Selective Color for Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks
Steve Weinrebe
Selective Color is a color adjustment with incredible depth and versatility, yet it doesn't get as much attention as Hue/Saturation or HSL adjustments. One reason is the addition of the other three primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Just because Selective Color is an excellent tool for adjusting images intended for offset printing in CMYK color mode, don't be dissuaded from using this wonderful adjustment on your RGB images as well.Read on and I'll tell you why.
Besides being a powerful color adjustment tool, Selective Color has a few tricks that no other color adjustment has. I always turn to Selective Color first when my goal is precise color matching, but Selective Color is wonderful for creative control of a photograph's color as well.
Selective Color allows us to go into any of the primary colors in the image and adjust the three subtractive primary colors – cyan, magenta, and yellow (with the addition of black) – as components of the color we are primarily affecting. More than that, Selective Color has three color target choices, that is colors to be influenced by the adjustment, that no other color adjustment in Photoshop has: Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks.
Adjust the Whites in a photograph
Let's target just the whites in an image using Selective Color. I have found that Selective Color does an intelligent job of seeking out the whites (or neutrals, or blacks) in an image even if those colors are off. What would be the point of adjusting the color if it were not off? So if the whites, as in this photograph, are too blue or cyan, Selective Color still knows they are the whites and influences them accordingly.
Step 1:
Choose Selective Color from the drop down menu at the bottom of the Layers palette, to add a Selective Color adjustment layer.
Here's a look at the Colors drop-down menu in Selective Color. Note that Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks are included. (NOTE: The Relative and Absolute "methods" are essentially different degrees of influence. Since we generally make small moves with Selective Color, leaving the default Relative should work well.)
Step 2:
From the Colors drop down menu, in the Selective Color dialog, choose Whites. Because there is too much cyan in the whites I'll pull cyan out of the whites by dragging the Cyan slider to the left.
We can see the adjustment as we make it, but if a fine adjustment like this is hard to visualize while you are making it, try toggling the Preview button off and on. That usually makes even fine adjustments more apparent. When satisfied with the adjustment, click "OK" to dismiss the dialog.
Adjust Blacks and Neutrals in an image
Just as with the Whites in the above image, Selective Color allows us to predominantly influence the Neutrals and Blacks as well. Be careful with adjusting the neutrals because that generally encompasses a broader range of tones in an image. This close-up of a commercial fishing net is perfect for our purposes.
Step 1:
Add a Selective Color adjustment layer, as we did in Step 1 above, and from the Colors drop-down menu choose Neutrals.To the neutrals in the image I added some warm tones, magenta and yellow, similar to adding a warming filter to just those neutral colors.
Step 2:
Choose Blacks from the Colors drop-down menu, and warm up the blacks by again adding magenta and, to a somewhat greater degree, yellow.
Step 3:
Now that the neutrals and black are nicely warmed up, the blue in the shadows, which is lit from blue skylight, needs to be subdued. The bluish tone in the shadows is in fact mostly cyan, so I'll choose Cyans from the Colors drop-down menu. The Neutrals and Blacks adjustments are still there; I'm simply adding individual adjustments to different colors. Here I reduce cyan by 20%, and since those shadow areas are where the cyans are dominant, those shadow areas are being affected.
Below is the final adjusted version. Compare it to the image at the beginning of this section and you'll see the difference.
I've used Selective Color for extremely precise color matching, matching portions of a photos to Pantone colors for instance, or simply for creative control as I've done here. If you want to use Selective Color for the former, consider keeping the Info palette close at hand to see the breakdown of the color numbers. Otherwise, use Selective Color whenever it fits into your color correcting workflow.
Steve Weinrebe:
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Photography © Steve Weinrebe, Getty Images
