color correction by numbers...

[Jduran133]

Hi Everyone....I'm aspiring to break into the world of retouching. I have been dabbling with retouching for a few years now....nothing professional, mostly personal self potraits and friends & family. Over the past year I have started to really dig into all the techniques and seeing which work best...and where certain techniques apply. I had a question regarding the color correction by numbers. I have seen many tutorials on the subject, it has worked on some of my photos, but not all. I also noticed in some videos, the instructor used more than 1 eye dropper point. But for some reason they don't seem to explain where eye dropper points should be placed, and why. Can anyone help?

[alien182]

Hi, this is my workflow(it's not so easy to tell):
1) using the Threshold you should select a white point and a black point to clip shadows and highlight (I use threshold just for point and after i discard the adj level)-> it depends to your image.
With the bar inside the Threshold you push the bar to the left and to the right. Before all will be black or white you will find 2 points (the last portion of the image that remain white or black) and there you should put your eyedropper.
They will be your light and shadow point.
2) With level you should clip the histogram to that values (ex: 10 for shadows and 242 for highlights)
3) Place your eyedropper to a middle gray point inside your image:
Ex: my point R=169 G=164 B=190

With curves you must to adjust the curves to have all of value equal

Ex: 169 169 169 (ctrl/cmd + clik to the point to set inside the curves in one channel, ctrl/cmd + shift + click for all channel with a single click)
After this you must to use your up/down arrows to increase or decrease the values of your point.
With 3 diffrent values go to the middle value.

If the image don't have strange areas (like burn white or shadow or too much color cast )you should obtain a color corrected image.
I hope that you understand all.
If you got questions I'm here....
Good luck!!!

[Anneke]

Learned something new again today, yeah!
Thanx!

[James D Pixeler]

This "treshold technique" i've been using it for a few years now,and it's always the first step in my workflow,it usually fixes a few things in one pass....finding your max blacks,max whites,and at the same time ajusting the curve to a certain point ( after you have told the curve what you want as far as your blacks and whites numbers should be, I use 13 for blacks and 247 for whites,based on the outputs for printing I use). Saves a lot of guessing...

[DiamondsDr47]

How about to get it right from the RAW istead of fixing poor jpeg's from those little digicams...also this technique not going to work 100%, sometimes there shifts in hue's, so you would need to go in hue saturation or another way fix it ...Just want to add that there alot of books and videos with general info and a bit advanced...
Best regards,