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Looking For The Easy Button
A lot of my emails about Photoshop seem to start with the same question, ?Is there A. (an easy way) or B. (a one click way) to do something?? While my current tag is about the only Easy Button I have found ($4.99 at Staples) there can be some easy buttons found in Photoshop.
One is found in both Levels and Curves which can be used for color corrections. These are the eye droppers for setting the white and black points. But first it works best if you set the sample size for the Eyedropper Tool on the tool bar. By default, the sample is set for point sample which means just one pixel. While this is fine for graphic designers, we as photographers work in blended tones so we need to change this to 3x3 for small images or 5x5 for larger images. Now, when you use any tool that samples it will be using this sample size.
So, back to the eyedroppers in Curves and Levels for setting black and white points. These will also need to change to work in our photographic print world. Double click on the black eyedropper and you will see that RGB value defaults to 0/0/0 which is a too dark for photography and a waste of ink if you are doing desk prints. Change these numbers to 7/7/7, which is the blackest black without detail. Click OK and double click on the white eyedropper and change the RGB settings to 245/245/245 because the default setting of 255/255/255 is paper white with no details or pixels (photographers call this blown out).
Click OK and now you can use these eyedroppers to color correct color casts by clicking on the areas in an image that should be pure black (darkest shadows) and pure white (click on the slightly shadow areas and not areas that are already blown out). As to the gray eyedropper, if you do use gray cards, then this will also need to be reset. If you are using a normal gray card a better setting would be 128/128/130 or if you have a digital gray, which is lighter than the normal one, then change the setting to 140/140/140. You can shoot the gray card at the start of the session and then if this was an adjustment layer it can be dragged and dropped on the other images which creates a copy of this adjustment layer on these images.
One other quick Easy Button is an answer to a post last month about converting images into jpegs. They were wondering if there was a simple way to convert just a few images in a folder and how to use actions to do this. While there are ways to both write an action and to batch it, there is a simple way to do this. If you are using Bridge with CS or later, up in the menu bar you will see Tools. Clicking on this go to Tools>Photoshop>Image Processor which brings up this menu tool. (Insert Image Processor image)
You can see that this allows not just conversion of the images selected in Bridge but whole folders. This is also the answer to those who shoot RAW and Jpeg; now, you can shoot just RAW and make the jpegs after you have made them look great in ACR. You can see that you can also save images as PSDs and Tiffs, all in separate folders. Plus, if you want to run an action on them for sharpening or special effects, you can do this too at the time they are created. Good luck and have fun!