Here's a good color-correction Photoshop tip

[chris jordan]

Jack, by the way-- your book is going out in tomorrow's mail; should be there Wed or Thurs.

cheers,

~cj

[DrPablo]

You could do it in RGB, but it would be a pain and sloppier.

In an individual color channel (red, green, blue) the more saturated colors are given higher tonal values than less saturated colors. So a bright blue sky will be very light in the blue channel and dark in the red channel. You can use the grayscale channels as masks to further desaturate the near-neutral areas. Problem is you'd have to either work individually with each channel, or you'd have to make some kind of composite.

I don't think the advanced blending options would work too well -- they'd be better in LAB.

[Jack Flesher]

Okay, I understand you now Chris -- and your method is better at targeting the neutrals specifically.

However it's not really tough to generate the mask I mentioned.

1) Open your image
2) Go to Select>Color Range
3) Click on your main neutral area
4) Now activate the dropper+ tool and click on all additional neutral hues you want to desaturate.
5) once you have them all click okay
6) add the curves adjustment layer and the mask is automatically loaded based on your selections
7) change the blend mode to saturation and pull down the top right corner of the curve to taste.

And thanks for getting my book out so quick -- I am looking forward to it!

[paul stimac]

dang it... I still cant get those values. (0,0)(4,0)(8,0)(12,12)(16,16)(20,20)(24,24) *(and their negatives) are as close as I can get them. It just won't let me do the (10,10). This seems to give the effect your talking about, but its frustrating that I can't enter the correct values.

[chris jordan]

Paul, that should do it; as long as the upper numbers are locked down, and you have the ones closer to zero moved down to zero, that's it. 8,0 is a bit harsh; I'd say maybe go 4,0, and 8,3 or something like. Then make sure 12,12 is locked down, and above that is all locked down, and you'll have the tweak I'm talking about.

Create the curve as an adjustment layer, and fade it back to taste (I usually fade it back to somewhere in the 50-75% range, so I'm not taking all of the color out of the neutrals).