The first command we’ll unleash on the baseball boys picture is Auto Levels (in the Editor’s Enhance menu when you’re working in Full Edit mode). You can also press Shift+Ctrl+L to execute the command. But first let’s talk a bit about levels.

No, we’re not worried (at this point) about whether the picture’s horizon is level or about your degree of Photoshop Elements expertise. In this context, the term levels refers to the differing levels of brightness and darkness in a picture. Ideally, you want color pictures as well as black-and-white ones to have some white pixels, some black ones, and a good selection of shades between white and black. If the entire image is done in medium shades, there’s no contrast and hence no visual interest. Auto Levels attempts to remedy this problem by making the lightest pixel in the picture white, turning the darkest pixel in the picture black, and spreading out all the others in the range in between (see Figure 14.2, here and in the color section). This gives the picture more contrast, but it can sometimes affect the color, for good or ill.

Figure 14.2. Auto Levels makes a big improvement in this photo.

If you decide you don’t like Photoshop Elements’ Levels adjustment, you can try adjusting levels manually (keep reading; we give this a try later in this hour). And if you get to the Levels dialog box and still can’t find a setting you like, you can always just click the Auto button in the dialog to go back to the automatic adjustment.

Without affecting the actual colors in the picture, Auto Contrast makes the light colors lighter and the dark colors darker, to increase the overall contrast in the picture (see Figure 14.3). You apply it by choosing Enhance, Auto Contrast or pressing Alt+Shift+Ctrl+L. You can also adjust contrast yourself using the Brightness/Contrast dialog, which we get to later in the hour.

Figure 14.3. Auto Contrast does a good job with the baseball boys photo; you can also see it in the color section.

Remember how I said earlier that color is subjective? Nowhere else in Photoshop Elements is that fact more clear than it is here. When you choose Enhance, Auto Color Correction or press Shift+Ctrl+B, Photoshop Elements fiddles with both your picture’s contrast and its color to produce what it thinks is the best result (see Figure 14.4, here and in the color section). Sometimes the program is right; other times, it’s very, very wrong.

Figure 14.4. I’m not thrilled with the result of applying the Auto Color Correction command (check it out in the color section of this book); I’d rather see if I can do better with manual tools.

Nonetheless, it’s always worth giving this command a try. Often it does a really creditable job of improving a picture, and you can always undo the changes if you don’t like the results.

Right-brained types love Color Variations. If you’re more the left-brained, analytical, by-the-numbers type, this feature might not be for you. But either way, give it a try and see what you think. Start by choosing Enhance, Adjust Color, Color Variations in the Editor (see Figure 14.5, here and in the color section of this book).

Figure 14.5. Playing with Color Variations is fun, but it’s best suited to working on photos that aren’t seriously flawed.

The whole point of Color Variations is to adjust an image by feel instead of by the numbers. First, you decide whether you want to work on the picture’s midtones, shadows, or highlights, or even its saturation. Then you click the thumbnails to add or subtract a color, make the picture lighter or darker, or change its saturation. The Amount slider controls how much effect each click has on the picture, so you can dial it down and click multiple times, or turn it up and click just once or twice.

You can change your settings and work on each part of the image in turn; start with the midtones, then fix the shadows, then work on the highlights. Each of these offers you eight choices for color images:

With grayscale pictures, you see only the Lighten and Darken thumbnails and you don’t have the option of adjusting saturation. For color pictures, though, Saturation works a little differently from the other controls; it affects the entire image, and your only choices are Less Saturation and More Saturation. Increasing saturation makes all the picture’s colors more intense, and decreasing saturation mutes the colors.

Clicking around in the Color Variations dialog is pure fun. Each time you click to make a change, all the thumbnails update so that you can see what effect your next change will have. Meanwhile, the two larger thumbnails at the top of the dialog show the original picture and the picture as it will look with the changes you’ve made. If you want to go back a step, you’ll find handy Undo and Redo buttons at the right side of the dialog, accompanied by a Reset Image button that enables you to start over.

