Enjoy this collection of photographs by Arthur Meyerson.
Learn more about Arthur Meyerson here.
Read our conversation here.
View 12 Great Photographs From Great Photographers.
View more in The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
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The Photoshop Color Adjustment Tool Survey – The Go To, The Exotic, And The Redundant
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You can evaluate any color adjustment tool, in any software – past, current, or future –based on the control it offers over one or more of the three elements of color – Luminosity, Hue, and Saturation.
Use this as a strategy for quickly mastering the intricacies of color adjustment in Photoshop: own the six go to tools; familiarize yourself with the eight exotic tools; forget about the eleven redundant tools.
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Go To Color Adjustments
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There are a six color adjustment tools I shudder to think of living without; Curves, Hue/Saturation, Vibrance, Selective Color, Photo Filter, and Black & White
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Curves offers the ultimate control over luminosity; no other adjustment offers such precision over the relative darkness and lightness of shadows and highlights. Using the separate channels, Curves offers the same kind of precision when adjusting hue.
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Hue/Saturation and Vibrance are the two essential tools for adjusting saturation.
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What’s the difference? Vibrance saturates less saturated colors more and prevents clipping in very saturated values, producing a heavier appearance. Hue/Saturation produces a lighter more intense effect, so use it cautiously; you can quickly clip values, producing an overly smooth, overly saturated synthetic appearance if used aggressively. Similarly, handle its Hue slider with care; it’s really more useful for color transformation than it is color enhancement. Unlike Vibrance, Hue/Saturation offers the ability to adjust individual hues without the need for masking. Neither has the ability to selectively adjust the saturation of highlights, midtones, and shadows; for this you’ll need a luminosity mask. Vibrance provides only a very limited ability to selectively adjust colors with different levels of saturation while Hue/Saturation provides none. (For a way to do this read my article Saturation Masking on DigitalPhotoPro.com.)
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Photo Filter offers the ability to adjust the hue and to a more limited degree saturation of an image much like an analog lens filter would do, only much more precisely and flexibly. Though less intense, it preserves hue variety better that a Color Fill layer set to a blend mode of Color.
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Selective Color trades in subtlety, referencing CMYK adjustments without leaving RGB working spaces. Its ability to adjust the hue of whites, neutrals, and blacks and its ability to mix white and black into other hues, producing reduced saturation tints and shades, makes it unique.
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Black & White is the simplest and most powerful tool for converting color to black and white, first reducing saturation to zero and then adjusting luminosity based on original hues. It shines brightest when used in combination with Hue/Saturation and when applied selectively with masks in multiple passes.
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Exotic Color Adjustments
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You’ll see and think about color differently once you use Photoshop’s three most exotic color adjustment tools; Color Lookup Tables, Gradient Map, and Match Color. (For more detail on each of these adjustments read my previous articles on DigitalPhotoPro.com.) They affect luminosity, hue, and saturation in complex non-uniform ways.
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Color Lookup Tables combines multiple color routines or recipes into a single adjustment, making it easy to create consistent effects across multiple images; it’s most frequently but not exclusively used for color grading the many stills in a video.
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Gradient Map uses the luminosity values of an original to selectively distribute new colors into an image.
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Match Color applies the color values of one image to another, based on a complex statistical analysis of the color relationships in both; it has an added benefit of being able to neutralize strong color casts, such as those found in underwater exposures, without the use of a second image.
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Five other exotic color adjustment tools are worth noting.
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While preserving shadow and highlight detail is best done during exposure and Raw conversion, and while you can mask a Curves adjustment to the shadows or highlight, both the adjustment Shadows/Highlights and HDR Toning offer occasionally useful sharpening options that Curves doesn’t, in the form of Radius sliders, which potentially makes them more related to detail enhancement than color adjustment.
Cast Equalize (resets dynamic range), Posterize (reduces gradation), and Threshold (reduces all values to pure black or white) into the really exotic category. They have real uses for very graphic images and for analysis but offer little that is useful for photorealistic images.
