It has been a long time since I posted a tutorial in my Photography Tutorials section so I thought I will add one that shows a new feature and combine some of the older ones to produce a final result.
I will use Photoshop to change the overall color of an image by applying a color tone to it. This effect only works on a small amount of images but used correctly it can be valuable technique.
The sample image is one I took on Trafalgar Square in London recently and features the well known fountains. These fountains are made from a bronze material and has the typical green cast due to oxidation. I wanted to create a special photo by showing these fountains as they may have looked without the oxidation.
To start off open the image in Photoshop and ensure that the layers window is visible by pressing F7, you should now have something like this.
The toning will happen on a separate layer and will not damage the original data in the photo, to do this we need to add a new layer. Navigate in the menus to Layer -> New -> Layer… or just press shift-ctrl-n. You will be presented with the following dialog box, choose a descriptive name and set the layer Mode to Hue. It is the mode selection that does the toning of the background layer.
Next we have to choose the color we want to tint the photo with. For this example I used the Eyedropper Tool to pick a color on the brown of the fountain, or you could also choose a simple orange. Make sure the new layer is the active one and use the fill tool to fill the whole layer with the tone color. You should now see the tone applied to the image and it will change color as below.
If instead all you get is one big square of orange, double check that the layer mode is set to Hue. There is a drop down box for the Mode on the layers window.
To finish off the image I straightened it using the Measure Tool and I used a Layer Mask to put the original color back into the bus in the background and the water in the bottom right foreground. This puts a final touch on the image and give it a much more authentic look.
