Color Correction

Truth is, digital cameras don't always capture color accurately. Digital photos sometimes have a slightly bluish or greenish tinge, producing dull colors, lower contrast, and sickly looking skin tones. Other times, the color looks OK, but you want to tweak it to create a specific mood.

Fortunately, both iPhoto and Picasa offer color-adjustment sliders that achieve just these effects. Start by opening a photo for editing.

Color Correction in iPhoto

Click the Adjust button on the toolbar, or press the letter A key, to open the Adjust panel.

The three sliders in the middle provide plenty of color adjustment power. In particular, the Tint and Temperature sliders govern the white balance of your photo. (Different kinds of light—fluorescent lighting, overcast skies, and so on—lend different color casts to photographs. White balance is a setting that eliminates or adjusts the color cast according to the lighting.)

  • Tint adjusts the photo's overall tint along the red-green spectrum—great for correcting skin tones and compensating for difficult lighting situations, like pictures you took under fluorescent lighting.

  • Temperature adjusts the photo along the blue-orange spectrum. That's a particular handy technique for breathing life back into subjects that have been bleached white with a flash. A few notches to the right on the Temperature slider, and their skin tones look healthy once again!

Color Correction in Picasa

Open the photo for editing, and then click the Tuning tab. ...

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