Photography Tutorials

here are some Photoshop Channel Mixer values to create the look of different kinds of film

note: open up the Channel Mixer, activate the "Monochrome" setting and type in the given RGB values.

now we make a curve adjustment layer:

take the neutral color picker (the middle one) and click anywhere in the brownish area
(marked with the X) - voila, your brown shows as neutral gray:

here how this simple move applies to the RGB channels without me (or you) touching a single curve:

now you can simply deactivate (or toss) the middle layer to see the final result - pretty cool, huh:

The easy way out: If you go into the curves "options" dialog you'll find a "Snap Midtones" option which works almost (but only almost, depending on the image) as good:

<< Easy Neutral Colors I

Oftentimes it might be a bit tricky to achieve the right White Balance, especially when shooting jpg. I usually shoot RAW and try to get the color temperature as close as possible in Adobe Camera RAW.
For this tutorial I purposely introduced a slight yellow-ish warm cast to the image.
Oftentimes, it's hard to find a neutral spot for using the mid-gray picker in the curves or levels... the goal is to make this image as neutral as possible with the least amount of work.

First we make a duplicate via "duplicate layer":

which should look like this:

now, select the top layer and run the Filter>blur>average filter, which gives us some ugly looking brown mess like this:

>> Easy Neutral Colors II