In this assignment, you will practice toning photos in Photoshop, meaning that you’ll make adjustments to exposure and color balance.
Adjusting Exposure of Existing Photographs
As discussed previously, exposure is an important part of successful photography. When taking pictures, you control exposure with aperture, shutter speed and ISO. If you don’t feel confident about how exposure works, stop here and review the photo exposure chapter.
Photoshop cannot fix a bad exposure. An underexposed image will appear too dark, and the quality will be degraded and “noisy” if you lighten it in Photoshop. An overerexposed image with bright white areas is “blown out” and those pixels do not contain any information to be retrieved.
This underexposed photo can be adjusted in Photoshop, but the quality is not good. Photoshop is not a replacement for getting good exposure in the first place.
Photoshop can improve a not-quite-right exposure. It can also help for mixed light, where the amount or color of light is inconsistent in the image because there were multiple light sources.
For the following steps, you’ll use provided images of cats and two of your own photos. Download the folder of provided photos here: Com320Cats.zip
Levels
The first step for improving exposure is adjusting Levels. This controls the range of light and dark pixels in a digital image.
1. Open ribbon-cat.jpg from the provided photo files.
2. In the Layers panel in the bottom right corner, add a new Levels adjustment layer.
3. The Levels adjustment uses a histogram that plots the image’s tonal range, from dark on the left to light on the right. When the histogram appears, drag the slider from the right side toward the center a bit, closer to where the plotted pixel range begins. This is telling Photoshop to use this range for distributing light and dark pixels.
4. Save the adjusted image as a small JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using medium quality and 600px for the image width.
5. Open rescue-kitten.jpg and repeat the previous steps to adjust the Levels for that photo, then save a 600px copy of the edited photo.
An alternative to Levels is Curves, which similarly uses a histogram to display (and adjust) the tonal range of an image. Many professional photographers prefer Curves because it gives more control over the midtones. We are not going to use Curves in this assignment since it’s less intuitive, but please try it out if you are interested. Two good resources are Adobe’s instructional page and Digital Photography School’s tutorial.
Color Balance
We perceive colors because of the wavelengths of light, and different light sources have different color temperatures. Our eyes compensate for this in real life, but in photographs this means that a photo taken indoors may look too yellow, for example, and a photo taken outdoors or in fluorescent lighting may look too blue.
To avoid this problem when taking photos, you can set your camera’s white balance to compensate for the color of the light. Photographers often carry a piece of white paper for this reason. However, setting the white balance has become less important in many situations because the automatic white balance is pretty good in most digital cameras these days.
1. Open blue-cat.jpg from the provided photo files.
2. In the Layers panel, add a new Levels adjustment layer. Yes, you want to check the Levels first!
3. Add another adjustment layer, this time for Color Balance.
4. There are three sliders for adjusting the color balance, but the blue-yellow spectrum is the only one you should use regularly. (Go ahead and try the others to see for yourself — they’re rarely useful in photographs with natural lighting.) Since this photo looks too blue, adjust the slider toward the yellow side of the spectrum.
5. There is a dropdown above the color sliders that is by default set to midtones. That is typically the most effective option, but you can also see what happens if you change that to adjust the highlights or shadows.
6. Like before, save the adjusted image as a small JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using medium quality and 600px for the image width.
7. Open nap-cats.jpg, which is too yellow. Go through the previous steps to correct this image, then save a 600px copy of the edited photo.
Hue/Saturation
Changing the saturation of an image changes the color intensity. Increasing the saturation makes colors “brighter” and more vibrant. Decreasing the saturation makes colors more muted.
Many photo filters in apps like Instagram make use of saturation. Changing the saturation of an image can be unethical if changes are made to make an image more appealing, rather than true to life. But it can also be helpful for correcting extreme or mixed lighting.
1. Open yellow-cat.jpg from the provided photo files.
2. In the Layers panel, add an adjustment layer to check the Levels.
3. Add an adjustment layer for Color Balance and drag that slider all the way toward the blue side of the spectrum. You should see a small improvement, but unfortunately not much.
4. Add an adjustment layer for Hue/Saturation. Click the dropdown that says “Master,” and choose “Yellows.” This means changes to saturation will only apply to yellow tones.
5. Drag the saturation slider almost all the way to the left, to desaturate the yellow tones. Then drag the Lightness slider toward the right to make those same yellow areas lighter.
6. Go back to the Color Balance adjustment layer and fine-tune that adjustment now that the yellow is mostly gone. You may also want to adjust the reds or other colors in the image.
7. Like before, save the adjusted image as a small JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using medium quality and 600px for the image width.
Layer Mask
Sometimes you need to make adjustments to part of an image rather than the whole thing. Careful — this type of adjustment can easily veer into unethical territory, and it can also make images look unnatural instead of improved.
1. Open cat-pals.jpg from the provided photo files. The exposure for the background looks good, and the color seems fine, but the cats’ faces are underexposed (too dark).
2. Add a Levels adjustment layer and move the sliders so the cats look correctly exposed. The background will become washed out, but don’t worry about that for now.
3. In the Layers panel, click the white rectangle in the Levels adjustment layer. This allows you to apply that adjustment as a mask.
4. Select the black swatch and use the Paint Bucket Tool to click anywhere on your photo. This will essentially make that adjustment layer invisible.
5. Select the white swatch and the Paintbrush tool. Choose a large paintbrush with soft edges. If you paint the cats, your adjustment will now apply to the cats without affecting the image background. It takes some finesse and patience to do this well! You may need to change the brush size or opacity.
6. You can stack adjustment layer masks on top of each other, so you might add another layer to further brighten the darker cat’s eye area, for example.
7. Like before, save the adjusted image as a small JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using medium quality and 600px for the image width.
Back in film photography days, skilled darkroom technicians could make small adjustments to photos as they developed. Photoshop includes a couple of tools as a relic of this process, the Dodge and Burn tools. Dodge makes things slightly lighter and Burn makes things slightly darker, with an increasing effect the more you apply it. These tools aren’t widely used anymore since others are more precise and nondestructive, but go ahead and try them out!
Your Own Photos!
Use these techniques to improve the exposure of two of your own photos. (Make sure you have the original files directly from the camera, not copies you’ve uploaded to Facebook or any other site that uses file compression.) You don’t need to take new photos — these could be photos you’ve submitted for a previous assignment, or any others from your collection.
1. In Photoshop, make adjustments to your first image. Try out the adjustments from this assignment, but also feel free to make other types of adjustments if you have a preferred method or want to experiment.
2. In a text document, make a list of what changes you made and why.
3. Save the “after” image as a JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using high quality and 1200px for the image width. Note that this is a different size and quality than the cat photos!
4. Hide your adjustment layers (by clicking the eyeballs next to the layers) and save a “before” image as a JPG file by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and using high quality and 1200px for the image width.
5. Repeat this process with your second image.
Submitting Your Work
Submit the following to Canvas by uploading the files with your submission:
- The six completed cat photos (600px width):
- ribbon-cat.jpg
- rescue-kitten.jpg
- blue-cat.jpg
- nap-cats.jpg
- yellow-cat.jpg
- cat-pals.jpg
- Your two “before” photos and two “after” photos (1200px width)
- Your text document listing the changes you made and why
Demonstrated Skills:
- Successful improvement of photo exposure and color in Photoshop using adjustment layers including Levels, Color Balance and Hue/Saturation
- Use of the layer mask technique in Photoshop to apply an adjustment layer to only a portion of a photo
- Choose and execute toning techniques to improve a photo in a realistic way that does not appear artificial or overly edited