Myerson Photo Blog

I shot this image of a newlywed couple a few years ago. Generally, we were pretty pleased with the results, but there’s one thing about it that has bothered me from the very beginning. We shot this image with a single strobe off to camera left, reflecting some light back onto the models from the wall off to camera right. A very very yellow wall.

The yellow cast on the left side (camera right side) of the models’ faces has always kept this from being an image I can truly be proud of. It’s time to finally fix that. Using Hue/Saturation, this is one of the easiest fixes we can do.

I opened a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I could have just performed the Hue/Saturation adjustment to the existing layer, but I am a firm believer in the “exit strategy” philosophy: make sure that any changes you make to the file are non-destructive, and can be undone. Or more importantly, make sure they can be partially undone, as we’ll see here in a moment.

The key to this fix is the drop down menu in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation dialog box. Rather than adjusting the hue and saturation for the entire range of values in this image, we can use that drop down box to select just the ones we want to modify. In our case, that’s the yellow values. Select “Yellows” from the drop down, and you’ll see the color range selector at the bottom of the window will now indicate the smaller range of affected values. There are three sections to that range indicator: the left fringe, the middle bar, and the right fringe. Input values (those colors above the selection indicator) will be affected by the slider actions and become the output values indicated on the color bar below the selection indicator. Those input values above the left and right fringes will be modified to lesser degrees than those values above the middle bar – from 100% for those values immediately adjacent to the middle bar, down to 0% for those values at the end of the fringe (marked with a rhombus shaped handle).

If that last paragraph was a little kooky, try playing with the sliders yourself to see what I mean.

With the proper input value range selected, I pushed the saturation all the way up to +100. This gave me a good sense of what values would be affected. I had to tweak the fringe sliders somewhat to get the range just right. Once I did, I could start making the real edits. I dropped the saturation down, increased the lightness, and slid the hue over a few degrees to make the last traces of yellow turn more red. Here’s what that gave me:

Not bad at all, but as you can see, it took out too much of the bride’s skin tones, leaving her much too pale. This is where adjustment layers have direct adjustments beat, hands down. I just masked out the adjustment layer, to allow more of the bride’s original image coloration to pop through:

Voila! All traces of the offending yellow wall have been removed in just a few easy steps.