Another must read - Professional Photoshop - by Dan Margulis

[Manfred M]

There have been a number of photography book recommendations on this site and I would like to add another; Dan Margulis's Professional Photoshop - The Classic Guide to Color Correction; 5th Edition.. I'm getting well along this book and this really should be on the "must read" list for people interested doing serious colour correction work. While he bases his method (rather generically) on Photoshop, any software that gives access to channel curves (including ACR and Lightroom) will work.

For those of you who don't know about Dan, he is considered to be the "guru" of colour correction and has three books out there that are quite difficult to find; the one I refer to is currently only available as an eBook or as a second hand book. I haven't quite figured out how to get hold of the CD that supposedly comes with the book, but it really isn't critical. He has a couple more out there; both of which I have on order and I'll look at reviewing when I've gone through them.

I've had the book for some time now, and with the terrible weather we've had, I've finally started to make my way through this book. It is not an easy read and is fairly technical. I find I have to re-read parts of what he has written two or three times before I "get it".

His method of colour correction is to use curves; not the master curve, but rather the individual channel curves, regardless if you use RGB, CMYK or LAB.

Now, as for the results. I'm a convert. I've got images that I had trouble colour balancing and his method works really well. It's not a method I would use on every image, some of the traditional shortcuts work just fine, but for images that I am going to make large prints of, I will be using his work method 100% from here on in. I've gotten images that I've fought to look right and have been able to nail them with a few minutes of work.

So, if you want to be able to get some really good looking images, I highly recommend his methods. They may be unorthodox and more complex when compared to the simpler methods that some other authors recommend, but they do work and work extremely well.

If any of you subscribe to KelbyOne; Dan has several tutorials available there.

Not an easy read, but highly recommended.

[rpcrowe]

Manfred...

I have attended several Photoshop Seminars presented by John Watts of Watts Digital Imaging, San Diego. He also uses the individual channel curves for correction.

I have learned a lot from his seminars which (at five U.S. Dollars per session) are amazingly cheap...

http://www.wattsdigital.com/

John has an eBook that is quite good and includes his color correction techniques.

One technique that I learned from John and have incorporated in virtually all my workflow is the use of Master Images... The master image is an image corrected for exposure and color, burned and dodged when required and then saved as a PSD file. It is neither cropped nor output sharpened.

This way, I have a master that I can go back to and crop any way I desire and then do the final sharpening depending on my output. The technique would have saved me a lot of sorrow a few years ago when I needed to convert a large set of images (many of which had been cropped into portrait format) into landscape formats for use in a calendar. If I had these images saved as PSD master files, I would not have been required to return to "ground zero" and start all over again. I could have simply cropped the images and applied output sharpening...

[Dave Humphries]

Perhaps I should read it and try it too - here's why ...

I come from an Outside Broadcast TV production background and we matched the colours between cameras with two sets of Red, Green and Blue 'wheels' that could increase or decrease the channel gains (one set of wheels each for highlights/whites and shadows/blacks). Bear in mind I am considering 'outdoors', not studio work. e.g. colour matching umpteen TV cameras together (often 'looking' in different directions with regard to the sun), especially when covering a football/soccer match on a pitch within a stadium which is half sunlit and half in shade, with cameras panning to follow the play between those areas!


When I started digital photography, I always felt the method of White Balancing (which I'd equate to 'Color Correction') was somewhat crude, or 'minimalist', compared to what I was used to.

Yes, it can be done (for the highlights) with just the (WB) Color Temp and Tint controls, but they're far from intuitive, not so well scaled numerically, and they don't allow for separate adjustments in the shadows. That has to be done separately, usually later in the processing workflow.

So yes, it sounds like I ought to look at this - thanks.


That said, I finally bought 'Light Science and Magic' recently, so I need to finish reading that first

[bnnrcn]

Thank you Manfred. I looked for the book in Amazon and I have found the new and second hand ones. The new ones are not very cheap but the price for the second hands look ok. Amazon also has a Kindle Edition for this book. So, it can be bought in any ways but it is about 500 pages! Dou you suggest any particular sections in the book so that it would be easier to read it in time if I buy it. I looked at the table of contents and it seems that it is a very comprehensive book

[James G]

I have had a copy of his book on L*a*b from when 1st published... (a bit defunct these days for my workflow )

Will take a look at this ... Thanks