If you’re a gardener, you’ll probably know that a weed is defined as anything that’s growing where you don’t want it to grow. For a photographer, a color cast is similar—it’s a color that shows up where it’s not wanted and shouldn’t be. Frequently, color casts are caused by lighting conditions, but they can also occur in traditional photos. Some of my World War II–era black-and-white prints are now an odd combination of yellow and purple because the paper has yellowed and the black image has, well, purpled. Chemicals do strange things over time; you should see what has happened to some of the color prints from the 1960s in my family’s photo albums.

Regardless of where it comes from, you want to get rid of any color cast. To accomplish this, start by choosing Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color Cast (see Figure 14.6). The Remove Color Cast command actually adds some of the opposite color on the color wheel to counteract the effects of the color cast. You saw how this worked when you looked at the Variations command; if a photo is too blue, you can add more yellow to fix it.

Figure 14.6. When there’s no color cast in a photo, Remove Color Cast shouldn’t have any effect—but watch out for the exception that proves the rule.

To determine what color is causing the problem, you need to help a bit by clicking a part of the picture that should be completely desaturated. In other words, the area you click should be white, black, or true gray. When you click to indicate this spot, Photoshop Elements examines it to see what color it really is. That color is the one you want to counteract, so Photoshop Elements calculates an appropriate amount of the opposite color to add so that the neutral area is once again white, black, or gray.

If you don’t like the results, click Reset and find another neutral location to click. When you’re happy, click OK.

The Hue/Saturation dialog in Photoshop Elements looks just like the one in traditional Photoshop. With Hue/Saturation, you can completely transform an image in several different ways:

See? You thought I was exaggerating, but I wasn’t. Anyway, you start by choosing Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation or pressing Ctrl+U (see Figure 14.7).

Figure 14.7. The Hue/Saturation dialog has a lot going on, but you can master it.

First, do you want to colorize the picture? If so, check the Colorize box and then drag the Hue slider to the color you want. Use the Saturation and Lightness sliders to make final adjustments; click OK, and you’re done.

If not, leave the Colorize box unchecked. In this case, the first step in adjusting hue and saturation is to decide whether you want to change the whole image or just some of the colors it contains. To work on all the picture’s colors, leave the Edit pop-up menu set at Master; to work on a range of colors within the picture, choose that range from the Edit menu. (You can fine-tune the colors you want to modify; check out the sidebar “Pick a Color, Any Color” to learn more.)

Pick a Color, Any Color

Restricting your actions in the Hue/Saturation dialog box to a particular range of colors starts with choosing anything other than Master from the Edit pop-up menu. Seriously, don’t worry about what color category you choose, and don’t stress that there’s no Purples option. Just pick one, and then click in the image to pick up the color you really want. Your cursor turns into an eyedropper for this purpose. To add to the range of colors you’re selecting, switch to the plus eyedropper and click or click and drag; do the same with the minus eyedropper to remove colors from the range.

Any time you restrict the color range in Hue/Saturation, you can see the color range that you’re working with indicated between the two color bars at the bottom of the dialog. The medium-gray area indicates the colors you picked with the eyedropper, or the colors defined by the Edit menu choice; the dark gray areas to either side indicate similar colors that will be partially affected by your edits (color fall-off). You can shorten or lengthen the color fall-off areas by dragging the sliders at their boundaries, but don’t shorten them too much or you’ll get very abrupt color transitions in the picture (see Figure 14.8).

Figure 14.8. Knowing how to restrict the colors you’re operating on with Hue/Saturation is the sort of thing that takes you beyond the novice level in Photoshop Elements.

Photoshop Elements keeps track of the color ranges you set up and adds them to the Edit pop-up menu, where they stay until you click Cancel or OK. You’ll see them named with the closest standard color range and a number (such as Red 1). The program keeps track of up to six of these custom ranges, but they’re all forgotten as soon as you leave Hue/Saturation.

