Before we dive headfirst into what I consider to be the best tools for tonal correction, I’d first like to mention which tools you should avoid. It’s not that I have anything personal against these tools (with the exception of maybe the legacy version of Brightness/Contrast)—they’re just not the best tools to use for optimizing print graphics.
Brightness/Contrast
With Photoshop CS3, we finally have an updated version of Brightness/Contrast. In the past, the Brightness/Contrast settings adjusted the overall image in equal amounts, resulting in blown-out highlights and washed-out shadows, or grayed highlights and plugged-up shadows. There was simply no reason to use this tool when you could get much better results by using Levels or Curves, both of which offer you much more tonal control. Now by default, the new Brightness/Contrast dialog box behaves the same as the Brightness/ Contrast controls located in the Camera Raw dialog box. This is a huge improvement, and a welcome change, but the Brightness/Contrast dialog still does not offer as much tonal control as either Levels or Curves.
What is really strange about this dialog is that it now includes a Use Legacy option. When enabled, this feature makes the dialog behave as it did in previous versions of Photoshop—which is something you would never want to use, unless of course you are trying to make your image look really bad.
Exposure
The Exposure command is really meant for use with high dynamic range (HDR) images. It’s great for editing images that contain 32 bits per channel, but for 8-bit or 16-bit images, it doesn’t offer you anything that you couldn’t do better by using Levels or Curves. In fact, by adjusting the dialog’s Exposure and Offset sliders, you can pretty much get your image to look as bad as it would by working with the legacy version of
Brightness/Contrast.
Color Balance and Variations
The Color Balance and Variations dialog boxes allow you to shift the colors contained in the highlight, midtone, and shadow areas of your image toward one of the primary colors (CMY and RGB). Color Balance does offer you more control than the Variations command, which forces you to use preset adjustment increments; but like Variations, it shifts all the colors in your image toward the chosen primary color. More often than not, applying either command usually winds up adding an unwanted color cast to your image. Levels, Curves, Selective Color, and even Hue/Saturation are much better tools for “balancing color,” which is generally a selective process rather than a global one.
Match Color
This isn’t necessarily a bad tool, per se—it just doesn’t really do what its name indicates, at least not from a print designer’s perspective. Match Color is great for blending color temperature between two photos to create a dramatic effect. It is not a good tool for automated color correction, as its name might suggest. For example, let’s say you are designing a product catalog that contains hundreds of similar products all photographed in the same environments and using the same lighting conditions. If you correct one image, you could use Match Color to match the rest of the images to the corrected one. However, it’s just as easy to use adjustment layers to correct the initial image, and simply copy and paste them, or save the settings and load them into an adjustment layer for each image.
Brightness/Contrast
With Photoshop CS3, we finally have an updated version of Brightness/Contrast. In the past, the Brightness/Contrast settings adjusted the overall image in equal amounts, resulting in blown-out highlights and washed-out shadows, or grayed highlights and plugged-up shadows. There was simply no reason to use this tool when you could get much better results by using Levels or Curves, both of which offer you much more tonal control. Now by default, the new Brightness/Contrast dialog box behaves the same as the Brightness/ Contrast controls located in the Camera Raw dialog box. This is a huge improvement, and a welcome change, but the Brightness/Contrast dialog still does not offer as much tonal control as either Levels or Curves.
What is really strange about this dialog is that it now includes a Use Legacy option. When enabled, this feature makes the dialog behave as it did in previous versions of Photoshop—which is something you would never want to use, unless of course you are trying to make your image look really bad.
Exposure
The Exposure command is really meant for use with high dynamic range (HDR) images. It’s great for editing images that contain 32 bits per channel, but for 8-bit or 16-bit images, it doesn’t offer you anything that you couldn’t do better by using Levels or Curves. In fact, by adjusting the dialog’s Exposure and Offset sliders, you can pretty much get your image to look as bad as it would by working with the legacy version of
Brightness/Contrast.
Color Balance and Variations
The Color Balance and Variations dialog boxes allow you to shift the colors contained in the highlight, midtone, and shadow areas of your image toward one of the primary colors (CMY and RGB). Color Balance does offer you more control than the Variations command, which forces you to use preset adjustment increments; but like Variations, it shifts all the colors in your image toward the chosen primary color. More often than not, applying either command usually winds up adding an unwanted color cast to your image. Levels, Curves, Selective Color, and even Hue/Saturation are much better tools for “balancing color,” which is generally a selective process rather than a global one.
Match Color
This isn’t necessarily a bad tool, per se—it just doesn’t really do what its name indicates, at least not from a print designer’s perspective. Match Color is great for blending color temperature between two photos to create a dramatic effect. It is not a good tool for automated color correction, as its name might suggest. For example, let’s say you are designing a product catalog that contains hundreds of similar products all photographed in the same environments and using the same lighting conditions. If you correct one image, you could use Match Color to match the rest of the images to the corrected one. However, it’s just as easy to use adjustment layers to correct the initial image, and simply copy and paste them, or save the settings and load them into an adjustment layer for each image.
Tools to Avoid
![Tools to Avoid]()
Reviewed by Pepen2710
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6:59:00 PM
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