Match Color in Photoshop

Hi! This is Mama Shan with the tutorial to show you how to use the Match Color Command in Photoshop and I am using Photoshop CS3 but this command is available in previous versions of Photoshop as well.

So what I am going to do is, match the color temperature from one image to the other. And this is a valuable function a lot of times when you are taking pictures and you want a particular mood that you did not capture for various reasons maybe you did not have the correct white balance and even if you did, maybe you want something to look warmer than it is.

So all you need to do is pull up an image where you like the color temperature and you can flip it to a new image. So I have got my two images opened up. And this one that is highlighted where you can see the title in bold, we call that the target document. And I am going to source the color temperature from this image over into this one.

But first, what I am going to do is, open up the Layers Pallet for this and just hit Ctrl J on the PC, command J on a Macintosh so that I apply it to this layer rather than this image. In that way, we can kind of look at a before and after here.

So with this document again highlighted, go up to the Top Menu Image over to Adjustments and down here to where it says, Match Color. When the Match Color Dialogue Box opens up, the top half is your destination image, your target image. Down here in Image Statistics, you want to click on this little downward karat and we want to choose as the source, the ShemmyE1 image, the one on the left. So this is going to be our source image. And as soon as I select that, you can see that it is attempting to match the color temperature and balance of this image. And also here, we are sourcing that background layer.

Now you can play with some of these settings up here for luminance and color intensity, and fade back on how much of this balance you want applied. I increase the luminance and brightens up the image, somewhat and the color intensity again saturates colors. So you have got quite a few things you can do. Now the fade, as I move this and increase it, it is bringing back some of that original color of the image.

So this is a pretty important slider right down here, so that you still get a natural appearance. The neutralize checkbox is in effect going to negate the matching. See how cool that has appeared now. So usually, probably 95% of the time, you are not going to check this one. So I am going to click Okay on this. And we will flip it. We will do it the other way as well. And so here you can see, move layers out of the way here. So now we can just look at a before and after. And we can see that, that matches that other image more closely. I hook this back in here.

And now what I am going to do is I am actually just going to shut the visibility of this off, and we are going to flip it, by coming over here and match this one to the warmer tone. So with this document highlighted, again go to image, Adjustments, and down here to Match Color. And this time, we want the Source Document to be the AprilE1. So, I am going to choose that document, and choose its background layer. Notice now that it does list all of the layers in that document since I added that one. But we want to have the background be the source. So let me move this out of the way a little bit. You can see that has warmed up the image to better match that. We can use fade a little bit; maybe add a little bit more luminance to it.

Now if you like the settings the way that they are, you can also save out these statistics to apply to other images. Say you had other images of Shemmy that you took and you want them all to have a warmer appearance here. So what you would do is say save statistics, and we will open up this dialogue box where you could name the .sta document. We will just call that the warm.sta and save it, so that the next time that you open up a document, you could simply choose Load Statistics and you would not have to play with any of these settings, it is saving these settings, so you could apply it to it.

So that is about it for the Match Color function. It is pretty cool if you had never tried it, and give it a shot. Thanks for watching.