Color Photo Editor

So imagine that you buy yourself a nice camera. You take it out to get some street photography done and the photos look great on the small LCD of the camera. But when you take the images out into your computer, you feel like their colors aren’t how they seemed to be to your eye. Instead of panicking and thinking that there is something wrong with your camera, you should know how to remedy the situation because a camera can never be as perfect as the human eye. This is why photo editing software programs exist in the world. These can help you edit your pictures, until you get the desired look, in a matter of minutes. You can adjust the colors, or use filters or effects to tweak your images to your heart’s content.

However, with so many programs available that you can use, it becomes confusing for many new photographers as to which one is best for their needs. This article will help explain the color correction and adjustment capabilities of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, two of the most popular editors on the market.

Color Correction with Adobe Photoshop

If you are someone who has anything to do with photography or digital design, chances are that you have heard of Adobe Photoshop. This is perhaps the most popular image editor that people use for their color correction needs. While Photoshop brings a plethora of features to the table, allowing you to alter the look of your photos as much as you want, we will discuss the various options that you can use to color correct your photos.

• Adjusting Color Balance:

Opening the Color Balance window within Photoshop by going to Image - Adjustments - Color Balance will bring you to a fairly simple way of correcting color in your photos. You can adjust your image’s color levels as well as increase or decrease the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. The effects of using this option can be as subtle or as extreme as you want.

• Playing with Levels:

Photoshop levels are a quick way to alter the color and contrast of your images. The Levels dialogue box can be opened by going to Image - Adjustments - Levels or by pressing CTRL+L on your keyboard. The interface of this window is simple; you have some sliders that you can alter in order to achieve the desired effect. If you are not content with the effects you achieve with these sliders, you can always take the Levels adjustment to a much deeper level.

• Adding Some Vibrancy

If you just want your photos to have a little more punch in terms of color, without needing to adjust anything in detail, you can open up the Vibrance window by going to Image - Adjustments - Vibrance. This gives you two sliders, one to change the ‘vibrance’ of your photo and the other to change saturation. This is a quick and easy way to add some more color in your pictures.

If you would rather not work very hard and want to get the job done quickly, you can always slap one of the many filters in the program on your image. While this is not advisable in most cases where pictures will be printed, it’s a great way to tune the colors of your photos for a quick social media post.

So How Does Lightroom Compare?

Another famous product that comes from Adobe is Lightroom. This software is aimed squarely at photographers, as it is a RAW image editor rather than something you should be using to add filters to your JPEG photos.

With Lightroom, you can modify everything in your RAW photos from their color and white balance to their sharpness and noise. Therefore, if you are a photographer who shoots in RAW, and you don’t want to lose yourself in the depths of Photoshop, Lightroom is the way to go.

The interface that you are greeted with is fairly simple. You have sets of sliders denoting various options like Color Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Contrast, and more. All of these can be adjusted, and each one will have a different effect on your file. For correcting color, you will most likely need to alter the Temperature and White Balance of the photo first. You can also pull back some highlights or fill in some shadows to liven up your photos.

Which One to Use and When

So now that we have established that both Photoshop and Lightroom are great photo editors if you need to fine tune the colors of your photos, the question arises as to which one is better in what scenario. As with every comparison, the answer depends on what you need the software to do. If you are a photographer and you need to quickly tweak your RAW files, then Lightroom might be better for you because of its easier workflow. If, however, you need to edit anything other than RAW photos and need more granular control over the settings, then you can’t really beat the usability of Photoshop.

Another major difference between the two editors is that Lightroom, when RAW photos are concerned, is a non-destructive editor. This means that the final quality of your processed photos will be much better than if you process a file in Photoshop. On the other hand, the amount of control you get with Photoshop, especially considering that you can edit each and every pixel in an image, puts quite a big feather in its hat.

So if the results of your photography trips don’t seem as nice as they should, there is nothing to worry about. Just make sure you know whether you want to maintain the quality of your RAW photos while you adjust their colors or you wish to tweak your photos from an artistic perspective with various effects and filters, and one of these two excellent editors will be enough to get the job done for you.