PhotoshopSchool PHOTOSHOP BASICS STEP BY STEP
Controlcolour forperfectprints
Chris Rutter
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George Cairns shows you how to make selective saturation adjustments in Photoshop Elements WHAT YOU’LL NEED Photoshop Elements 9 or 10
AFTER
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN How to set up Photoshop Elements to work in a print-friendly colour space and avoid unwanted artefacts by making selective saturation adjustments IT ONLY TAKES 20 minutes
C
apturing a scene’s colours can be a challenge, especially if you plan to reproduce the image as a print. We’ll show you how to set up Photoshop Elements so the colours you see on screen are the same as those in print. When shooting a landscape you can set your camera to boost the saturation of a photo as it processes it, so that the location’s colours are more vivid. This enhanced colour can help to differentiate between objects in a landscape and even draw the eye to particular features. By boosting the saturation of our start image, for example, we can make the red foreground flowers pop out, which helps to add a sense of depth to the scene. However, by boosting colour saturation in-camera, you run the risk of creating colour-related artefacts, like posterisation – where delicate colour gradients (such as a graduated sky) become jagged bands of varying colour instead of a smooth blend. By boosting a shot’s colours you also run the risk of creating unprintable ones. We’ll show you how to use Photoshop Elements’ versatile Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to select weaker colours and give them an appropriate boost in saturation, while tweaking stronger colours in a more subtle way. We’ll start our colour enhancing in the Adobe Camera Raw editor. By shooting in raw format you can be confident you have more colour information to work with, which will help reduce artefacts and improve the quality of your prints. Digital Camera June 2012
ON YOUR DISC
BEFORE