110
Matching colors with Curves
1
At first glance, the hand needs to
have much more yellow in order
to match the face. There’s a problem
here: we have access to each of the Red,
Green and Blue channels, but there’s no
yellow. The trick is to think in reverse,
taking out colors we don’t want rather
than adding colors we do.
It’s fairly clear, if we look at it this
way, that the hand is far too blue. So
open Curves (using Cm Lm) and
switch to the Blue channel using the
pop-up menu. Click in the center of the
line and drag down slightly to remove
that blue cast from the skintones.
M
ATCHING COLORS
between two
photographs is at the heart
of the photomontage artist’s
craft. Variations in lighting can
produce enormous differences
in color and tonal range, which
need to be balanced in order
to make a montage work.
While the hand shown
here was a reasonably good
original digital capture, it
looks completely wrong
when placed against a face
which appears to be a totally
different color.
The Curves adjustment is
the ideal tool for this job. The
process involves several steps,
and it’s a good way of learning
how to manipulate Curves to
achieve precisely the results
you want.
2
Removing the blue from the
midtones, as we’ve just done,
helped a lot; but we can still see some
blue in the highlights, most noticeable
in the shine on the backs of the fingers
and in the fingernails. To fix this, click
on the right side of the curve and drag
vertically downwards. This limits the
brightest part of the Blue channel,
reducing the highlight glare.
IMAGE: STOCKBYTE
4
Image adjustment
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
111
3
So far, so good – but the image
still isn’t quite the right color.
Taking out the blue has left it with a
greenish tint. We could simply take
out the green, but that would make
the whole thing too dark; instead, if
we compare it to the face, we see that
the face has more red in it. So switch
to the Red channel, click in the center
of the line and drag upwards slightly
to increase the red content in the
midtones.
4
The result of the last three
operations left us with a hand that
is now the right color, but which is too
highly contrasted: the shadow on the
left of the hand is much darker than
anything we can see in the face.
Switch now to the RGB channel,
which affects the overall contrast and
brightness. Because we want to remove
the shadow, we need to click on the
extreme left of the line – which marks
the darkest point – and drag upwards,
to limit the darkness of the layer.
5
Much better – but not quite there
yet. By reducing the shadows,
we’ve also left ourselves with a hand
which is somewhat lacking in contrast.
We can boost this by clicking on the top
right corner of the line, and dragging
it to the left: the result of this is to
compress the tonal range, so boosting
the contrast overall. It’s important to
make only a small adjustment here, as
it’s easy to go too far. In the end, though,
we’ve got a hand which matches the
face almost exactly.
HOT TIP
If you create a
point on the curve
which you later
want to remove,
hold C L and
click it again to
make it disappear.
To reset the entire
operation, hold
O A to make
the Cancel button
change to Reset,
and then click it.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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