Next, you need to specify what you want to do to the selected colors by dragging the three sliders. Hue represents the actual colors in the picture; by dragging it, you shift those colors around the color wheel. The two color bars at the bottom of the dialog represent the original image colors (the upper one) and the revised image colors (the lower one), arranged in their order on the color wheel. As you drag the Hue slider, the lower color bar moves to show you the new colors corresponding to each of the original colors.

The other two sliders, Saturation and Lightness, are simpler to understand and to manipulate. Drag Saturation to the left to dull the colors you’re working with; drag it to the right to intensify them. If you take the Saturation value all the way down to −100, the picture (or the selected colors) turns grayscale. At the other end of the scale, if you take Saturation all the way up, things get pretty psychedelic. Meanwhile, Lightness is equivalent to Brightness in the HSB color model. Increase it to lighten the colors, decrease it to darken them. A Lightness value of −100 yields a completely black image, and a value of +100 turns the picture completely white.

What should you do when the colors in your pictures aren’t just a bit off—they’re way off? You have two choices: Fix ’em or get rid of ’em entirely. The latter is the simpler choice: All you have to do is choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color, and the color is instantly gone. You can get the same effect by choosing Enhance, Adjust Color, Hue/Saturation and simply dragging the Saturation slider all the way to the left. However—you knew there was going to be a “however,” didn’t you?—you’ll get better results by using the Enhance, Convert to Black and White command.

Why? Good black-and-white photography is about more than just the absence of color. When you don’t have color to create a mood and highlight important parts of an image, you need to do more with what you do have. In other words, you need to be sure that the lighting and contrast are good enough to do for the picture what the color would have done. Using Convert to Black and White gives you more control, and it’s the best choice for times when you’re converting the whole picture to black and white, as opposed to just desaturating an area within the image. Let’s take a quick look at how this command works.

This is another one of those giant dialog boxes (see Figure 14.9, here and in the color section of this book). As with Color Variations, the box has two large preview thumbnails at the top, but that’s where the similarity ends. Here, you start by choosing a style. These are different preset conversions that offer varying amounts of brightness in each area of the spectrum. For example, the Portraits setting makes reds and blues somewhat darker than the Newspaper setting. This is because newspaper printing is prone to what’s called “dot gain,” when ink sinks into the paper and spreads so that each dot of ink in a photo looks bigger and, therefore, darker than it should. When preparing images for newspaper printing, you want them to be a bit lighter than normal to make up for the dot gain that will take place on press.

Figure 14.9. Don’t let the dialog’s size intimidate you; it’s mostly preview. Be sure to check it out in the color section.

Other styles are based on the content of your picture more than what you plan to do with it. There’s one for portraits, one for scenic landscapes, one for particularly vivid landscapes, and one for urban scenes and snapshots. Each of these darkens and lightens particular colors in a picture for a different result (see Figure 14.10). Be sure to try them all when you’re converting a picture.

Figure 14.10. I used four different settings to convert this photo in very different ways. Clockwise from top left: Portrait, Scenic Landscape, Urban/Snapshots, and Vivid Landscapes.

When you’ve settled on a style, you can tweak it by moving the four sliders, one for each of the RGB colors and one for contrast. No rules apply; just pay attention to what you like and don’t like with each tweak, and keep going until you like what you see.

Replacing colors is, in a way, much simpler. The hardest part of this process is making sure that you’re affecting only the colors you want to change, not the rest of the picture. It’s a lot more fun, though—you can make the blue sky pink, turn a green dress purple, and compensate for all your friends’ lack of fashion sense with a click or two.

