The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers- P5:This new book, from Photoshop User magazine editor and bestselling author Scott Kelby, starts at the moment your digital camera photos come into Photoshop, and he shows you the Photoshop pros techniques for managing, correcting, retouching and outputting your photos to knock your client's socks off, and turn you into a Photoshop production wizard. | The Photoshop Book tor Digital Photographers Color Correcting Digital Camera Images As far as digital technology has come there s still one thing that digital cameras won t do give you perfect color every time. In fact if they gave us perfect color 50 of the time that would be incredible but unfortunately every digital camera and every scanner that captures traditional photos sneaks in some kind of color cast in your image. Generally it s a red cast but depending on the camera it could be blue. Either way you can be pretty sure there s a cast. Figure it this way If there wasn t the term color correction wouldn t be used. Here s how to get your color in line. Step One Open the digital camera photo you want to color correct. The photo shown here doesn t look too bad. but as we go through the correction process you ll see that like most photos it really needed a correction. Curves Step Two Go under the Image menu under Adjustments and choose Curves. Curves is the hands-down choice of professionals for correcting color because it gives you a greater level of control than other tools such as Levels which we use for correcting black-and-white photos . The dialog box may look intimidating at first but rhe technique you re going to learn here requires no previous knowledge of Curves and it s so easy you ll be correcting photos using Curves immediately. f load f Save Smooch Auto Options IZI I I Sè z Cancel 106 Chapter 4 Color Correction for Photographers The Photoshop Book tor Digital Photographers Curves Input Output f OK Cancel f Smooth 1 Auto Options .7 S4 Preview I5 Step Three First we need to set some preferences in the Curves dialog so we ll get the results we re after when we start correcting. Well start by setting a target color for our shadow areas. To set this preference in the Curves dialog double-click on the black Eyedropper tool it s on the lower right-hand side of the dialog the first Eyedropper from the left . A Color Picker will appear asking you to .
