What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>Fixing a horrendous color cast
</objective> <objective>Compensating for poor lighting
</objective> <objective>Turning the sky pink, green, or whatever you prefer
</objective> <objective>Sharpening details to direct focus to a photo’s subject
</objective> <objective>Blurring backgrounds to make them less distracting
</objective> <objective>Intensifying and toning down color in selected parts of a picture
</objective> <objective>“Fixing” image problems that aren’t actually wrong—just annoying
</objective> <objective>Hand-tinting a black-and-white photo
</objective> </feature>The vast majority of the pictures you deal with are color. Color photography was developed in the mid-nineteenth century, and it became affordable for the average consumer in the 1960s. These days, you take a black-and-white picture only if you’re going for a special effect or if you like to do your own darkroom work. (Color film processing is much more difficult to do at home.)
But what about repairing color pictures? Of course, we’re mostly talking about scanned prints here. Well, the nice thing is that color prints generally don’t need as much repair as black-and-white photos because they’re newer and printed on thicker paper; they’re much less likely to be physically damaged. You do run into a huge variety of weird color casts with older color photos, however. And, of course, there’s always the “dog ate my photo” problem. All these problems are best fixed in Full Edit mode, where you can access all of Photoshop Elements’ power.
We all know that printed materials fade, including photos. Color photos, however, are notorious for fading in bizarre ways, with green, purple, or other colors obscuring the true colors of the image. This happens because color processing is a much more complex process than black-and-white printing; in fact, a properly processed black-and-white print can be more stable (meaning less prone to fading) than the paper it’s printed on. The chemicals used in color photography, on the other hand, are not stable over time. What’s worse, the dyes fade at different rates, producing color casts even when photos are stored in the dark using archival materials. In dark storage, cyan is the least stable, followed by yellow, and magenta is the most stable. In light storage, on the other hand, magenta is the least stable, with cyan being the most stable and yellow falling between the two.
Which colors fade over time in a particular photo is determined by the type of paper, film, and processing chemicals used to make the print, as well as how old the film was when it was processed. If you spend much time looking at old color snapshots, you’ll see three basic kinds of fading:
Dark fading is the inevitable fading over time that happens no matter how you store a picture. It usually hits cyan dyes first, making the image appear too red.
Light fading happens when photos are exposed to light, and it varies depending on how intense the light is. Magenta dyes are usually the first to go, yielding that unmistakable greenish tint in skin tones.
Highlight staining is yellowing of the border and highlight areas that happens with older photos; you generally won’t see this in photos newer than those from the 1960s.
Fortunately, Photoshop Elements is equipped to deal with all these problems, and you’re equipped with Photoshop Elements.
As you might recall from Hour 14, “Adjusting Brightness, Contrast, and Color,” Photoshop Elements has a special command just for fixing color casts. Let’s try it on this old snapshot, which is a clear victim of highlight staining (see Figure 17.1, here and in the color section). Its borders have yellowed badly, along with the white and yellow areas of the picture. The lighting is also bad: The trees are too dark and the grass in the foreground is too light.
The first steps in editing a photo are usually cropping and straightening—but not this time. The border of the photo is the best color-neutral location we could ask for to make best use of the Remove Color Cast dialog, so we’ll wait to crop and straighten this picture until we’re done fixing the color. And it’s always best to avoid retouching until you’re happy with the picture’s color and lighting because your adjustments can make image edits stand out more.
Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color Cast to get started. In Hour 14, you saw that using this dialog is a simple matter of clicking in a color-neutral area of the picture, which can be white, black, or any shade of gray in between. I like to experiment with clicking different areas of the picture, though, because I don’t trust my own eyes to know when an object really has no color. Here I clicked all the way around the border and tried a few clicks on white blouses and the like, too. I ended up with the best results from a click in the upper-left corner of the photo’s border. I could tell that this spot was the right place to click because it resulted in the most normal-looking skin tones. See Figure 17.2.
Did you Know?
Judging the results you get from the Remove Color Cast dialog requires you to pay close attention to objects whose color you can be sure of. These include skin tones, if you know the people in the picture, and “memory colors,” such as the red and blue in the American flag. If any of these are still off after Remove Color Cast does its thing, you know there’s still work to do.
If you don’t like the results you get from Remove Color Cast and want to try an alternative, either Levels or Curves will do the trick as well. First undo the Remove Color Cast command, and then choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels or Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Color Curves. Using the eyedropper tools in the Levels or Curves dialog, click in the picture to indicate a point that should be perfectly white, one that should be perfectly black, and—if you can find one—a point that should be medium gray. Because these tools operate on brightness as well as hue, you might have better luck with either one of them when you’re working on a picture that’s particularly dark or light (see Figure 17.3).
If you can get most of the picture to shape up, color-wise, you don’t have to struggle to come up with Levels, Curves, or Remove Color Cast settings that will fix everything. Sometimes it’s just never going to happen—or, although you’ll get the color right, you’ll hurt the picture’s appearance in some other way, such as enhancing the film grain. When this is the case, you can turn your attention to fixing that one recalcitrant image element.