Everything begins in the Editor, where you choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Replace Color (see Figure 14.11). First, click in your picture to indicate the color you want to replace. See how the preview immediately colors all matching areas white, in a sea of black? That’s showing you what parts of the image will be affected by your changes. Of course, this is assuming that your preview is set to Selection, which is the default. If it’s set to Image, it shows you only the picture (which I find rather useless because the image window is right next door). Regardless, you can also click the color swatch next to the eyedroppers to choose a color to replace, but I find it’s simplest just to use the eyedroppers in the image itself. Switch to the plus eyedropper to add more shades to your selection, and use the minus eyedropper to remove colors from it. When you’ve selected the bulk of the area you’re targeting, drag the Fuzziness slider to the right a bit to grab those last little bits.

Figure 14.11. The Replace Color dialog makes it easy to pull one colored object out of a picture and change its color.

When your selection is just right, you can drag the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders to change that color to a different one and make it more or less vivid, as well as lighter or darker. Or—and this makes more sense to me—you can click the Result color swatch and choose a new color in the color picker. When you click OK in the Replace Color dialog, Photoshop Elements replaces the selected color with the new one.

Getting Your Hands Dirty

If you prefer a more hands-on approach to replacing colors, you might give the Color Replacement Tool a whirl. You’ll find it hiding under the Brush in the toolbox; its icon looks like a paintbrush accompanied by a little color swatch.

First, choose a brush tip and size from the Options bar and make sure that the Mode menu is set to Color; this blending mode affects color only, so you won’t eliminate the surface texture of the objects you paint.

Now set your options:

• Sampling—. This refers to how Photoshop Elements figures out what colors you want to get rid of. Choose Continuous to tell it that every color you drag over should be replaced, Once if you want it to replace only the first color you click on, or Background Swatch if you want to specify the color to replace by making it the current Background color.

• Limits—. Here you tell Photoshop Elements how far you want to go in replacing color. Discontiguous replaces the color only when you paint over it, while Contiguous replaces it in all the adjacent pixels of the same color as well.

• Tolerance—. Adjust this value downward to limit the colors replaced to those that are very close to the one on which you clicked, or upward to replace more related colors.

Finally, choose a Foreground color for the new color, check the Anti-alias box, and paint within the picture to change the color. Because you can control where the color is applied, the Color Replacement tool can be much more precise than either Hue/Saturation or Replace Color. It comes in handy when there are multiple areas with similar colors in your photo, some of which you want to change and some of which you don’t (see Figure 14.12).

Figure 14.12. By using the Color Replacement brush, I can change the red firefighter’s hat without affecting the red areas in the Oriental rug, as the Replace Color Command would do.

In the next section, let’s give the Replace Color command a try and see what it can do.

In Photoshop, Curves is the favorite tool of true color-correction connoisseurs. In Photoshop Elements, the Curves tool is very limited. Still, it’s worth checking out, because you can adjust one part of the picture without affecting the rest.

As with Levels, Color Curves offers you a graph to manipulate (see Figure 14.15). Unlike Levels, the Curves graph doesn’t represent how dark, light, or contrasty the image is right now; it’s more like a two-dimensional slider bar. The three points on the line represent the picture’s shadows, highlights, and midtones; dragging a point down using the corresponding Adjust slider darkens those areas of the picture, and dragging it up lightens them. Midtones have two sliders: Midtone Brightness, to darken or lighten midtones, and Midtone Contrast, which moves the midtone point left and right on the graph to adjust image contrast.

Figure 14.15. Here I started with the Lighten Shadows preset style and then adjusted the sliders to bump up the contrast.

The best way to use Color Curves is to choose a preset style from the options on the left: Backlight, Darken Highlights, Default, Increase Contrast, Increase Midtones, Lighten Shadows, or Solarize. From there, use the four sliders to tweak your picture until you like the way it looks. In Photoshop, you can drag the points on the graph directly and add more points wherever you want them; in Photoshop Elements, you can manipulate only the three middle points using the sliders.

This command is so quick and easy to use that it should qualify as a Quick Fix. As with Remove Color Cast, it requires only that you click in an appropriate area of the photo for it to do its magic (see Figure 14.16).

