- Once digital cameras arrived on the scene,
and once I could stop worry about wasting film,
I started taking pictures, and I mean a lot of pictures.
And it wasn't long before I started shooting pretty much
all the photos for my layouts and for my books.
And then clients started asking
if I'd take pictures for them.
And the next thing you know,
I've written five books on digital photography.
And I mention all this to you just to say yes,
I'm a designer, and I usually talk about design,
but given my experiences with cameras,
I'm going to claim that what I have to say about photography
might also be worth a listen.
Now I'd love to talk about
photography and cameras all day long,
but I'm going to limit myself here
to a certain color related aspect of photography.
What I want you to know right up front is that
above all, the colors your camera gives you
when you snap a photo,
they're rarely the ideal colors for that image.
Adjustments and modifications,
they almost always need to be made
to give images the clarity
and the stylistic flavor that they need
to present themselves effectively.
I make most of my image alterations in Photoshop,
and what I want to do here
is demonstrate a few of my favorite
color enhancing photoshop treatments and adjusment layers.
Here's a photo straight from my camera.
And it's not a great shot, as you can see.
It's underexposed, there are dull colors,
and you know, in other words, it's actually perfect
for this color rescuing and image enchancing demonstration.
I'll start by going to the layer menu
and adding a Curves Adjustment Layer.
I'm going to use it to lighten the lights
and darken the darks.
So it's way better already.
There's more contrast.
And in color terms, that just means we're talking about
a better value structure.
You can see that this also boosted
the saturation of our colors, that's also good.
Next, a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer.
I'll go with it's Deep Yellow setting.
I'm going to raise it's strength
all the way to 75 percent.
Since I'm going for at least a touch of that
nostalgic yellow look.
Here's something I often do to give my photos
a nice contemporary look.
I change the Blend Mode setting
of a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer
to either Soft Light or Overlay.
I'm going to go with Soft Light in this case.
This both tints the image
and raises its color contrast another notch.
Here's the image without this adjusment,
and here it is with it again.
Now I might normally be inclined
to use a Shadows and Highlights Adjustment
to rescue some of the detail in the dark shadows,
like below the old fire truck.
But you know, I'm actually liking
the deep contrast that we have going here,
and I'm going to make an executive decision
and leave things just like they are.
Next, for the sake of generating a touch of artistry,
I'm going to add one more Adjustment Layer,
a Hue and Saturation layer.
With this layer, I'll go in and change
the photo's coloring a little bit.
I'll use the layer's pull-down menu
and tell it to pay attention only to the blues here,
And I'll nudge the Hue slider to the left.
This adds a touch of blue-green to the sky.
I'll also move the Saturation level down to mute this color.
I like that.
Now I'll go and select Red,
and I'll try out some different looks for the truck itself.
I kind of like this dusty orange
that I got by moving both the Hue and the Saturation sliders
to the right a little ways.
Ok, done.
Check out the before image,
and now the after.
Quite a makeover, both in terms of
the image's colors and it's stylistic flavor.
I'd say this image is ready to be presented
either on it's own, or in a layout, on a website.
So chances are, you have got all kinds of photos
sitting around on a computer or on a hardrive somewhere.
Pull out some favorites, give these treatments a try.
I think you're really going to be amazed
at your ability to transform even the most ho-hum image
into something that's definitely worth a second look.