Lesson B: Photo Filter Adjustment

• Have a look in the Course Files folder and locate the folder “02 A Few Adjustments.” Open the file within called “B Photo Filter.psd.”

To my eye, based on the time of day and time of year (winter), the image looks to cool—bluish. The time of day can be discerned by the lengths of shadows, image metadata, or, as in this case, a big clock in the middle of the frame.

The image looks neither too light nor too dark. Thus, the only issue is the cool color cast pervading the whole image. So we need to perform an adjustment that doesn’t necessarily affect tone but does affect color.

• In the Adjustments panel, click the icon for Photo Filter (it looks like a camera with a small round thing in front of it). This creates an adjustment layer above the Background and opens the Properties panel, which shows this adjustment’s properties.

Adjustment as Diagnostic and Cure

If you’re not convinced the image needs warming, we can use the Photo Filter adjustment to puzzle that out. As soon as the adjustment appears, it uses the first choice in its Filter menu, Warming Filter (85). Frankly, I think that is a marked improvement.

But don’t take my word for it. We can try other settings to see if moving the image’s color in other directions is more helpful.

• Choose one of the cooling filters from the Filter drop-down menu.
• Toggle the visibility of the adjustment layer by clicking the eye icon next to the layer name in the Layers panel or at the bottom of the Properties panel.

Does the image look better or worse? This is the bottom line: we want an improvement. The cooling filters make the image more blue, accentuating the problem it already had.

• Choose the Red filter and the Yellow filter. It seems like the correct choice would be somewhere in between, like perhaps the Orange filter. Most of the warming filters are a version of orange. The Sepia filter is too (its brown is just a darker orange). I like its result best if one more refinement is made.
• Choose the Sepia filter then adjust the Density slider. This is essentially the strength of the adjustment. I’ve set mine to 40%, which is a bit high, but is noticeable in this book. The effect is like holding an orange/brown-tinted piece of glass in front of the lens when making a photo.

If we really did affix a physical tinted-glass filter in front of our lens, we would have had to adjust the exposure to compensate, as such a filter would diminish the light impacting the sensor. By default, this adjustment makes that compensation for us. That’s the job of the Preserve Luminosity checkbox. If this is left unchecked, the image will be darker, noticeable especially in the highlights. Since it’s sometimes a favorable effect, you should try it when applying this adjustment to see if it helps.

In this case, the high Density setting causes the image to become far too dark and muddy if Preserve Luminosity is unchecked.

• Save the document.