Correct color and tone Adobe Photoshop cs 2

Correct color and tone
You can fix photos that are dull, lack contrast, or have a color cast by adjusting the shadows, midtones, and highlights. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to adjust tonality and color.

Evaluate your image.
Evaluate the image brightness, contrast, and color. This image is dark, has little contrast, and its overall color is shifted toward blue. We can fix this image quickly using the Photoshop Levels dialog box.

Create a new Levels adjustment layer.
Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels and click OK in the New Layer dialog box. Rather than working directly on the image, we are going to make the tonal correction in an adjustment layer. Working in an adjustment layer leaves the original image untouched so you can discard your changes and restore the original image at any time.
Evaluate the image histogram.
The histogram in the center of the Levels dialog box shows how pixels are distributed in an image by graphing the number of pixels at each intensity level. It displays the relative number of pixels in the shadows (left part of the histogram), midtones (middle), and highlights (right). You can see that this image is not using the entire tonal range. Pixels don’t extend across the entire length of the histogram.

Set the shadows and highlights.
Move the black point input slider and the white point input slider (the black triangle and white triangle located directly beneath the histogram) inward from the edges of the histogram. The black point input slider adjusts pixels to value zero. All pixels at the level you set and any pixels below become black in the image. The white point input slider maps values at its position or above to 255, or pure white. After you adjust the sliders, the image will have more contrast.

Adjust the midtones.
The middle input slider (the gray triangle below the histogram) adjusts the gamma, or contrast, of the midtone values. It moves the midtone (level 128) and changes the intensity values of the middle range of gray tones without significantly altering the highlights and shadows.
Move the middle input slider to the left to lighten the image or to the right to darken the image.

Remove the color cast.
Select the Set Gray Point Eyedropper tool in the Levels dialog box (the middle eyedropper). Click an area in the image that should be gray. That area becomes neutral gray, and the color cast is removed.
The Set Gray Point Eyedropper tool works best on images with easily identified neutral tones. Advanced users often use the Levels command to adjust individual channels and remove a color cast.

Finish up.
When you’ve made all your adjustments, click OK to close the dialog box and accept your changes. Because you’ve used an adjustment layer, you can reopen the dialog box and see the adjustments you made. You can readjust any of the settings.
To reopen the Levels dialog box, in the Layers palette double-click the left thumbnail in the adjustment layer.
You’ve seen one way to adjust the color and tonal values in your image. Photoshop has many more tools to make these adjustments. For more information see Correcting images in Photoshop and Color adjustment commands.