A Before & After Step by Step

Just a quick little tutorial for the readers of the food blog.  Since I absolutely do no promotion for this blog, I assume everyone here came from the food blog. :)

Okay, so here's the original photo opened up in the RAW editor of Photoshop- the colors are a bit dull, the meat a not so medium-rare looking gray, and the broccoli a shade of yellow.  To fix the muted color problem, we're going to be utilizing curves.  In simple terms, just think of curves as the contrast tool on steroids.  It produces much more detailed  results and offers the user more control over what parts of the image he/she wants to adjust.  I'll just give a simple use for this tutorial.

On the side bar click the second tab (the one with the curve on it... get it?).  After that switch from the "parametric" tab to the "point" tab.

 

Probably the easiest way to achieve results with the curves tool is to make what they call the "S" curve.  Just like it says, you just drag and drop the line to resemble a slight "S."  Keep making adjustments until the image suits your liking.

 And voila! Already a markedly better improvement!  Now to address that terribly overcooked broccoli.  On the right, click on the 4th tab- HSL (hue, saturation, luminance)/Grayscale tab.

As you can see, you can toy with certain colors in an image.  Our problem is that the yellow broccoli is not green.  All you gotta do is take the slider for yellow, and move to the right towards the color green!  You can also take any green in the original photo and make it "greener" if you like by moving the green slider to the right as well.

 Yellow broccoli no more!

I also moved the orange slider a little to the left towards the color red to deepen the color of the rib-eye.

After that, you can go back to the first tab and make adjustments to exposure, general saturation, or white balance until you're satisfied. 

Just for the Sake of Posting

I know I haven't touched this blog for a while (most of my attention is devoted to the food blog), but I just wanted to show a before and after a black and white editing.  After desaturating the image, I made multiple adjustments using curves.

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