Of course, you can change an object’s color in Photoshop Elements in myriad ways. We used the Replace Color command in Hour 14 to change the color of a newspaper box from yellow to pink, and we also looked at using Hue/Saturation to modify colors and punch up their intensity. In the case of the photo in Figure 17.4, I tried these techniques with no luck whatsoever.
First, I selected the sky—that’s the first step in most selective color adjustments, and getting the selection right is what takes the most time. Then I chose Enhance, Adjust Color, Replace Color and used the eyedroppers to make sure I was operating on the whole sky. Dragging the Hue slider, however, had no result because my real problem is that the sky is gray, and pinkish or greenish gray doesn’t look all that different from bluish gray. So I bumped up the Saturation, but that backfired. The saturation of all the “noise” in the sky, graininess resulting from JPEG compression, also skyrocketed, making the sky look as dotty as a Pointillist painting. That was not part of my plan. The same thing happened with the Hue/Saturation command, and that’s what you see in Figure 17.4.
Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to modify the existing color to get what I wanted. So I tried a different approach. With my sky selection still active, I created a new layer and filled the selection with a nice bright blue. Then I adjusted the layer’s opacity to about 25% and set its blending mode to Color (see Figure 17.5). That worked beautifully because I was laying the blue on top of the grayish pixels instead of changing their saturation.
By the Way
The job of Color blending mode is pretty obvious: It applies just the hue of the layer’s pixels to the underlying image. You’ll learn about all the blending modes in Hour 22, “Making Composite Images.”
Sometimes the problem with color isn’t actually its hue, but its lightness or darkness relative to the image as a whole. In this case, the Shadows/Highlights dialog can help you bring the colors in a picture back into balance. And you might find that fixing this problem can improve a picture’s sharpness as well.
In Figure 17.6, the photo just didn’t look right. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem, but the colors seemed off somehow. When I fired up Shadows/Highlights, I realized that the problem wasn’t the color; it was the lighting. Making these settings gave me a warmer, more even-toned photo.
What if you want to apply a few fixes to specific areas of the picture instead of the whole thing? That’s where the Blur, Sharpen, and Sponge tools come in handy. With these tools, you can blur and sharpen spots within the picture, as well as intensify or downplay the color intensity of specific objects.
The Blur tool’s button in the toolbox looks like a drop of water, which makes sense if you think about what water does to nonpermanent ink. The Sharpen tool looks like the sharp point of some unspecified tool. Until now, we’ve generally blurred or sharpened entire images, but you can use these tools to pinpoint your effect and leave the rest of the picture as it is. For example, you might use the Blur tool to blur a face or nametag for privacy reasons. This tool is also great for making a distractingly detailed background take its rightful place: in the background. And as you saw in the last hour, it’s useful for smoothing out skin in portraits.
When you want to blur areas of your picture, switch to the Blur tool and choose a brush shape and size from the Options bar. Leave the mode set at Normal, and set a Strength percentage. I prefer to start with a lower percentage and bump it up, if I need to. Now you’re ready to blur. Paint across the picture with the Blur tool, being careful not to pass over anything you don’t want to blur. Zoom in as needed, to make sure you’re covering the right area.
My favorite use for the Blur tool is to blur backgrounds to draw attention to the photo’s subject. Modern digital cameras tend to have a very deep depth of field, which means that both objects close to the camera and those farther away are in sharp focus. Sometimes that’s great, but other times it can be distracting. Minimizing the depth of field can make the photo’s subject stand out more. Figure 17.7 shows a great example of this situation. Here I’m halfway through blurring the busy background around the farmer and his cow; the left side of the picture is done, and I still need to do the right side. I’ve been very careful to work around the man and the cow, blurring the background between them and under the cow’s belly.
By the Way
Don’t confuse the Blur tool with the Smudge tool; that’s a completely different animal. Its icon shows an outstretched finger, ready to smudge away detail. But when it blurs details, the Smudge tool applies a motion blur so that you can see which direction the tool was moved. It’s a fun effect, but it’s usually not appropriate for retouching.
Sharpening, of course, is the opposite of blurring. You sharpen objects on which you want to focus attention, such as the center of the flower in Figure 17.8. In general, you’ll apply much less sharpening than you would blurring; because sharpening works by increasing contrast, excessive sharpening can turn an area into a super-high-contrast collection of dots, as shown in the circle in Figure 17.8.
In traditional darkroom work, a sponge is used to salvage a print that isn’t developing darkly enough; by wiping the print with a developer-soaked sponge, the photographer can force it to darken up. Photoshop Elements’ Sponge tool works a bit differently. You use it to increase or decrease saturation, or color intensity, in areas of your picture. In Saturate mode, the Sponge makes colors more intense; in Desaturate mode, it drains their intensity, eventually turning them to gray if you keep it up.
