Underwater-Photoshop :: Adjustments :: Adjusting Colour

Adjusting Colour

CS5 offers a baffling array of methods to adjust color in your images. Which one you choose is largely a case of personal preference. I shall merely suggest a couple and you can make your own mind up.

Color casts

RAW files do not have a fixed white balance like the other formats e.g. TIFFThe Tagged-Image File Format (TIF) is a bitmap format extensively used to exchange files between applications and computer platforms. It is found in most paint imaging and DTP programs. TIFF is a lossless full-color image file format. , JPEGThe Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format is widely used. It is a bitmap format commonly used to display photographs and other continuous-tone images in web pages on the Internet. JPEG retains all the color information in an RGB image but uses a compression scheme that reduces file size by discarding extra data not essential to the display of the image. etc. Adobe Camera Raw offers 3 different ways to balance color temperature within your photo.

1. There is a drop down under the white balance heading that allows you to adjust for daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent etc.
2. You can manually adjust the color temperature using the temperature and tint sliders.
3. Finally and this is one of my favorites, you can use the White Balance Tool. With this you simply use an eyedropperA tool to sample color to select a point in your image that is white, or you can select the black point, and the rest of the image will be brought into line.

Color adjustment of other file formats within Photoshop is similar (except for having no white balance option). You have auto levels on the image menu, or you can use levels. This dialog allows you to remove color casts using a sliderA sliding control in digital editing software used to adjust color tone opacity etc. and with reference to a histogram or by using the eyedropper and the white point tool.

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