Beach Shot - Color Correction

In this tutorial I'm gonna take a standard picture and make it look better using color correction embodied in the Adobe Photoshop tool, "Curves," and other tools as well.

Here's what the transformation will look like:

 

Pretty neat huh?

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Let's start by taking a normal digital camera picture and loading it into Adobe Photoshop.

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A beach is best described as:

...a place that I like to go to. A place where I can 

be alone in the bright sunlight. A place where I can sit and listen
to the waves of water crashing along the shore.

Looking at the original picture I can't quite see that description. My goal is to give to it a bright, yellowish look. This will be achieved mostly with the Curves tool.

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Let us begin. Go to Image>Adjustments>Curves.

 

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Now for the much-needed contrast. Follow the picture below and proceed to the next step.

 

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For the yellowish look, go to the Red, Green, and Blue Channels and edit them individually as shown below.

 

 

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What we did, is enhanced the Red and Green Channel and lowered the Blue one. That, combined with the changes we did with the RGB Channel, gives the picture a yellow tone.

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Pretty cool right? We can pretty much leave it like that but If you have time to burn, we can add some more edits. Go to Image>Adjustments>Vibrance. Copy the values on the image below.

 

What it does is it gives an added shine to the overall look.

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Now to add a small vignette and we're all done. Go to Filter>Lens Correction. If you are using a Adobe Photoshop version other than Adobe Photoshop CS5, instead, do Filter>Distort>Lens Correction.

Go to Custom, and change the values as shown below.

A more detailed tutorial on adding a vignette to a shot can be found in our Vignette Effect tutorial

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The finished product should look something like this. 

 

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Thank you so much for taking this free Adobe Photoshop tutorial! Please share this with your friends and post your comments below. Cheers!


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