The color in digital photos is often not true to reality, sometimes it is too dark, sometimes too light and in some cases, depending on the camera used, it has false colors or artifacts. If in the past I had listed some automatic tools to optimize contrast colors and light of photos, here we use some professional programs instead.
Although Photoshop and the free Gimp and Paint.net are not easy to use if you don't study them, as far as the correction of the colors in a photo is concerned, you can work without making too much effort to find the commands.
Since it is bad to take a photo and find out that the color is influenced by the environment, the lighting and the bad lens of the digital camera, without being too sorry, you can have faith in the potential of one of these great photo editing programs for computer, Windows or Linux it is.
These graphics tools allow you to correct the colors as you prefer, with a simplicity that you would not expect being professional programs anyway.
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To correct an inaccurate color with a program chosen from Photoshop, Gimp or Paint.net, you have to play a lot with tools such as selective color, Hue / Saturation, curves and levels to transform a bad image into a photo that reflects the reality.
The goal (difficult to achieve if not very patiently) is to recreate the natural color of the scene with an optimal choice of values in shades and in the distribution of colors and light.
When editing images, be careful not to overdo the color saturation levers, especially when turning on colors like blue, green and orange.
The main tool to use in any photo editing program is the one that regulates Hue and Saturation .
Hue allows you to set a predominant color in the image as if you put a filter on it.
Saturation instead serves to give liveliness to dull colors, to create bright colors and make stylized images more opaque.
In Photoshop and Gimp there is a hue and saturation editor more powerful than that of Paint.net which, however, among the three, is the least complex and lightest software.
You can adjust hue and saturation only of some parts of photos, choosing, for example, to change the colors of the red areas, leaving the other ones intact.
The color correction menu is in:
Photoshop: Image -> Adjustments -> Hue / Saturation
GIMP: Colors -> Hue-Saturation
Paint.NET: Adjustments -> Hue / Saturation
The selective color function is present only in Photoshop and allows to correct the primary colors, separately from the others so as to modify only some isolated colors, without affecting the others .
For Photoshop go to the Image menu -> Adjustments -> Selective color correction .
Color balance is another great alternative tool to changing hue and saturation.
By balancing the colors it is possible to isolate and modify the lights and shadows of the photograph.
Photoshop and GIMP come with an almost identical color balance tool:
Photoshop: Image -> Adjustments -> Color Balance
GIMP: Colors -> Color balance
Curves and Levels are not as intuitive as other color correction tools but are tools that offer much more precise control over images.
Curves are used to adjust contrast and brightness as a professional who uses Photoshop, GIMP or Paint.NET would do.
The curves tool can also be used to correct colors by changing the values of Blue, Red and Green, moving the parabolic curve with the mouse.
The curves tool is identical in Photoshop, GIMP and Paint.NET:
Photoshop: Image -> Adjustments -> Curves
GIMP: Colors -> Curves
Paint.NET: Adjustments -> Curves
Last but not least, the color correction tool is that of the levels that allows you to adjust the RGB values.
Paint.NET, which lacks some features that have bigger programs like Photoshop and Gimp, has a great tool for setting different levels of colors.
The color levels are adjusted by histograms and a closing parenthesis must be opened in this article.
Histograms is a tool present in Gimp and Photoshop (Pain.Net does not have a Histogram tool that only comes out by adjusting the levels).
The histogram is a kind of algebraic mapping of the information of an image.
The horizontal X axis represents the range of values, on the left, and white on the right.
The vertical axis (y axis) indicates the concentration of this value in the image, the higher the peak, the darker or lighter it is present in the photo.
Histograms can be made for each color or for color combinations.
Returning now to the adjustment of the levels, you have a clearer idea of what it means to move the histograms.
By changing the levels, the color is distributed differently on the image, increasing or decreasing the light.
All three programs have a very similar level editing function:
Photoshop Image -> Adjustments -> Levels
GIMP: Colors -> Levels
Paint.NET: Adjustments -> Levels
You cannot be more specific in this guide because each image and photo will have to be modified with different values in the various color and contrast correction tools.
Generally speaking and depending on how precise a job has to be, it can take a minute or 4 hours to find the most realistic combination possible.
On the technical side, without knowing in detail the meaning of colors and adjustment tools, with Gimp, Paint.net and Photoshop, this is one of the easiest operations to do.
