Digital Photography Hacks

Intelligent Auto Color Correction

Photoshop CS includes a helpful Auto Color function. The problem is that it needs to be calibrated. Here’s a calibration how-to that reveals the secret to fast color correction.

Our everyday world is a mishmash of lighting. We read at home by tungsten lamp, ride to work under overcast skies, and toil at the office beneath fluorescent tubes. We normally don’t think about all these different lighting situations, because our eyes and brain automatically correct what we see. Our environment, at least in terms of lighting, appears relatively consistent.

This isn’t the case for digital cameras. As wonderful as their little computer brains are, they’re not as powerful as our human brains; they have a more difficult time rendering the world in a consistent light. As photographers, we can assist our digital cameras by taking care to set the white balance as accurately as possible. But even with our best efforts, we sometimes need to correct the color in postproduction, to render skin tones and the overall environment in the same light that our eyes perceive.

Color correction is one of the most difficult tasks in digital photography. You can spend a lot of time fiddling with it and still not get the results you want. This hack will change all that. By combining two handy functions in Photoshop CS, you can correct color quickly and accurately, enabling you to process an entire folder of images in short order.

The secret starts with opening the Curves dialog ...