Digital Photography Easy

As you can see above, the top photo needs a little help. That picture was taken in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cloudy outside, giving it that really blue hue. I wanted to try and bring some color back into the picture and make it look a little more natural. I also wanted to accomplish this in less than 5 minutes!

Once you have your image open, go over to the layers palette and click on the Adjustment/Fill Layer menu and choose "Curves...".

create a new curves layer

Now, I'm not gonna get into color theory because a) I don't really know anything and b) there is so much information out there that you can read that is much better than anything i could tell you.

Essentially, since we are in RGB color mode, there are 3 "channels" of color: Red, Green and Blue. And the Curves layer lets you adjust those channels individually.

So let's go to the blue channel first since blue is the overriding color in this photo and that's what we're trying to correct. To pull some blue out, just click and drag the curve up.

adjust the blue channel up.

OK, some of the blue is out, but the picture is a little dark, so let's bring up the other channels to add more light and color to the image. Go to the green channel and pull the curve down to increase the green levels in the photo.

it's not easy being green

Now go to the red channel and increase the red levels in the photo, giving the skin a more natural look and balancing out the overall image.

seeing red

Of course, every image is different, and you will need to do some tweaking to get everything to your liking. If you want, you can also adjust the opacity of the curves layer to tone down the amount of correction.

adjust your opacity

That's it! Obviously, you can get pretty crazy with curves, so experiment as much as you want. It is a really powerful way to edit your images. I hope you're able to use this technique on your pics!