Color Correction in Digital Printing

In photography, exposure is controlled by way of number of things–the size of the lens opening, the film speed, and also the duration the lens remains open taking the picture. In digital photo editing, we can easily adjust exposure further, in the Brightness and Contrast controls.

Brightness, when the name implies, will be the amount of light here in the picture. The longer the lens was open as well as the wider the lens aperture, the brighter the resulting picture may possibly be. Every photo editing program are going to have Brightness control. Changing the brightness setting will adjust the colors of your pictures as if the photo was taken with a wider or narrower aperture.

However, increasing the brightness could cause the image to appear washed out. This is not the best thing for Gallery Digital C-Prints or for Giclee Prints. This is where Contrast is available in. Contrast is the of dark and light-weight here in the picture–the spectrum related to the darkest along with the brightest regions of the image. Changing the contrast will likely make the brights brighter and also the darks darker, that may counter-balance the changes produced by the Brightness control. Brightness and contrast some times applied in tandem for most photo editing projects when printing Giclee Art Prints or Digital C Prints.

Practically in most projects, it’s rare to have a photo that has to have overall brightness and contrast adjustments. What’s more common is to possess a picture that needs adjustments to small areas. For instance, a dark cityscape against a bright blue sky, or even a portrait with sunlight in the area of the subject, would likely be ruined by changing the complete brightness and contrast. These pictures need smaller, focused adjustments. Here in the old darkroom days, the only real choice the photographer had were to dodge or burn. With modern photo editing programs, however, he should use a Lasso selection set, and after that apply Burn, Dodge, Brightness, Contrast, or perhaps Levels and Curves adjustments, to only those areas of depiction that really want it.

List of Color Correction Terms

Aperture

The Aperture is the size of the opening in the camera lens at the moment a photo is taken. Aperture is measured in fractions, so the larger the number, the smaller the aperture opening. Shutter speed and aperture are the two primary controls for limiting the amount of light that hits the film or sensor.

Burning
Burning means darkening part of a photograph. In the darkroom, it’s done by blocking some of the light that would normally reach the rest of the photo. In digital photo editing, it’s usually a paintbrush-like tool built into the application.

CMYK
CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. These are the four colors used in the standard printing process. It’s also a color mode in photo editing programs.

Dodging
Dodging is making a section of a photo lighter. When this is done in the darkroom, it’s usually by blocking some of the light from reaching that part of the picture. In a photo editing program, it’s a paintbrush like tool that lightens instead of painting.

Grayscale
Technically speaking, a spectrum of gray shades from black to white. A grayscale picture is the digital equivalent of a black and white photo.

Highlights
The Highlights are the whitest part of a picture. Normally, they are a very small percentage of the picture, because it’s very easy to lose details in highlights.

Histogram
A Histogram is a chart that graphs all of the tones in a photo. Most programs will generate histograms, and most digital cameras can create them also.

Layers
Think of Layers as sheets of tracing paper or transparency film laid over top of your image. Graphic designers use layers to separate out elements of their project, so that they can work on individual pieces without damaging others. Adjustment Layers are a special kind of layer that shows the results of whatever color correction function is attached to that layer.

RAW
RAW is the internal format of a digital camera. Many cameras “pre-process” images. They will do JPG compression, white balancing, and a number of other adjustments. The RAW image is the starting point for all of these. Digital photographers prefer to start from the RAW file so that they can make their own changes to these items.

RGB
RGB is the standard color format for digital images. It stands for Red, Green, Blue. Each of the three colors is given an amount between 0 and 255, and the blend of the three produces all of the other colors. Three zeroes produce white, and three 255s produce black.

Saturation
Saturation is a measure of the richness of the colors in a photo. When a picture is desaturated, all of the color information has been removed, and what’s left is a grayscale or black and white picture.

Shadows
The shadows are the darkest part of an image, just as highlights are the brightest.

White Balance
White Balance is a camera setting used to compensate for changes in the color of light. Some artificial lights “tint” the color they project, so the camera’s white balance setting is used to balance this back to a more normal color cast. If the camera’s white balance was incorrect, then the photo editor has to account for this by changing the color scale. The program will use an area that was supposed to be white as the starting point, and will remap every other color in the picture accordingly.