Why I LOVE Photoshop!

Okay photographers, this one's for you!

I love using Photoshop because it can recover a lot of hues that are lost during an overcast day, as was the case with this picture that I took while on a trip to Napa. The clouds were heavy overhead and casting a greyish shadow on everything.

Not to fear, Photoshop is here!

In order to adjust the tones in a picture without over hue-ing (is that a word?) something, ISOLATE the colors and adjust them that way instead of adjusting everything at once.

Open up your hues panel.

(Image-->Adjustments-->Hue/Saturation)

(The shortcut for this one is: Control + U)

If you look under the preset option, you'll see something that says "Master." Master means all of the colors together at once. So, if you make any adjustments on the hue slider, you'll adjust all of the colors at one time to what you're telling it to do.

However, you can isolate each color and adjust each one separately.

Click on the drop down menu where it says "Master" and you'll see a list of colors pop up. Click on one of them so that it's selected.

For instance, I chose "yellow" and then slid the hue button back and forth until I came up with this:

Wow, all of a sudden, the yellows were muted and replaced with red!

This works good if you're looking for a monochromatic look.

You can also adjust per color by isolating the colors in CURVES, SELECTIVE COLOR, COLOR BALANCE, LEVELS and CHANNEL MIXER, etc. All are found under your Image-->Adjustments tab on the upper left hand corner.

For my photo purposes, I wanted more of the yellows to stand out in my photo, not be muted and blending in with the reds, so I increased the yellow hues in it and made them "pop".

Happy Photoshop-ing!

PS: Just a personal preference: I like to shoot in RAW because it allows me to recover a lot of shadow and light areas that may be lost with shooting in just JPEG format. I can't fit as many pictures as I'd like on my camera disk, but I have got backup disks to be able to take a lot of pictures at one event. It's helpful for me to shoot in RAW because then I can play with the picture as it was shot--I get to fully control how it's being edited, not the camera.