Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 7. Creating a Good Image

In This Chapter

• Understanding the histogram

• Getting ready to correct an image

• Making a good tone curve

• Editing adjustment layers

• Testing your printer

With all the incredible things you can do in Photoshop, you can easily forget the basics. Yes, you can create incredible compositions with special effects, but if the people look greenish, it detracts from the image. Get in the habit of building good clean images before heading into the artsy filters and fun things. Color correction isn't complicated, and if done properly, it'll produce magical results in your images. In this chapter, you discover how to use the values you read in the Info panel and use the Curves panel to produce quality image corrections.

Reading a Histogram

Before making adjustments, look at the image's histogram, which displays an image's tonal values, to evaluate whether the image has sufficient detail to produce a high-quality image. In Photoshop CS4, choose Window

Note

The greater the range of values in the histogram, the greater the detail. Poor images without much information can be difficult, if not impossible, to correct. The Histogram panel also displays the overall distribution of shadows, midtones, and highlights to help you determine which tonal corrections are needed.

Figure 7-1 shows a good full histogram that indicates a smooth transition from one shade to another in the image. ...