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Understanding The Color Controls |
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It is important to understand what it is that
color controls do to your image. Often times you will need to adjust
hue, contrast, saturation, and brightness. Some of these controls,
if used badly, can damage detail in your image. If you know what
they do, you can predict the results. |
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Hue And Saturation |
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I will start with hue and saturation. If you read the section on color theory, you know what hue is. If you didn't, here is a link. When you set hue, you are setting what color you want. When you set saturation, you are setting how much of that color is present. It is as simple as that. You can not damage your image with hue, since all you are doing is moving the pixels around on a wheel. You can always return the wheel to its original position and the colors will revert back to where they were. Look at the images below. |
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Saturation is a horse of a different color, though. You do have a lot of room to move with the saturation control, but you CAN damage your image with it in extreme cases. The saturation control tells the program how much color to add. The image is really a gray scale, with no color at all. As you increase saturation, you tell the program to add more of the colors to the gray scale until you have 100% pure colors. You can increase and decrease the saturation a good bit, but if you totally de-saturate an image it will go to gray scale and you will not be able to restore the original colors. Likewise, if you saturate too much, you may not be able to restore the image back. Some examples are below. In each example, I made a change to the saturation, saved the file, then re-opened it and returned the file to normal by undoing what I did. |
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Within the range these controls are normally used, the hue and saturation controls are not destructive. You can go a long way before damaging your image, but some care must be taken. Even if your image is not damaged, it can look pretty odd if you set these controls the wrong way. Just be judicious with their use and you should be OK. |
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This can not be said of some of the other controls. The contrast and brightness controls can very easily damage your image. Before I get into why, I want to show you a tool for looking at their effects, the histogram. |
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