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Redundant Color Adjustments
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Part of mastering a tool is learning what not to use. Many of Photoshop’s color adjustment tools are redundant, offering similar control over the same elements of color – with less power and precision. You can simplify your toolset by eliminating these eleven adjustment types from your workflow. Instead, use the tools that give you more control.
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Brightness/Contrast (Use Curves instead.), Exposure (Use Curves instead.) Levels (Use Curves instead.), Color Balance, (Use Curves instead.), Invert (Use Curves instead.), Equalize (Use Curves instead.), Desaturate (Use Hue/Saturation instead.), Replace Color (Instead, use Select By Color Range and then Hue/Saturation.), and Channel Mixer, Apply Image, and Calculations (Instead, use Layer Styles to blend channels, with or without a mask. (For more on this technique see my previous article Blending Channels on DigitalPhotoPro.com.)
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See the pattern(s)? Two adjustments, Curves and Hue/Saturation, and one layer technique can outperform all of these eleven adjustments.
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Blend Modes
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You can make any color adjustment in Photoshop more precisely target an element of color by using one of four Blend Modes – Luminosity, Hue, Saturation, and Color (a combination of Hue and Saturation). Simply change an adjustment layer’s blend mode from its default Normal. If, instead, you apply an adjustment directly to an image, immediately after applying it, select Edit: Fade (Command / Shift / F) to change the Mode. As a general guideline for all color adjustments, I recommend you make a standard practice of using the blend mode of the element of color you are adjusting, making exceptions when desired.
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Lightroom & Camera Raw
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Can the separate but related programs Lightroom and Camera Raw do things that Photoshop can’t? Yes. While the majority of these two interfaces, which differ in appearance but not in function, provide controls that are quite similar to but sometimes more limited than what you find in Photoshop, they can do three things that can’t be done in the same way in Photoshop: first, White Balance (Curves and Photo Filter are similar but different.); second, Clarity (High Pass filtration is similar but different); and third, the HSL panel is able to produce luminosity adjustments of individual hues without adverse side-effects on dynamic range.
While the precision of the adjustments provided in Lightroom and Camera Raw is often more limited, it’s usually best to do the basic heavy lifting during Raw conversion – it’s less destructive – and then either dramatic transformations and/or fine-tuning in Photoshop.
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In the future, if we discover a single interface that allows us to precisely and without side-effects control the luminosity, hue and saturation of any range of brightness (L), colors (H), and intensities (S), then we’ll have found the Holy Grail of color adjustment. For now, the Photoshop interface, a product of more than 25 years of continual expansion, is more complicated than it needs to be, but it’s capable of producing magic – so much magic. When you clarify your thinking about color, you’ll find it becomes much easier to navigate interfaces and master color adjustment. Keep it simple. Remember, color only has three elements – Luminosity, Hue, and Saturation – so color adjustment is all about controlling the relationships between them … nothing more and nothing less.
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Read more color theory resources here.
Read more color adjustment resources here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Style.