Figure 14.16. Don’t overlook the Temperature slider; it’s amazing how much difference the overall perceived temperature of the picture can affect how skin tones look.

When I first heard about Adjust Color for Skin Tone, I immediately wondered how Photoshop Elements could revise skin tones when there are so many different colors of skin in the world. The answer has to do with proportions of the basic colors, red, green, and blue. Evidently, they tend to be similar no matter how dark or light your skin is. But it turns out that I actually had the question slightly wrong. Adjust Color for Skin Tone actually modifies the overall image color to make the skin tones look better (not necessarily more accurate). And, of course, Photoshop Elements has no idea what parts of a picture are really skin and what parts are just things that are vaguely skin colored. So your results might vary, depending on what other objects are in your picture along with the people.

When you’re adjusting skin tones, all you have to do is click in a representative area of skin. Be sure to pick a point that’s unblemished (no freckles, please), glare free, and not artificially colored by makeup, other than base, or by colors reflected from other objects. One click, and Photoshop Elements does its thing. Then you can tweak the results with three different sliders:

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements users have always used tools such as Brightness/Contrast and Levels to work with pictures that are too light or too dark. When you want to control the process yourself instead of letting Photoshop Elements’ automated commands have a go at your picture, these are the places to start.

Using the Brightness/Contrast command is about as simple as it gets. It’s a rather blunt instrument, though, so you’ll probably find that it’s best used in selected areas rather than on a whole image. Choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Brightness/Contrast, and drag the Brightness slider to make the image lighter or darker, or the Contrast slider to make the color contrasts more or less pronounced (see Figure 14.17).

Figure 14.17. Brightness/Contrast is simple but effective; look for this figure in the color section to see just how effective.

Levels, on the other hand, is intended to work with the image as a whole and yields distorted results when applied to a selected area. The Levels command adjusts all the brightness levels in a picture and can be used to remove color casts. Earlier in this hour, you learned about the Auto Levels command; now let’s take a look at how you can make your own custom Levels adjustments.

First, choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels or press Ctrl+L so you can get a look at what you’re dealing with (see Figure 14.18). The most prominent feature of the Levels dialog is a histogram, a graph of how many pixels in the image are at each of the 256 possible brightness levels between black and white. The histogram should be a smooth curve without a lot of gaps; when you use the Auto Levels command or click Auto in the Levels dialog, Photoshop Elements spreads out the lines on the histogram evenly to fill any gaps. You can see this in action by clicking the Auto button in the Levels dialog and then clicking Reset several times.

Figure 14.18. Go here to adjust levels for yourself instead of letting Photoshop Elements make all the decisions.

When you’re adjusting levels yourself, the first step is to fill any gaps at the ends of the graph by moving the black and white sliders to the points where the graph trends sharply upward. You can use the eyedropper tools to help with this; click the black one on an area of your image that should be completely black, and the white one on an area that should be completely white. Use the gray eyedropper to get rid of a color cast by clicking in any neutral gray area. Then drag the midtone slider back and forth to lighten or darken the overall image.

For the absolute best results, use the Channel pop-up menu at the top of the Levels dialog to adjust each of the picture’s color components separately. Starting with the Red channel, drag the end sliders in to where the graph begins to go up, and then move the middle slider left or right until the color looks most accurate. Repeat with the Blue and Green channels. I find that this method yields the most accuracy, and it keeps shadows and highlights from getting muddy or developing a color cast.

All this time, we’ve been talking about the Input Levels sliders below the histogram. What about the Output Level sliders? Well, these can restrict the range of brightness levels in the picture by chopping off levels from each end. You can use them in three ways:

In earlier versions, Photoshop Elements had two very useful tools for fixing problem lighting, called Fill Flash and Adjust Backlighting. Now they’re replaced by the even-better Highlights/Shadows dialog. To get there from the Editor, choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Shadows/Highlights.

