Using Curves and Color Adjustments
The Curves adjustment lets you adjust tonal ranges in the image without changing image exposure. Curves is an excellent adjustment for lightening the dark shadows of an image to bring out detail, or for creating special effects like solarization. The Color Balance adjustment lets you change the highlight, shadows, and midtones of an image separately. The Color Balance dialog box performs linear adjustments to color; therefore, it's a good tool for correcting common tonal adjustments, such as using traditional outdoor film, indoors and getting a green cast to the image.The Brightness/Contrast adjustment changes an image by an overall lightning or darkening of the image pixels. While good for special effects, its linear way of changing an image's brightness and contrast do not lend themselves to photo restoration. Curves and Levels are much better for this type of work.

Use the Curves Adjustment
Open an image.
Click the Image menu, point to Adjustments , and then click Curves .
Click the Channel list arrow, and then select the composite channel.
Click the Tonal Input bar to reverse the Curves tonal values.
Click on the diagonal line to add an edit point, and then drag up or down to increase or decrease the tonal values of the active image.
Use the Eyedropper tools to select tonal values directly in the active image window.
Select the Preview check box to view changes to the image.
Click the curve or pencil option to change how edit points are added to the Curves graph window.
Click the Enlarge button to get a larger Curves dialog box.
Click OK .
Use the Color Balance Adjustment
Open an image.
Click the Image menu, point to Adjustments , and then click Color Balance .
Drag the CYMK to RGB sliders to adjust the color.
Click a Tone Balance option.
Click OK .
Use the Brightness/Contrast Adjustment
Open an image.
Click the Image menu, point to Adjustments , and then click Brightness/Contrast .
Drag the Brightness slider left to decrease the brightness values or right to increase the values of the colors in the active image.
Drag the Contrast slider to the left to decrease the color steps or left to increase the steps in the image.
Click OK .
Did You Know?You can use selection to control the Brightness/Contrast adjustment. Use any of Photoshop's selection tools to isolate a portion of the image before using the Brightness/Contrast adjustment, and then only the selected areas will be adjusted. |
For Your InformationUnderstanding Brightness and Contrast The Brightness/Contrast adjustment performs linear adjustment to an image. For example, moving the brightness slider to the right will increase the brightness values of all the pixels in the image equally. Since photographs are not linear in nature, the Brightness/Contrast adjustment is not recommended for use on images. For images, use the Levels, and Curves (non-linear) adjustments, and use Brightness/Contrast for clipart, text, and non-photographic images. |