By the Way
Why isn’t the Sponge tool two tools, as with the Blur and Sharpen tools? I have no idea, but it would be more consistent if Photoshop Elements had separate tools for saturating and desaturating image areas. Are you listening, Adobe?
You can use the Sponge to create interesting combinations of color and grayscale in the same picture; for example, a picture might contain one color element (a flower) or just one grayscale object (an antique of some kind). Most often, however, I use the Sponge tool to tone down distracting objects in a picture and play up the subject. In the cow photo, for instance (see Figure 17.9), after I blurred the background, I used the Sponge to tone down the bright yellow wheelbarrow in the background, the pumpkins under the cow, and the flowers above her head.
Adjusting Saturation
The best way to get a feel for what the Sponge tool can do is to try it. Let’s apply it to a gray-day photo I took in New York and see what we can do. You can download the photo from the book’s website at www.informit.com/title/9780672330179; it’s called manhattan.jpg (see Figure 17.10).
Choose the Blur tool and, adjusting your brush size as needed, blur the building on the right in the photo. Leave the building to which the sign is attached sharp; it’s closer to the camera.
Switch to the Sponge tool. Make sure it’s in Saturate mode, with a Flow of 50%, and wipe it over the Manhattan Diner sign a few times. Don’t worry about the metal struts holding up the sign; focus on the colored part.
Change the Sponge’s mode to Desaturate, keeping the Flow set at 50%, and wipe down the bright-colored edges of the sign at the left side of the picture. You’ll probably have to reduce your brush size for this step.
We talked in earlier hours about deleting obtrusive objects in photos, but what do you do when you want the object to be in the picture, just not where it is? You might want to flip a person so she’s facing the other people in the group, or move objects closer together so the focus of the picture isn’t split. In the picture shown in Figure 17.11, for instance, I’d really like to move the guy in front back a few steps so he looks more like part of the group.
To make this happen, I start by drawing a Lasso selection around the baseball player and his shadow. That’s right, don’t forget the shadow. Fortunately, in his new position, his shadow will still fall on the dirt instead of the grass, so I won’t have to do much to blend it. Next, I put the player on his very own layer by choosing Layer, New, Layer Via Cut; then I use the Move tool move him where I want him to be (see Figure 17.12).
Now that I have the player where I want him, I need to clean up the extra dirt that he brought with him from his previous location. I use the Background Eraser for this, clicking and dragging around his edges to remove the dirt. Remember, the color erased by the Background Eraser is the color you click on when you begin a stroke (see Figure 17.13). When you’re using this technique, it’s a good idea to hide the Background layer occasionally, to be sure you’ve gotten all the little bits and pieces. You can also switch to the regular Eraser any time you want to clean up stuff that the Background Eraser doesn’t seem to want to deal with.
When the player is blended into his background, my next task is to create more background to cover the hole where I cut him out. That’s a time-consuming but simple, task that requires extensive use of the Clone Stamp with a nice, soft brush. As I work, I’m careful to maintain the sharp edges between the grass and the dirt, as well as the tire marks in the dirt (see Figure 17.14).
Way back in the Dark Ages, before color photography became affordable and popular, photographers commonly hand-tinted black-and-white photos to create color images. You’ve probably seen both portraits and landscapes done this way; many older postcards were tinted in a similar fashion. The work was originally done with slow-drying oil-based paints that could be spread around on the surface of a photo print. But these were not the same sort of oil paints used in heavily textured oil paintings; instead, they were quite transparent, lending a delicate appearance to the picture that remains attractive to this day.
You can use your high-tech tools to apply this low-tech effect to any photo you like. If the photo is in color, first convert it to black-and-white by choosing Enhance, Convert to Black and White. The Newspaper preset is best for this purpose because it produces images light enough that the color will show and high-contrast enough that you won’t lose details when you paint over them.
Simulating hand-tinting with Photoshop Elements is fairly simple (see Figure 17.15). It’s done with the Brush tool on a separate layer (so that you can erase color later if you decide it’s too much), set at a fairly low opacity, such as 20%. You don’t have to worry about tiny details when hand-tinting; the photo provides the detail, and your job is to fill in the larger colored areas, such as grass and sky. Use a soft-edged brush tip, and vary the brush size as needed to make sure you don’t spill over into areas that should be another color.
In this hour, you learned what causes color shifts in old pictures and how to fix them. You also worked on compensating for poor lighting when the original photo was taken and changing the color of just one element in a photo. We looked at how individual toning tools, including the Sharpen, Blur, and Sponge tools, can be useful for spot touch-ups and special effects. Finally, just for fun, we went over how to modify a picture that isn’t really wrong—just inconveniently composed—and how to colorize a grayscale image so that it looks like an old-time hand-tinted photo.
Test your understanding of the color concepts we’ve talked about in this hour with these quiz questions. After you check your answers, reward yourself with some playtime by completing the activities.