Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Correcting Color

The Color palette lets you—surprise, surprise—play around with the colors in your image. In many cases, if you’ve been successful with Auto Levels or Auto Contrast you won’t need to do anything here.

Auto Color

Once again, there’s another one-click fix available—Auto Color. Actually, in some ways Auto Color should be up in the Lighting section. Like Levels, it simultaneously adjusts color and brightness, but it looks at different information in your photos to decide what to do with them.

When you’re first learning to use Quick Fix, you may want to try all three—Levels, Contrast, and Auto Color—to see which generally works best for your photos. Undo between each change and compare your results. Most people find that they like one of the three most of the time, but you don’t usually need to apply all three to the same photo.

Auto Color may be just the ticket for your photos, but you may also find that it shifts your colors in strange ways. Give it a click and see what you think. Does your photo look better or worse? If it’s worse, just click Reset or press Ctrl+Z to undo it, and go back to Auto Levels or Auto Contrast. If they all make your colors look a little off, or if you want to tweak the colors in your photo, then move on to the Color sliders, which are explained in the next section.

Using the Color sliders

If you want to adjust the colors in your photo without changing the brightness, then check out the Color sliders. For example, your digital camera may produce ...