Thirty Second Color Correction in Photoshop

07 Dec 2008 •

Often when a client sends over photographs they’d like to use for their websites, they were taken with a less-than-professional camera and the colors, in a word, suck. Over or under-exposed, a bad picture can really diminish the beautiful website you’ve designed.

This weekend I helped a friend put a couple snapshots of her Thanksgiving party into a simple online photo gallery to share with her friends & family, but the colors in her pics were just terrible. So I showed her this quick technique I picked up way back in a Black and White Photography class I took in college that you can use to spice up your photos in Photoshop.

Photoshop has lots of very powerful and very intimidating photo manipulation tools, with which you can do some amazing things. But for those of us who aren’t professional photographers mastering them is something we just don’t always have the time to do. In this little tutorial I’ll show you a technique that only takes about thirty seconds and will get you by 90% of the time.

1 ) Open Up Your Washed Out Image

I’m going to assume you’re familiar with Photoshop and have you open up the image you want to fix up. Here’s a picture of the Post Office in downtown Cleveland I took with my Canon PowerShot SD1000 (a great little point and shoot digital camera, I might add):

Click for a larger view. Not a bad snapshot, but let’s see what it looks like with a little more contrast.

2) Create a New Adjustment Layer

At the bottom of your Layers pallete, click on the little half black/half white circle to create a new adjustment layer:

Select “Levels…” from the list that pops up, and you should get this menu, with 3 little eyedropper icons:

Let’s start with the first eyedropper on the left.

3) Set the Black Point

Click on the first eyedropper. Your cursor should now be the eyedropper. In the photo, look for a dark spot that is not absolute black. I’m going to use the shadow underneath the overhang:

If your picture goes black or gets too much contrast, just undo (command + Z/Control + Z) and try again. If you pick a spot that is absolute black, nothing will happen. If you pick a spot too light, everything will go dark. Don’t be afraid to experiment a few times with different spots, but don’t get too hung up, we still have two more points to set.

3) Set the White Point

Now click on the eyedropper on the right. Take the white dropper and choose a point that is lighter, but not completely white. Just like with the black point, choosing pure white will get you nothing and choosing too dark will completely wash out your image.

I’m going to grab the light spot in the corner underneath the lettering:

That looks pretty good, and sometimes that’s all you’ll have to do. But it now it looks too bright for me, so I’m going to keep going. Let’s finish this up.

4) Set the Gray Point

Click on the middle eyedropper. This one will try to balance out the colors between the black and white points, and you’ll probably have to undo a few times to get the result you’re looking for. Look for the best neutral gray you can find. You can also get some cool effects right in here, so play around. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Done? Alright. I’m going to use the shadow below the top of the last column on the right:

5) Save!

Yep, that’s it; we’re done. It probably took you longer to read this than to actually do the correction. Here’s what we got:

The photo is a little brighter and sharper, the colors are a bit more rich, and you didn’t waste all morning adjusting the curves. Take a look at the difference:

And here are the original and the result next to each other. Much better hey?

Notes

If at any time you mangle your colors beyond all recognition, just cancel out of the Levels menu and start over. Also, don’t worry about messing up your beautiful composition; all the adjustments take place on their own layer so you can try as many different adjustments as you want. Or scrap it all after you’re done and start over.

If you’re going for some over-saturated effects you can use more than one Adjustment Layer on top of each other to get some cool combinations. Have fun.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Mac) was used for this example. Some menus/effects may be different in other versions.