AV News 194 - November 2013
Many versions of Photoshop include three other useful tools that can be used
for adjusting colour, saturation, or density so why would anyone choose to use
'Variations' in preference to those other tools? The 'Curves' function is a
powerful colour editing tool that can adjust RGB, Red, Green and Blue
channels, it also has several different pre-set values that can be loaded and
custom settings can be saved and loaded for later use. 'Curves' can also
indicate clipping but using 'Curves' generally is much less intuitive. The
'Hue/Saturation' function also has several pre-sets and permits adjustment of
Red, Green, Blue, Yellow,
Magenta and Cyan separately.
Custom pre-sets can be saved
and loaded but this is also less
intuitive than using 'Variations'.
The 'Colour Balance' function
is actually simple and intuitive to
use, it can adjust Shadows,
Midtones, or Highlights but lacks
the facility to save your settings
for future use. If you're editing just one single image then this is not a problem,
but if you need to adjust a series of images using the same settings then it's
less than ideal because re-adjustment of settings would be needed for each
individual image.
The first photograph in this article is of Thurne Windmill in Norfolk, it's
composition carefully chosen to allow space for a sequence title to be placed in
the left side sky area. The second image shows the same picture opened in the
'Variations' control panel
at its default settings i.e.
with the 'Midtones' being
selected for adjustment.
Image three shows
the simple 'Variations'
controls at their default
setting.
Image four depicts the
'Variations' control with
'Shadows' selected on
the top radio button and
the adjustment slider set
to coarse.
This setting has been
chosen to emphasise
clipping which is clearly
visible in image five showing a 'selection' view at the base of the windmill. Look
carefully at the lower 'magenta' and 'darker' images (bottom two right images)
where clipping is highlighted in Green and Blue.
Is there any drawbacks to 'Variations you may ask, it doesn't function on 16
or 32 bit images and there isn't a shortcut key.
Page 11