Throughout this unit, you’ve explored the power of Photoshop’s colour tools — from basic corrections and adjustments, to advanced transformations and creative effects. You’ve built skills in:
Using adjustment layers to control tones and balance
Working with Levels and Curves to refine light and contrast
Correcting skin tones and portraits
Matching colours between objects and images
Transforming colours creatively with gradients, recolouring, and AI tools
This is your opportunity to showcase everything you’ve learned in one creative and polished piece. Rather than focusing on just one technique, you’ll combine multiple skills to design a final composition that demonstrates both your technical mastery and your creativity.
Review your saved practice work from each stage.
Select the techniques you want to feature in your final piece.
Create a single, eye-catching composition that combines at least three of the colour skills from this unit.
Include small versions of your original images and a screenshot of your Layers Panel (with meaningful names) to show your process.
This project is your chance to move beyond exercises and apply your skills like a professional. By combining correction, matching, and transformation, you’ll see how Photoshop’s colour tools can be used in real-world projects — from marketing graphics to creative artwork.
Adjustment Layer Creation: Both Levels and Curves should be applied using Adjustment Layers (Layer → New Adjustment Layer → Levels/Curves). This ensures edits are non-destructive and flexible—allowing you to fine-tune or mask them later.
Histograms Displayed in Both: Both tools feature a histogram to guide your tone adjustments. Levels uses sliders (shadows, midtones, highlights), while Curves allows you to place precise control points on the curve for detailed tone manipulation.
Shadow & Highlight Behavior in Levels: The sliders in Levels can clip pixels: moving the left (shadow) slider makes everything darker than that point pure black, and moving the right (highlight) slider makes everything brighter become pure white.
Curves for Precision: Curves offers fine-grained control: drag points up to brighten or down to darken exact tonal ranges. You can create S-curves for contrast or inverted S-curves for a softened look.
Channel Control for Colour Adjustment: Both tools let you adjust individual color channels (Red, Green, Blue). For example, raise the Red curve to intensify reds or lower it to add cyan. This allows for precise colour corrections and creative grading.
When to Use Each Tool:
Use Levels for speedy, broad exposure fixes and contrast adjustments.
Use Curves when you need nuanced control or want to shape contrast and color precisely.
Ultimately, both are powerful, and your choice depends on the task at hand.