I wonder if anyone has suggestions on the following. I needed to match the greens in the upper part of LAYER D (rightmost layer) to LAYER C adjoining it to the left. I lassoed the area and used Color Range to select the darker green and match it to the left using a Curves Layer. The red rectangle surrounds the seam dividing the 2 Layers. But the lighter green underneath the darker green was also selected in the Color Range selection and now these areas in LAYERS C & D (divided by the seam in the blue rectangle, screenshot 3) don't match. Is there a tool or technique that would enable me to match these areas by, preferably, matching the color in the area of LAYER C defined approximately by the blue rectangle in screenshot 4? I don't think Color Range will work for the same reason that it didn't distinguish between the 2 different greens in the other instance. Many thanks.
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If the problem is that one of the greens is lighter, then one approach is to take advantage of the fact that Curves lets you place multiple points across the tonal range. Maybe at least one channel’s curve needs a minimum of two points added to it: One point in the lighter tones to correct the lighter green, and another point in the darker tones to correct the darker green.
This is much easier and faster if you’re taking advantage of:
- Eyedropper tool color samplers.
- Info panel readouts for each sampler, so you can compare before/after numbers of the multiple colors that must match on each side.
- The Target Adjustment Tool, so that you can drag directly on the image to affect the tones that need correction. It will automatically add and shift curve points where you drag it on the image.
That way, you can look at the numbers reported by the color samplers as you adjust each tonal range, and make sure they are the same for the critical colors on both layers, as shown in the demo below.
Basically what I do in the demo is:
1. (not shown) Use the Eyedropper tool to add four color samplers, one pair for the each pair of greens that need to match across the layers. This is done by Shift-clicking the Eyedropper tool on the canvas. Then I open the Info panel so I can monitor the samplers’ color values.
2. In the Properties panel for the currently selected Curves layer, I switch to a color channel, starting with the first one, Red.
3. Match color sampler RGB values in sampler #2 to the readout in sampler #1, by dragging the Target Adjustment Tool over the lighter green that needs to match the red channel value in the other layer until the sampler #2 value matches sampler #1. That takes care of the lighter green.
4. Repeat step 2 by dragging the tool over the darker green near sampler #4, to match its red channel value to sampler #3.
5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the other color channels. This is an RGB image, so I went on to correct the lighter and darker green for the green and blue channels too.
6. After the RGB values on both sides match up for corresponding color samplers, their colors should visually match up too.
7. I switch back to the composite curve view, where the adjusted curves can now be seen for all channels.
The greens in the demo might look like they don’t exactly match at the end. They do in the original screen recording, but what’s shown here is subject to the color quality limitations of the animated GIF format.
Thank you! This is a much more precise method for achieving what I was trying to do visually before. I decided I wanted to make the LAYER D colors match the LAYER C colors, contrary to my previous post. I did all that you said – created the 4 color samples for the upper and lower (darker and lighter) areas of the image; but when I started to drag the Target Selection Tool once accessing the first channel – Red – both sides of the Info panel changed. Screenshot 1 shows the screen before applying the Tool. You can see that the Red values for 3 and 4 are respectively 32 and 35. After applying the Tool to bring sample 4 to 33 (I could not get it to 32, no matter how hard I tried – it would reflect 32 as long as my finger was on the cursor but upon release, went to either 31 or 33), you can see that this has also changed the value in sample 3 which is now 30, and no longer 32. The same thing happened when I changed the value for Sample 2 from 44 to 51, to match Sample 1, which then went up to 62. See screenshot 2 for both examples. Why is this happening? LAYER C overlays LAYER D for the portion of D that is not visible. Is the overlap of Layers the problem? I wouldn’t think so, as that is pretty common. Thanks for your help.
Thanks for your reply. I'm not having such good luck with this. While I saw what you said with regard to Red changing for you too, you were able to get Red to very near (within a point) the values that were needed. In my case, Red is not only changing for both Samples within the pair, but for the other pair, as well, and it's changing by the same number of points for all 4 Samples. This is also happening with Green. (I haven't tried Blue yet). Screenshot 1 below shows the values before making adjustments. Screenshot 2 shows the values after adjusting for Red, and screenshot 3 show sthe values after adjusting for Green. Is there something about my colors that would be causing this, do you know, or another possibly common or likely reason? Thanks.
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