Color Correct with Curves

Move your cursor over the image to reveal
the color corrected image.

I am almost certain that the woman in this photograph is not green in real life. With this knowledge as my weapon and a little help from curves we shall attempt to make the colors in this picture a bit more realistic.

With a rapid scan of this image I've decided that the wall behind the women is more than likely white with offwhite trim rather than yellow. This means that the wall should be neutral (equal amounts M & Y with a few more points C). Instead, the values are:

·C=25
·M=11
·Y=29
·K=1

These are not the values we want for a neutral. A better example of a neutral would be more like:

·C=14
·M=11
·Y=11
·K=1

An interesting consequence of fixing the neutrals in an image is that the non-neutrals (e.g., skintones) are automatically fixed in the process.

Remember that silly Ziploc commercial where the cute little girl says, "Yellow and blue make green!" Well, if an image looks green overall, then you can be sure that reducing the amount of cyan and yellow will improve it.

We already know that we have too much yellow overall. Sometimes moving a corner of the curve in one direction or the other can lead to clues as too how the image can be improved. Doing this showed me that there was too much yellow ink in the shadows.

Removing all of that yellow made our wall a little pink. Removing a little magenta alleviates that problem.

I felt that there was an excessive amount of black ink in this woman's skintone. Reducing black ink from the quarter tone and bumping it up in the 3 quarter tone can increase the contrast of an image.

The image was still a bit dark, so pulling ink from the highlight and mid-tones effectively lightened it. Notice how I placed a point in the 3 quarter tone to keep the shadows in place.