What if you do not know all about this stuff about crazy color theory? You do not know where magenta is falling on the big old color spectrum.

You just know that that is approximately right and you really want to nail the correct colors inside the image. Well, here is what you do, just select one of the color ranges, you can not have master selected but you could have anything else selected. Heck, I could select yellow and I will just to make my point.

I will go ahead and select yellow. I know these are not yellow but anything besides master us fine. Then I will move my cursor outside the dialog box, notice that and it changes to a little eyedropper and I click and that re-centers the range. You will notice that it even selects magenta for me. You do not mean yellows. What are you, nuts? You mean magentas and that is fine. And then I could add more colors as well by Shift clicking. Notice if I press the “Shift” key, if you look very closely, you can see that the cursor gains a little plus sign to show that I am adding colors. And I can just Shift click around just to make sure I got what colors I need to have selected.

Now, I will edit the hue range and let us see what happens and as I drag to the left, it is making the colors bluer and if I drag to the right, it is making the colors redder and so, let us say, I want her to have a red shirt. That is actually looks pretty nice with what she has going on. It matches her lips, it matches her sunglasses. That is so very important to have children with matching outfits, do you not think? And then, I am going to tab my way to saturation and bump it down just a little bit, so this comes off as being a bit more natural.

Now, what if after this point, you still notice that some colors still need to be changed. For example, I will move my dialog box down here so that we can see it a little better. Down here on our shoulder, notice how we still have some blues left over. Some blues are still showing through, what used to be blues in the violet range. So, you know, different colors are reflecting off of our shirt here.

What if you want to bring those colors into the fold? Well, one thing you could do is once again, press the “Shift” key and click on them and notice how they change. Did you see how that updated for me, so I can go ahead and shift click on colors to add them to my spectrum even after I got some edits in play here. That is fine. Or drag this up here so that we can see this slider bar. You can also just move these things around.

For example, if you want to include more blues, I could drag this little sort of triangle here in order to expand the range which gives me a larger drop off. I could drag this little vertical bar to expand the central range of colors that are completely getting edited or I could actually drag this gray slider here to keep the drop off frames the same size but move where it is. So, I will just drag it over a little bit here, so that we can see more colors come into play.

And then there is numerical readings just showing you where the drop off occurs and colors are measured in degrees as I said. Zero degree is red, 180 degrees turns out to be cyan, 187 is just slightly off cyan. So, it is saying, the color start getting edited at the 187 degrees. They taper off to 224, so these guys go together and then the full range of colors are getting edited, drops to 293 and then there is a drop off all the way to 323 degrees.

So, you can actually change those numerical values by entering new numbers but they do track your movements. See that. Just something to bear in mind. Now, I am just eyeballing, so use whatever settings you like and notice now Photoshop has changed its mind. I am not editing the magentas anymore. I am editing the blues.

My response, who cares? I do not care what you think, you are editing Photoshop. So, just bear in mind. Things are going to change around on you. Just use your eyes, keep an eye on the image window, make your changes as you see that, and then click the “OK” button in order to accept the changes. So, here is before, here