Photoshop Tutorial (video) - Color Correction with the Eyedropper

Just a little 2-minute video showing how to use the Curves eyedropper technique to correct color in a photo (plus a tip for correcting portraits.)

http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=QmX2xu73tW0

Hope you find it helpful!

Nice job! Thanks for this simple and powerful technique.

Chas, thanks for the kind words! Glad you like it!

That was nice, simple, easy to use. Thank you!

My problem isn't ever finding black and white ... it's the midtone points that I can't find due to severe colorblindness.

dave

Short but straight to the point, the way a tutorial should be done!

(Dontcha' just hate videos and written tutorials where people babble on about irrelevant stuff?)

Well done!

Hi snyderman,
That midtone dropper can be a real challenge. I go into a lot more detail in the actual course about finding the midpoint, of course. One trick you might use if colorblind is using the INFO panel and looking for points that are neutral by finding those where the RGB values are nearly equal. That's pure math and won't rely on your color vision!

Very cool and thanks. I find myself second guessing my adjustments since I'm colorblind and this will really help out!

photofreak99 wrote in post #11701587
Hi snyderman,
That midtone dropper can be a real challenge. I go into a lot more detail in the actual course about finding the midpoint, of course. One trick you might use if colorblind is using the INFO panel and looking for points that are neutral by finding those where the RGB values are nearly equal. That's pure math and won't rely on your color vision!

That won't work if you are trying to correct a colour imbalance, as shown in the video. The whole point of the midtone dropper is to select an area that should be neutral, but probably isn't due to the imbalance.

Thanks very much for this,its very useful and easy.It saves a lot of messing about

Cool. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

thank u

snyderman wrote in post #11681774
That was nice, simple, easy to use. Thank you!

My problem isn't ever finding black and white ... it's the midtone points that I can't find due to severe colorblindness.

dave

In a pinch, if you are not sure of a neutral reference in an image, you can try this technique.

Let's assume you have no layered edits and the first thing you want to do is WB your image.

1) Cmd/CTRL-J to duplicate the background.
2) On that new copy of the image, perform "Filter > Blur > Average"
3) Now make a new curves adjustment layer at the top of the stack and use photofreak99's mid dropper technique on the averaged layer. This will shift the curves to neutralize the average tone in the image.
4) Now turn off the visibility of the averaged layer and the neutralizing curve will affect the image on the background layer.

This technique is sorta kinda like autoWB. It is predicated upon the assumption that the average tone across an image is relatively neutral and that the cast in an image will be represented in the averaging of all pixels. You could also use a selection of a part of an image, average it and use the curves+dropper on that patch as well, if you suspect that that patch represents an overall neutral tone.

Give it a try using photofreak's dropper method and see if it works. Not being colorblind, I'm not sure how you verify the accuracy of color in your images, but hopefully this will take some of the guesswork out should you run into a situation where there is no easily identifiable neutral tone. It does not always work, especially when compared to white balancing on a raw file with a neutral target, but it works well enough most times. Here is an example:

1) RAW WB dropper on Lastolite neutral target:

Kirk, far from hijacking, you contributed some great additions! Thanks for chipping in. I look forward to trying your technique!

A note after trying Kirk's technique on some photos: As with most things in color correction, I find sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't (depending on whether the colors in your image really "should" average out to neutral). In some shots it works great, in some that naturally have a dominant color, which skews the average, it's not so great.

Of course the same caveat applies to my Info panel RGB suggestion. Sometimes that trick works, and sometimes not, depending on how far off your color tint is, and whether you pick the right "near equal" combination (i.e. one where the outlying number is the one that needs correcting.) Pick the wrong combination and you'll skew it the wrong way.

If anyone else has a trick for finding neutral gray, I welcome it!
Phil

thanks for posting. you mentioned this can be done in lightroom, can you post that vid?