Photo Color Correction

Adobe Photoshop Tutorials

Introduction

Question: Why is it that photos which would never be acceptable for publishing in a magazine always seem to be acceptable for publishing on the internet?

Answer: There is no prepress. This puts a company on the same level as the 14-year-old kid who is making his own geocities website. Neither one does any prepress.

Where are the professional photo services for publishing online?

Definition

Adobe, the developer of Photoshop, offers the following definition of prepress:

The steps required to turn a design into final form, ready for final printing on a printing press. May include preflight, color correction, color trapping, imposition, color separation, proofing, and imagesetting.

Photos viewed online are typically in their final form (they are not going to be printed), so there is no requirement for color trapping, imposition, color separation or imagesetting, but there is a need for color correction.

Kodak offers the following definition of color correction:

The process of correcting or enhancing the color of an image.

Purpose

Why make a website entirely about photo color correction? This website was created because photo color correction can be a very significant part of photo editing for a website's total visual impact, and yet it is usually neglected by webmasters and companies publishing content online.

The reason is webmasters have no training and no skill. Companies turn to web design firms for their websites, or they appoint in-house webmasters, but the webmasters don't know much at all about photo color correction.

All photo color correction skills cannot be learned quickly, not in a day, not over a weekend, and not after a week. There is a steep learning curve. It takes much longer to learn than most all other photo editing techniques, and most people have neither the time, nor the interest, nor the patience to master photo color correction.

There are two issues here, two things which take time. Firstly, learning the software, and, secondly, developing a trained eye. It can take months before the software is mastered and subtle problems become instantly obvious and perfectly clear to the trained eye.

Software

The software used for photo color correction is the industry-standard image-editing program: Photoshop.

Photoshop's color management control panel adds so much depth to the program it makes photo color correction one of Photoshop's most powerful features.

Photoshop is an extremely powerful program which was first sold more than 10 years ago. When Photoshop 1.0 was released in February 1990, it did not have the photo color correction capabilities which it has today. It has been continuously developed with new versions coming out regularly since then, with more powerful color management features being added in recent years. The most significant color correction features were introduced in Photoshop 4.0 and 5.0.

The software used for photo color correction of images on this website was done with Photoshop 5.0. You don't need the latest version of Photoshop to do web photo color correction because the power was released in the 1990s.

The focus of photocolorcorrection.com is web photo color correction. All of the techniques have been tested for web photos; none of the techniques have been tested for printed photos.

The goal is to bring web photo publishing closer to magazine photo publishing.

Approach

The approach to photo color correction is systematic, logical, and comprehensive. Start at the beginning, end at the end, place Adjustment Layers in the order in which they are presented, and try every Adjustment Layer.

The goal is full visual impact. Total color control. The assumptions are the software developers at Adobe think the default Adjustment Layer order is logical; there are no extraneous color management features; and they have developed Photoshop to the point where total color management is possible.

The other assumptions are there is no way of predicting how much (if any) color editing is going to improve the quality of a photo. The only way to know if the image can be improved is to try. The only way to know if the image can be improved further is to try each Adjustment Layer.

Damage Causes

Why do photos have to be color corrected? What causes color problems? Weak color can be the result of one or more problems. It can be human error or technological error -- or both.

Here are a few examples. The photographer can take pictures with poor lighting; the camera can be defective. The film developer could be unprofessional; the film development equipment could be defective. A person can scan photos without calibrating the scanner; the scanner can be defective.

The best assumption about a picture which has been taken, developed, and scanned is that its color can be corrected.

I heard someone say, "There is no such thing as a perfect scan." This is true of the $30,000 drum scanner and the $100 flatbed scanner. It is true if the scanner was calibrated and even if it wasn't calibrated.

Digital cameras are now used to bypass scanning, but that doesn't mean the cameras or the people operating them are perfect.

Retro photos may need photo color correction due to fading. If the pictures were not stored properly, very often the saturation starts to disappear. Either color will be lost or color will change.

Not all color pictures can stand the tests of time even if they were stored properly. Film today is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago. They did their best with what they had at the time.

Total color correction often requires a series of changes, not a single change. A single change can make a huge difference, but it doesn't mean the correction is over, or the picture cannot be improved.