Image editing: Photoshop explainer 3 of 5

Open an image and apply basic colour correction

All our image editing explainers are waffle-free and work-tested. That’s the pixels.cool guarantee!

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:

  1. Open an image, resize it and save it
  2. Open an image, rotate it and crop it
  3. Open an image and apply basic colour correction
  4. Open an image and add text
  5. Create a new image with a single-colour background

The Software

This series of beginner explainers uses Photoshop. You can download a free 7 day demo at Adobe’s website. Note Photoshop forms part of the ‘Photography plan’ AND the full ‘Creative Cloud’ all apps plan – Check carefully which will be appropriate for you before committing to a paid subscription.

This month we’re also running explainer series for PaintShop Pro (which requires a single payment) 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 photoshop’ or speak with someone who’s familiar with downloading and installing.

Why would I do this?

Colour correction is used to make images look ‘better’ (Yes, it’s subjective!). This can mean anything from applying a one-click filter to adjusting colour curves and touching up a portrait. In this explainer we open a photo that looks ‘flat’ and apply a one-click ‘fix’ before individually adjusting brightness, contrast and ‘ambience’.

Let’s do it!

You can download the image used in this explainer from the download section further down the 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 and apps include numerous one-click filters or ‘looks’. They might be all you need!

Where to next?

Looking at the ‘Image’ menu below, you can see there are numerous options for colour enhancement. Feel free to play with them! We’ve highlighted the ‘HDR toning’ option and chosen the ‘saturated’ preset. HDR is ‘high dynamic range’ and, when applied subtly can enhance certain types of photos including landscapes. Unfortunately, its over-use has given it a poor reputation in recent years.

If you’re ready to go beyond basic colour correction and want to learn about curves and adjustment layers, take a look here: https://www.phixer.net/blog/basic-color-correction-tutorial/

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 use this image for your own personal use:

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 13 of the 15 explainer videos made available for image editing month! Make sure you check out the others!