Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® & Photoshop® Workflow Bible

Chapter 13. Adjusting Tonality and Color

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using Levels and Curves to adjust brightness and contrast

• Understanding 16-bit files and how they're used

• Using the Eyedropper tool and the Info palette to measure colo

With the workflow presented in this book, much of a photo's basic tonal and color corrections will have been made in Lightroom and/or ACR before it's opened in Photoshop. However, when important images are brought into Photoshop, it's always a good idea to reevaluate those decisions. Knowing how to use the tools presented in this chapter will help you to do that. Additionally, these tools are used with advanced selection and masking techniques to make precise localized tonal and color corrections that aren't possible in Lightroom. Those techniques are covered in upcoming chapters. For now, the focus is on how these tools are used to make general adjustments.

As you move through this chapter you'll notice that the tonal and color adjustment tools in Photoshop are very similar to the adjustment tools in Lightroom's Develop module. That's because they address the same set of fundamental image qualities: brightness, contrast, and color.

Adjusting Brightness and Contrast

When you explored tonal adjustments in Lightroom you used the sliders in the Basic panel to target the brightest whites and darkest darks in the image. These modifications set the overall contrast of the image. You used the histogram and its clipping previews to monitor your progress. The tonal adjustment ...