In this dialog, you can get right to the point. You don’t need to worry about which color channels are responsible for the problems you’re seeing in your photo; you can just get started fixing them, with a jump-start from Photoshop Elements. Because one of the most common flaws in amateur photos is dark shadows, you’ll always start your trip to the Shadows/Highlights dialog with a Lighten Shadows setting of 25% (see Figure 14.20). Sometimes this is a good idea; sometimes it’s not. Start by looking at the darkest areas of your image. Do they look washed out? If so, back off with the Lighten Shadows slider as much as needed to restore life to those shadows. Then take a look at the brightest parts of the picture. Are they blown out—in other words, are they so bright that they’re all white, with no detail? If so, drag the Darken Highlights slider to the right until you’re happy with them. Finally, drag the Midtone Contrast slider left or right to even out the medium-brightness areas of the image.

Figure 14.20. Shadows/Highlights is a bit more complicated than Brightness/Contrast, but it’s worth taking the trouble to get used to it.

I do love the results I get with the Shadows/Highlights dialog, but I almost always have to reduce the Lighten Shadows setting first thing. Keep that in mind, and I think you’ll love Shadows/Highlights, too.

Fix a Fuzzy and Very Green Photo

The picture we start with for this Try it Yourself is a scan of a 1959 print with seriously degraded color. The kids look as though they’re having a good time, though, so let’s see what we can do to bring back the picture’s original sparkle. You can download the photo from the book’s website; it’s called greenhouse.jpg (see Figure 14.21).

Figure 14.21. These kids have been trapped in the jungle so long they’ve turned green themselves.

1. First, let’s see what we can do to fix the lighting. This picture is both too dark in the shadows and too light in the highlights. Choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Shadows/Highlights, and start by moving the Lighten Shadows slider back down to about 10% so that the shadows aren’t all gray and grainy.

2. Now let’s deal with the rest of the picture. I think the highlights could be a bit darker. Look at the fur hoods on two of the children for guidance here; I moved the Darken Highlights slider to 3%. Then I tried moving the Midtone Contrast slider in both directions before settling on +4% (see Figure 14.22).

   

   Figure 14.22. The first step is fixing the lighting.

3. Those changes improve the lighting a lot; next we address color. Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Color Variations. Before clicking on any of the thumbnails, be sure to choose the area of the image you want to address first (I always start with Shadows) and adjust the Amount slider to determine how much each click changes the picture.

4. For each aspect of the picture, see if you can nudge it toward where it should be, with less red, less green, more blue—whatever you think it needs. If you find that the picture still has a red or green color cast no matter what you do, you’re not alone. I wasn’t able to get the results I’m looking for with Color Variations, so let’s try another tool. Click Cancel.

5. This time we know the problem is a color cast, and Levels can often deal with that, so let’s go old-school. Choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels. Before you try anything else, click the gray eyedropper and then click the rock next to the doll’s feet at the right side of the picture. Much better, eh? Now lighten up the picture as a whole by dragging the middle Input Level slider to the left just a bit (see Figure 14.23).

   

   Figure 14.23. Now we take a whack at getting the color right.

6. I don’t know about you, but now the picture looks a bit cool to me. Let’s try one more thing. Leave your Levels adjustment in place—don’t undo it—and choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust for Skin Tone. Click on any of the kids’ faces and see how you like the results. I like ’em a lot!

This picture still needs work; it’s grainy and blurry, which means it’ll be difficult to sharpen it without emphasizing the grain. But those are tasks for another hour. For now, you’re done! Here’s the final version of the photo (see Figure 14.24); turn to the color section of the book to get the full impact of these changes.

Figure 14.24. That last tweak with Adjust Color for Skin Tone makes all the difference.

Find the oldest photo of yourself that you can track down. Scan it in and see what you can do to fix it. Does the lighting need help? Are the colors off? If it’s a color image, try converting it to black and white using different presets. Print the one you like best.