Just by pressing okay, and now we’re again going to need to eyeball it to kind of adjust for this overkill, third time I used that word, overkill blue-green cast. And to bring in more red, you’re going to slide the opacity slider to the left, more toward 0. To bring in more blue, you simply slide it towards 100 on the right hand side, and about 30% looks good to me. Now to examine my changes, I’m just going to hide my adjustment layer, and we can see immediately how much of that red-orange color I’ve brought back in. And it’s as simple as that. There you have your color corrections. And again I’m going to stress to you that if you need to do advanced color corrections to be explicitly precise, do some more reading on the subject perhaps on that Keach Pete book that I have mentioned.

So now on the second mini tutorial, this comes from a user request on You Tube, asking me to show how to use the dodge tool, and in order to explain how to use the dodge tool, I’m also going to need to mention two other tools. These are the burn tool and the sponge tool. And these tools are found at that last icon in the second grouping on your tool bar here. To get to them, hold your left mouse button over the icon and you see a secondary menu here with dodge, burn and sponge. And you can also get to them by pressing O on the keyboard, but when you do so, you’re going to get the dodge tool to get your burn tool. To get the burn toll, you’re going to need to go to your tool bar here and hold your mouse button. So, with the dodge tool selected I’m going to make sure that my range is set to mid tones, my exposure set to 18%, and my hardness set to 0%. And let’s just assume that I thought the shadows on the left side of her face were a bit too deep and needed be lightened. Well, I’m just going to paint over that area using one click, one stroke with my mouse, and I now lighten those shadows.

The drawback, the side effect to using this dodge tool though is that when you use it, you’re also slightly de-saturating your image by whatever percentage you entered into the exposure value box right here, which in this case is 18%. So in order to compensate for that and bring those colors back in, I need to use the sponge tool. So with the sponge tool, I’m going to set my mode to saturate, making sure the value in the flow box is set to the same number that I used when I was using my dodge tool, which is 18%. And again make sure that your hardness is set to 0. And with the same stroke, paint over that same area that you’ve dodged, and you now bring back in those colors.

So, in order to examine my changes, I’m going into my history palette here, and we see the changes we’ve made. And the burn tool works much the same way. If I thought that the shadows weren’t deep enough, I would simply paint over this area with the burn tool. And I’d deepen those shadows, but you might have guessed that because I’m using the burn tool at an exposure value of 18%, I’m also now saturating that area by an additional 18%. So, in order to eliminate that excess saturation, I’m going to switch over to the sponge tool, this time setting the mode to de-saturate. Keeping the flow at whatever value I used to burn it, which was 18%. And just go over that same area. We’ll now eliminate that excess saturation, but we’re keeping our deep in the shadows. So, let’s examine our changes, and we can see there what I’ve done with those shadows.

Well those are pretty much the basics of the dodge and burn tools, and if you have any other questions, or comments, or suggestions, feel free to drop me a line, I’ll be more than happy to help. Until then, keep learning.