Color Correction

(Monument) Before/After

(Rooster in Shadows) Before/After

(High Contrast Bird) Before/After

For this project my goal was to color correct each image and then present them in a before and after image. The first image I corrected was of the monument. I noticed that this picture was a little bit too blue, which washed out some of the colors. So first I copy and pasted the image over to another layer and then opened the Image drop down menu. There I found the Variations tools; which samples and displays the picture in various tones of color, and also brightens and darkens them. First I tried neutralizing some of the blue out, by adding a warm color like red to warm up the picture and give it more color. I then darkened the photo a degree, to make the shadows more pronounced, and finally I added some cyan to even out the red, and then some yellow to brighten the colors. I think the final product made the picture more rich in color and clearer to see. The second picture I corrected was the Rooster in the dark. In this picture my goal was to brighten the picture and make the rooster pop-out from the background better. I repeated the first steps again, and once in the variations tool, I began to brighten the picture. I noticed that as I brightened it the color was beginning to wash out somewhat. So I added red to preserve some of the color, and later added cooler colors to even the red out again. The result made the rooster easier to see and the background is much clearer, you can also see the wooden stump in the back now. The last picture I color corrected was the high contrast bird. The problem with this one was that it was a little too bright and almost yellowy. It made the white features of the bird hard to see. So I repeated my first steps, and once in variations tool I began trying to remove some of the brightness and yellow hue by adding in cool colors like blue, and green; and mixing in some warm colors to balance them out. I then darkened it a few degrees to make the lines and shadows more pronounced. The result made the shadows on the bird more noticeable. The variations tools made it very simple to color adjust all of these pictures, and this was my first time using this tool. I don’t think I would have been able to achieve the same look if I had used just a simple layer adjustment.