Adjusting for Color and Exposure
Photo-editing software is really powerful and
there isn’t a magazine cover, advertisement
poster, or press shot that hasn’t had a little (or a
lot of) editing done to it. Adobe Photoshop is so
well known that it has been used as a descriptive
term (“Oh, that’s been Photoshopped.”) or as a
request (“Could you please Photoshop that?”).
And then there is the worst of all, “Don’t worry;
he will fix it in Photoshop.” The truth of the mat-
ter is that you really can do amazing things using
the image-editing software, but it shouldn’t be a
crutch for fixing sloppy work with your camera.
With that being said, there are times when you
want to, and might need to, enhance an image
using software—I do it all the time.Adjusting the lighting and color in Elements
There is a full set of exposure controls in the
Adobe Camera Raw module in Elements, but
because those controls are the same as the ones in
the Develop module of Lightroom, they are cov-
ered a little later in this chapter. This section is
about the option that Elements gives you under
the Enhance menu, specifically, the Adjust
Lighting menu and the Adjust Color menu
choices.
The Adjust Lighting menu gives you three choices,
but remember that these adjustments will be on
the selected layer, so if you want to be able to go
back to the original, you will need to first duplicate
the layer. You can do this by right-clicking the
layer and choosing Duplicate Layer from the
choices shown. The three menu choices are:Another way to set the white balance is to use
the drop-down menu that gives you a basic set of
white balance presets. If you are adjusting a RAW
image file, then you will get more options than
when adjusting a JPEG or TIFF file. The list con-
tains the following options: As Shot, Auto,
Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent,
Flash, and Custom. The list of options for chang-
ing the white balance when editing a JPEG or
TIFF file is much shorter, only giving you Auto
and Custom, and possibly As Shot. When you use
one of the presets (or the White Balance Selector
tool), you see that the Temp and Tint sliders
move to show the new setting. You can also use
these sliders by themselves to set the white bal-
ance, or more commonly to fine-tune the white
balance.
The Temp slider uses the Kelvin scale to set the
white balance. Moving the slider to the right
warms up the image by making it more orange
and red, while moving the slider to the left cools
the photo down by removing the red and orange
and adding more blue. You can also set the color
temperature directly using the box to the right of
the Temp slider. If you are adjusting a JPEG or
TIFF, the Temp slider goes from –100 to 100 and
allows you to adjust the color on a relative scale.
Kelvin is covered in more detail in
Chapter 2.x-refThe Tint slider allows you to adjust the amount
of green or magenta tint in the image. When you
slide the Tint slider to the right, you add
magenta; when you slide it to the left, you add
green. These tools make it really easy to set the
white balance on any of your images.