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” ― Gore Vidal
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.” – Jean-Luc Godard
“Style is the answer to everything. / A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing / To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it / To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.” – Charles Bukowski
“Style is the most valuable asset of the modern artist. That’s probably why so many styles are reported lost or stolen each year.” – Brad Holland
“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.” – Orson Welles
“Don’t look for gimmicks to give your work style. You might be stuck with them for life. Or, worse yet, you might have to change your ‘style’ every few years.” – Irwin Greenberg
“Every age has its style, motifs, tunes and rhythms – its special sense of space and time.” – Vladimir Gusev
“Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live.” – Gianni Versace
“Fashions fade, style is eternal.” – Yves Saint Laurent
“Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn’t follow style, it creates it.” – Darby Bannard
“Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with ‘style’ because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.” – Franz Marc
“Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience.” – Ernst Haas
“A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias… it is the Self escaping into the open.” – E. B. White
“Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.” – Ben Shahn
“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.” – Wallace Stevens
“We don’t need to impose a style, we just have to show up and be present to catch its unfolding.” – Linda Saccoccio
“When doodling, you are not trying to emulate anyone else but subconsciously developing a vocabulary of shapes and hand movements that are simply and wonderfully your own. Doodling seems to be one way to develop a personal style …” – John Stuart Pryce
“What influenced my style was the feeling that I was a lousy artist… I was like the ugly duckling, not knowing what I was, style-wise, and thinking I was all on my own… I evolved into a style that couldn’t be compared to anyone else.” – Jim Rowe
“Many a fine style has evolved from a decent handicap.” – Robert Genn
“The unity in any painter’s work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way… style.” – Frank Auerbach
“Style is something that should come in spite of itself… Because you’ve worked, you’ve looked.” – Mark Adams
“After years of painting, drawing, sculpting or whatever, your style becomes you. You are your style. Inseparable, one and the same, no matter what you choose to create.” – Sonja Donnelly
“One of the characteristics of great drawings is the artist’s whole-hearted acceptance of his own style and character. It is as if the drawing says for the artist, ‘Here I am.” – Nathan Goldstein
“The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle… and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.” – John Leonard
“After the spirit and the thoughts are concentrated, the ideas may be developed in accordance with the style; and then it may be said, that what is grasped by the mind is expressed by the hand.” – Anonymous Chinese painter
“A man’s style is his mind’s voice.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The style is the man himself.” – George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
“Style is the image of character.” – Edward Gibbon
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” – Rachel Zoe
“He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.” – Paul Klee
“Self-plagiarism is style.” – Alfred Hitchcock
“Why change? Everyone has his own style. When you have found it, you should stick to it.” ― Audrey Hepburn
“As you grow older, it dawns on you that you are yourself – that your job is not to force yourself into a style but to do what you want.” – Beth van Hoesen
“Once you’ve built your reputation on a particular signature style, it can be hard to wriggle your way out of the straitjacket of your own brand identity. After all, where does distinctively recognizable end and stalely repetitious begin?” – Judith Palmer
“One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.” – Georges Braque
“An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.” – Henri Matisse
“The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.” – Pablo Picasso
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” – Matthew Arnold
“Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.” – Victor Hugo
“To achieve style, begin by affecting none.” – E. B. White
“Only great minds can afford a simple style.” – Stendhal
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It’s the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.” – Chuck Close
Read more in The Essential Collection of Creativity Quotes.
Learn more about Chris Rainier here.
Read my conversation with Chris Rainier here.
View more 12 Great Photographs From Great Photographers.
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
View more in The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
“Professional photographers are obsessed over the details, but we wanted to find out how obsessed. We invited three people to analyze the same print and used eye-tracking technology to trace every eye movement they made. In the end, it was clear, a photographer’s obsession is unmatched.”
Looking for authoritative information on climate change?
Find the books climate scientists recommend here.
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Photoshop CC 2015 was updated Nov 30.
What’s new?
Here’s a list of updates with links for more detail.
Find a timeline of Photoshop CC’s new features dating back to June 2013 here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Tobias Hutzler’s balancing act is truly impressive.
Enjoy!
My December desktop calendar features an image from Iceland.
Find out more about this image here.
Learning to see in black and white has changed. Prior to the 21st century, black and white photographers developed a heightened sensitivity to intensity and direction of light as well as tonal relationships between highlights and shadows. For the most part, they discounted the appearance of hue and saturation, with a few exceptions.
These perceptual skills are still very important for 21st century digital black and white photographers. But, today, previsualizing possibilities becomes much more challenging. Because you can make any hue light or dark, globally or locally, dramatically extending the variability of an image's tonal structure, the two additional variables, hue and saturation, need to be factored in rather than factored out.