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Open an image and apply basic colour correction.
Overview
Name of explainer: Open an image and apply basic colour correction.
Creative theme: Image editing
Software used: PaintShop Pro
User level: BEGINNER
This is explainer 3 of 5 in this series
This series includes:
- Open an image, resize it and save it
- Open an image, rotate it and crop it
- Open an image and apply basic colour correction
- Open an image and add text
- Create a new image with a single-colour background
The Software
This series of beginner explainers uses PaintShop Pro. You can download a free 30 day demo version at Corel’s website. (PC only).
This month we’re also running explainer series for Photoshop (which requires a paid monthly or yearly subscription) and GIMP (which is completely free).
The pre-requisities
This is a BEGINNER workflow explainer, so you just need to install and open the software. We’ll take it from there.
If you’re new to IT / computing, you may need help downloading and installing the software. Start with a search for ‘how do i install paintshop pro’ or speak with someone who’s familiar with downloading and installing.
Why would I do this?
Colour correction is useful for a variety of editing tasks, from making images ‘pop’ by boosting contrast and saturation to colorising black and white images and applying filters to create a stylised look or evoke a mood. In this explainer we open a photo that looks ‘flat’ and adjust the brightness, contrast and ambience.
Let’s do it!
You can download the image used in this explainer from the section further down this page.
Click the play icon to watch this video. Subtitles are available – Click the settings cog at the bottom right for options. You can also watch this video full-screen by clicking the full-screen icon at the bottom right.
Good to know
Most image editing software includes numerous one-click filters or ‘looks’. Depending on your project they may be all you need, so feel free to try them out!
Where to next?
Looking at PaintShop Pro’s ‘Adjust’ menu below, you can see sub-menus and options relating to colour enhancement. Feel free to try them out and be sure you try the ‘One Step Photo Fix’ as it can be a great time-saver. Remember you can use UNDO (found in the EDIT menu) if something goes wrong.
New in recent versions of PaintShop Pro is the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ menu item as highlighted below. If you have a selfie or portrait image to hand, try out ‘AI Portrait Mode’ and see what you think of the results!
Remember, this is part of a series of explainers for this software – Join us again for the other explainers in the series 🙂
Download the image used in this explainer
You’re welcome to download this image for personal use only.
Notes and updates
There are no notes or advisories at this time. This video explainer was last updated in February 2023. This page was last updated in February 2023.
We at pixels.cool are not responsible for the content of any external webpages or software downloaded from third party sites. Links are included in good faith at the time of writing. All explainer content is compiled in good faith using processes and methods used by the team. Modern software gives users many ways in which to accomplish the same task, and for reasons of clarity we choose not to reference multiple options. All computer users should run up to date virus / security software at all times to minimise risk.
This is number 3 of 15 explainer videos available in image editing month! Make sure you check out the others!
