on time, which is often the case, quick and dirty works well for me.

Today I retrieved a promising photo from a free stock photo site and quickly realized that Fireworks and Lightroom were not going to get the job done. Although the image was underexposed, I knew that increasing the overall exposure would simply blow out much of the colour information. I needed the kind of nitty-gritty fine tuning and control that the two more lightweight applications didn’t have.

Enter Photoshop. I applied several different masking layers and adjusted hue, levels, curves and exposure only on those parts of the image that needed the adjustment. I then exported the image back into Fireworks, which is without question my application of choice for the preparation of web-optimized images. Fireworks is also far more adept than Photoshop at placing optimized typeface on web-ready photos, and in my world that counts for a lot. To address possible legibility issues, I used the burn tool in Fireworks to darken the area behind the text, and finally exported the optimized image as an 85% compressed jpeg. Bingo.

Most of the photographs that I work on only need minor adjustments so I sometimes forget how much more difficult my job would be without Photoshop. So this is my Ode to the Wonders of That Application.