Lesson 7: Subtle color: color casts and overlays.

With photos you want to convey messages to people that perceive, judge and interpret and color is a consistent tool to express and refine your creativity. In general the term color cast suggests a predominant "color taste or tint" on a continous tone image. Sometimes undesirable, sometimes desirable, sometimes you want to manipulate it, sometimes you may want to create it.

Theoretically usual problems with color casts are better handled when shooting RAW. In this school we will not dive in the RAW ocean. A photographer will normally want to manipulate color casts and this concept takes its share in a typical photo editing workflow, regardless if you use RAW or not.

After the previous lesson, you should have a fair knowledge about how color is analyzed. Now we proceed to an approach to control color by manually affecting the white balance. Of course these tricks apply to color photography, and every color photograph may theoretically pass this way for a controlled color adjustment.

Getting rid of a color cast
Doing the opposite: adding a color cast
Editing the color cast
Copying a color cast

Overlays with black or white

Overlays do not necessarily have to do with color casts. An overlay with black or with white might help to tonally correct a problematic photo. Before watching the next video, please make sure you understand the basic concepts of histograms exposed in Lesson 4. In the video you will watch a trick how to handle two examples of problematic images in an interesting way.




Reusing adjustment settings

To always have in mind: on a layer vs. on a selection -- again!

As with the adjustment tools we have seen so far, a color cast adjustment may be made not on a whole layer but on a selection. This is closely related with the concept of selection, which will be explained in the next Lesson.

No comments:

Post a Comment