From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Enhancing contrast, color, and tone - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Enhancing contrast, color, and tone

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- [Instructor] Next we're going to find out how to make quick enhancements to color, tone and contrast in Camera Raw. I'll select the Mountains.dng, and this time use Command+R on Mac or Control+R on Windows in order to open it in Camera Raw. I'll change the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape and click Auto to have Camera Raw automatically enhance the image. Sometimes this is all you need, but in this case I want more control, so I'm going to click Auto again to reset it. I'll start with the Color panel and let's take a look at the different white balance options. So if your image has a color cast to it and you want to remove it, you can either select one of the options from the list or we can use the Eyedropper and click in the image on something that we think should be neutral. Here, I'll click in the cloud area, but clouds aren't always really neutral. There's often a lot of blue in them, so just be a little cautious of using clouds as your white balance point. We also have a Temperature and Tint slider, so I can change the temperature, making the image cooler or warmer, and there's a Tint slider to make it more green or magenta. I'll double click in order to reset that, and I want this image a little warmer, so I'll move the temperature over to the right. One thing to note, if you're working along using your own JPEG files, there are fewer options in the dropdown menu, and these numbers here will go from zero to 100 instead of the numbers that you see here. Of course, you can also use these tools to add creative adjustments to the image instead of just fixing or neutralizing the color cast. Next, I'll choose the Light panel, and it doesn't matter which order you apply these. I typically start with the whites and blacks, but you can start with any of the options. Now, as I move the blacks darker or the whites lighter, I'll want to know if I'm clipping these to pure black or pure white without detail. The easiest way to do this is to turn on our clipping warnings. So at the top of the histogram, I'll click on the one on the left and the right in order to enable them. Now, when I push values to pure white, we see the red overlay, and if I push values to pure black, we'll see the blue overlay. So this tells me that I need to back off on my blacks as well as on my whites. All right, I'm going to take down my exposure for the overall image and then also take down my highlights just to get a little bit more detail in those clouds. Then I'm going to bring up my shadows to see into the darker areas of the image, but be a little careful when you do bring up your shadows. It's likely that there'll be a little bit more noise introduced in those darker areas. After making these other adjustments, we might need to readjust, say, for example, the white point or the black point, so feel free to do so. You can also drag in the histogram to change your slider values. We can drag in the blacks as well as the shadows, the Exposure, Highlights and Whites. Now there's several different ways to add contrast. First, there's the Contrast slider. Moving it to the left will decrease or increase the contrast, but this really does it to the overall image. If I want to be a little bit more targeted, then I can use the Effects panel where I can use Texture, Clarity and Dehaze. I want to zoom into this image, so I'm going to tap Escape. That just put back my White Balance Eyedropper tool and gave me the Zoom tool instead, and I'll zoom into this area where we can see these houses as well as all of these rocks that have slid down the mountain. Now, when I move the Texture slider to the right, Camera Raw is going to add contrast in the high frequency or the small detailed areas in the image. It's looking for contrast along edges, and it's going to increase the amount of contrast so that it tricks your eye into thinking that your image has more texture or it's sharper, because by making one side darker and the other side lighter, you're going to be fooled into thinking with that added contrast that there's more definition. If I move the other way, it's going to decrease the texture and lessen the contrast, and it looks more like it's kind of an overcast or foggy day. All right, Clarity also adds contrast, but it's looking primarily in the midtones of your image, and when it finds an edge, it's going to add the contrast. So it's going to make one side of the edge darker, the other side of the edge lighter, but when it does that, it's going to do it to a wider range of values. So it's a much softer look. I'll go ahead and zoom out so we can see this overall. When I increase it, it's not like the texture where it gets really gritty. It's just adding more contrast in those midtone areas, or we can decrease the contrast as well. All right, I'll reset that. Now Dehaze was designed to remove haze or smog in an image, and it primarily moves the left side of the histogram, so it pushes those darker values towards black and it also adds saturation. Of course, that's when you move it to the right. You can also decrease the Dehaze, in which case you're going to introduce fog into your image. So for now, I'll just move that over a little bit to the left until I see those clipping warnings. Now with most of these sliders, you can also hold down the Option key or the Alt key on Windows and drag the sliders, and what you get is a visualization of any of the pixels in your image that are being clipped to pure black or pure white. So it's doing it on a channel basis. That's why we're seeing the yellow and then the red. But if I move this far enough, we'll also start seeing where all three channels are being pushed to black, and that's represented by the black areas in the image. So I'll want to back off on that and then I can release the Option or Alt slider, and I might want to go back to the Light panel and just move my blacks a little bit further to the right. Okay, I'm going to toggle off the clipping warnings. And then let's return to Color and let's talk about Vibrance and Saturation. So the Saturation slider is an absolute slider. If I move it all the way to the left, it takes out all the saturation. If I move it all the way to the right, it increases saturation so much so that you might actually lose detail in saturated areas because it's going to push values that were different in the original. Because they had different amounts of saturation, it's going to push them all the way to be fully saturated, and so you won't see any difference in those areas. Therefore, you might not see that detail. All right, I will reset that. The Vibrance slider, on the other hand, is relative, so when I move it to the left, there's still color in my image and if I move it to the right, it doesn't go as far as the Saturation slider. It also doesn't add as much color in the reds and yellows in an image, so it can avoid giving people sunburns, like if you have a portrait of a person in an environment, and you can also use them in tandem. So I can move the Vibrance down to get rid of a lot of the blues in here, but then increase the saturations in order to raise all of the color in the greens and oranges. Of course, you don't have to use them at all. We can just double click to reset them. If you only want to target a specific color range and make changes to the Hue, Saturation or Luminosity, then we would move to the Color Mixer panel. Here I can choose between affecting the Hue, Saturation or Luminance of all of these different color ranges. So if I choose Saturation, I could choose to decrease or increase the amount of saturation of the oranges or any of the ranges. If I'm not sure what color an area is in my image, I can pick up the Targeted Adjustment tool and then click and drag left or right, and that will adjust the color underneath where I clicked. So in this case, it's a mix of oranges and yellows. The only thing with the Color Mixer is that you can't define what the range is. So yes, I can select an orange, but I can't tell it how much orange has to be in that color to be considered an orange. If you need that kind of precision control, you can move to the Point Color. Then we can use the Eyedropper and sample a very specific color in your image. Then we can adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity either by using the sliders or by just dragging here in this large square to adjust the hue and saturation or the small rectangle over here to adjust the luminance. So I'm going to increase the luminance here. I'll reset the hue, and I'm also going to decrease the saturation. If I want to refine this even more, I can use the Range slider. So moving it to the left says I just want to pick that specific green. I want to define the range that Camera Raw considers to be green. If I want to broaden that, I can move it over to the right, and in fact, I can even use the disclosure triangle and go into the Hue, Saturation and Luminance range and move the rectangles to adjust them as well as their fade range to narrow down what range of green is being affected. Excellent, well, I think I went a bit overboard on this image, but if we tap the P key, we can see a before and then tap it again and we'll see the after. I'm going to go ahead and click Done to return to Bridge, but as you can see, there are a number of ways to alter the color, tone and contrast in your photographs using Camera Raw.

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