This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Color
If you've studied art, you might have run across the idea of defining colors in terms of their hue, their saturation (or intensity), and their brightness. And if you've never heard of this color model, you might want to stop off at the sidebar on this page, "Color Me Impressed," and spend some time getting used to it.
Color Me Impressed
What better way to learn about how color works than to get your hands dirty with some paint—metaphorically, of course. To get a handle on how hue, saturation, and brightness work together, switch to Full Edit mode and click the Foreground color swatch in the toolbox to open the Color Picker (see Figure 6.5).
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Figure 6.5 In HSB mode, your color choice is determined by the position of the cursor in the color field combined with the slider's hue setting.
Choosing colors with the Color Picker is almost exactly like poking your fingers into a paint palette and mixing up just the shade you need. First, drag the slider on the rainbow-colored hue bar to choose the basic color you want.
Then click around in the larger color field to choose darker, lighter, more intense, and less intense variations of that color. The color you're mixing up is displayed as the top swatch next to the color slider, with the previous Foreground color below it for comparison. As you move from left to right in the color field, your color choice becomes more saturated—basically, it moves farther from gray. And as you move from top to bottom, the color becomes darker.
Meanwhile, the numbers in the H, S, and B fields to the right of the color slider show you the actual mathematical values associated with each color you choose. Hue is measured in degrees; it's often pictured as a rainbow-colored circle instead of a straight bar. True red is considered the zero point, so the number of degrees indicates how far around the circle your color is from red. A measurement of 180° gives you the opposite, or complement, of red, which is cyan (greenish blue).
Saturation and brightness are both measured in percentages. A saturation value of 0 gives you a color with no color in it—that is, a shade of gray. And brightness ranges from 0%, which is black, to 100%, which is white. Try clicking and dragging in the color field to see how the saturation and brightness numbers change as you move the cursor.
Feel free to experiment with the Color Picker until you feel you have a good understanding of how colors depend on these three attributes of hue, saturation, and brightness. Then you can move on to working with the Color Fixes.
Working with the Components of Color
We've already worked with brightness; the controls for that aspect of color are located in the Lighting Fixes section. So here, we're able to modify a picture's overall saturation and hue. Essentially, you increase saturation to improve faded colors, and you change the hue setting to fix a color cast.
The Color Fixes also include two specialized variations on the Hue slider: Temperature and Tint. Dragging the Temperature slider makes the image look warmer (more red) or cooler (more blue). When you have the color temperature where you want it, you can use the Tint slider to fine-tune the image's color.
Let's try these tools on a picture that can definitely use some help.
Try it Yourself: Fix an Off-Color Photo
The photo I'm using here is also on the book's website, so you can download it and follow right along with me. I took it at one of my favorite New Orleans restaurants, Café Degas, and the file is called degas.jpg.
- Find degas.jpg in the Organizer or on your hard drive, and open it.
- Set your View menu preference, making sure you're using one of the Before & After options so that you can see exactly what effect your modifications have on the picture.
- Try dragging the Saturation slider just a bit to the right. This picture is already pretty highly saturated, but a bit more will just make the neon sign glow a touch more brightly.
- Now experiment with the Hue slider. It provides some pretty neat special effects—I especially like the purple version of the image you can produce by dragging the slider about halfway to the left end—but it's not really improving the picture any. Click the Cancel button and move on.
- The lighting in this scene didn't look orange when I was standing there, but it came out that way in the picture; this sort of color shift often occurs when you photograph artificial lights at night. Drag the Temperature slider to the left to eliminate that orange cast; make sure you move the slider well into the blue area of the bar.
- Okay, the orange is gone, but now the image looks too green. That's what the Tint slider is for! Drag it rightward to about the three-quarters position, or even further, depending on where you placed the Temperature slider (see Figure 6.6, both here and in the color section). Watch the bushes (they should still be green) and the skin tones on the waiter's face (he's leaning in the doorway).
Figure 6.6 When combined, the Temperature and Tint sliders can work wonders.
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When you're done making these changes, you should see that the sky at the very top of the picture, above the restaurant's roof, is now a lovely midnight blue. If so, you're on the right track—that's exactly what color the sky was on that warm evening in the Crescent City.