Inside Photoshop® CS

Applying Curves to Selected Areas

Color correcting purists shun the thought of selecting areas in an image and applying local corrections. Their reasoning is sound, though: What's wrong in one part of the image affects the entire image even though it might not be obvious. However, paradigms are being broken almost daily in this age of ever-improving digital imaging software. My approach is this: Use whatever tools you have to improve the image as much as possible.

The sample image for the next set of steps contains two areas that have distinctly different color and tonality problems. Applying the same Curves correction to the entire image would not yield the best possible image. Therefore, you will select each area, one at a time, and then apply ...