How To Quickly Fix a Picture's Color and Brightness in Adobe Photoshop Cs2

This short tutorial will show you how to use four keyboard shortcuts that will quickly improve color correction and brightness on a digital picture. (Shortcuts in this article are used in Windows operating systems)

Step 1  

Open your image in Adobe Photoshop CS2 = Click File > Open > browse your picture > Click OPEN. Or you can just press Ctrl+O.

Step 2  

Now that your image is loaded you can start using the following keyboard shortcuts, which will save you a lot of time when correcting an image color and brightness.

Step 3  

For auto levels press Shift+Ctrl+L.

Step 4  

For auto contrast press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+L.

Step 5  

For auto color press Shift+Ctrl+B.

Step 6  

The keyboard shortcuts will correct almost, if not, all common color corrections normally used to fix an image. Instead of going through the menu just use the time saving shortcuts.

Step 7  

Now for the fourth keyboard shortcut. Sometimes an image is either too dark for color correction, or too bright. There is a very simple way of fixing this. For this we use the Ctrl+M keyboard shortcut, which is known as Curves. Works better than Brightness/Contrast from the Adjustments menu. Press Ctrl+M.

Step 8  

You will see this little window pop up. Now you will find the correct grid to fix the brightness of the image.

Step 9  

I've highlighted the grid that you are going to manipulate in order to get the correct brightness for your image. If you drag the line diagonally to the upper left corner of the grid your image gets brighter. If you move the line diagonally to the bottom right corner of the grid your image gets darker.

Step 10  

Make sure that you have checked the box that says "Preview" highlighted in blue. This will allow you to see a real time change of brightness on your image.

Step 11  

Once you are satisfied with the results, press OK and save your image. (You can see the difference in the sky color in the image. The "AFTER" image has a more true blue-ish color than the raw image from "BEFORE". In other words; colors are more vibrant and true)

Tips

• Always make a copy of the original image. This is very important in case you make a mistake you have something to go back to.
• If you don't like the results of the changes you made, you can press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z to undo the last step. To undo multiple steps press Alt+Ctrl+Z.
• Play around with the Curves window menu. Changing the curves in RGB, Red, Green, or Blue mode will give some nice, and interesting, color results to your image.
• Be creative. It's your taste! and have fun editing.

Warnings

• Once again, always make a copy of the original image before editing it. If you make any mistakes in the editing process, or not satisfied with what you came up with, you'll have something to go back to and restart the process.
• When using these shortcuts you will find that changes to some pictures won't be noticeable. These kinds of pictures require true color editing; mostly scanned images. Don't worry much about these at the moment. Just try to use the Curves tool (Ctrl+M).

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3
• Your digital, or scanned, images
• Your creativity