Video Transcript

All right. Now that we've learned how the eyedropper tool works in detail, let me go through one more quick example just to show you how fast it is once you get comfortable with it. So this is a photo from my portraits course and if you took that course you saw me edit this one in Lightroom and now we're going to see how you do it in Photoshop.

Now this has several problems going on. It's kind of washed out. It's got a little bit of...sort of a blue-green color cast going on in it and it needs contrast. And we're going to correct all these things all at once with the Curves eyedropper technique and you'll see how quickly you can do everything all in one swoop.

So we'll make our Curves adjustment layer. I'll take my black dropper and it looks like the darkest part is probably her hair beside her head. Yep. Looks better already. Take my white dropper and obviously the brightest point has this blown out area of highlight behind her. So I click that. And now the gray dropper... In this case... Fortunately in this photo we have lots of concrete around here, which often makes a nice neutral gray and if we click that, you can see how it warmed up her skin and took that blue-green color cast out.

And I'm going to show you a little trick. I'm going to undo that. I've got my medium dropper and if you can't find anything in the surroundings of a portrait sometimes you can pick on the whites of the eyes and get your medium point there. And I'm going to get right in here and try to get the white of her eye. Yep. See that? It corrected the color of her skin and everything just perfectly. So that's a little trick you can use on a portrait if you don't have anything...any neutral colors in the surroundings or in the person's clothes or something.

So I'm going to boost now on the RGB line just to brighten it up a little. That's looking a little better. And maybe tug down to keep our contrast high. And we're done. It was that quick -- bang, bang, bang. Here is before. Here is after. All at once with the Curves tool.