PhotoShop Tutorial: Playing God with Photoshop

Playing God with Photoshop CS4 – How to change the color of the butterfly Planetary Nebula using Photoshop CS4.

Photoshopped Butterfly Planetory Nebula

Changing a specific color range in Photoshop is remarkably easy. Photoshop allows you to select particular colors and color ranges in your image, tweak your selection to the desired specificity and area, and then adjust it to your heart’s content. If you are using the trial version of PhotoShop, a good place for discounted software is SoftwareMedia.com.

In this tutorial, I decided to try my hand at a divine design, and adjust the color range of a beautiful image of a butterfly shaped Nebula, one NGC 6302, that was snapped by the Hubble telescope earlier this year.

If you would similarly like to tread on the outskirts of digital blasphemy, just go to Nasa’s Hubble Image page, and download the image you dare to adjust. Then follow the audacious steps below.

Step 1

With the desired image in your browser, right click and select copy image. Nasa offers different sizes of its photos to choose from. Remember, the bigger the image, the more precise will be your Photoshop adjustments, but too large an image can slow everything way down and will sometimes crash the program.

Step 2

In Photoshop, select New from the File menu. Photoshop will detect the size of the image on the clipboard, and adjust the canvas to the image’s specs. Now Paste your image. If you wish to make any other adjustments to the overall image, you should probably do this before messing with the color ranges.

Step 3.

When you are ready, pull down the Select menu, and click on Color Range. Photoshop will now open the Color Range window, which includes a special thumbnail view of your image. This thumbnail displays a black-and-white mirror image of the photo, showing which pixels are selected and to what degree they will be altered by the relative intensity of the white portions of the translated image. In other words, whiteness equals change.

You will notice Photoshop automatically selects the eye dropper tool. By clicking around in the original image, you can select the color range you wish to change. Hold to shift if you want select additional pixels while keeping your original selection.

Use the Fuzziness slider bar to widen or narrow the selected color range. If you wish only to change the color range in a specific area of the image, check the Localalized Color Clusters box above the Fuzziness slider bar.  Now you can adjust the Range slider bar to make bigger or smaller the area of your selection.

For my image, I want to adjust only the red color range. To do this, hold down Shift and clicked around the image, focusing on only red areas.

Note:  There is also an Invert box on the right hand side of the Color Range window. This little box is awesome. By checking the Invert Box, you can reverse your selection. This is very useful when it easier to select the parts in the image that you DON’T want to change, rather than what you do want to change.

Step 4

Okay. Now, when you are satisfied with your selection, click the OK button. The Color Range box will go away, and you will be left with your image, but now with the specified color ranges selected.

You are now ready to adjust the colors of your image. I would be interested to see what a bluish butterfly nebula would like to, personally, so let me lead you through the steps I would take to produce this effect.  As you get more comfortable with Photoshop, you will probably find a specific style and order of adjustment-making that makes the most sense to you.

Step 5

Color Balance Adjustment. Click on the Color Balance button in the Adjustment Panel. Don’t be worried that the selection outlines disappear on the image. Photoshop remembers what you chose, and your adjustments will affect only those areas.  Also notice that a new Color Balance layer has been indexed in the layer index below.  If you don’t like the way an adjustment turns out, or just want to see what your image looks like without it, you can simply delete or turn off a specific layer at any time.

Notice that you have three Color Balance Tones to play with: Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights.  You will want to adjust each of these until your image looks they way you want it to.  I started with the Midtones, took out all the red, turned out the blue, and made a slight adjustment to the Magenta/Green bar. Your adjustments to the Shadow, and Highlight tones will probably be much more subtle.

Step 6

Once you are finished with your color balance adjustment, click the small arrow in the bottom left hand corner of the adjustment panel, located directly over the layer index. This will take you back to your adjustment panel from where you can make additional adjustments.

Also, click on the original layer, Layer 1, in the Layer index. This is how Photoshop knows you are making changes to the original image, and not another layer.

I will now make a Vibrance adjustment. Click on the Vibrance button on the adjustment panel. Two sliders appear: one for Vibrance and one for Saturation. Play with these, until you like what you see.

Step 7

For my third adjustment, I will make a Hue/Saturation adjustment. Click the arrow again, to go back to the adjustment panel, make sure Layer 1 is selected, and now Click the Hue/ Saturation button to begin making your adjustment.

You now have three slider bars you are able to adjust: Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. These are pretty self-explanatory. The Hue Bar adjusts what colors are most prominent. The Saturation Bar will emphasize the appearance of the colors, and the Lightness Bar simply lightens or darkens your selection.

Notice the pull down menu that currently read Master. This pull down menu allows you to select the specific hues to which you can make an adjustment: reds, blues, yellows, etc. Leaving it on Master, your adjustment will affect all hues similarly.

One cool feature Photoshop includes is predetermined adjustment that allows you to select a style of adjustment already designed, such as Sepia or Cyanotype. At the top of the Hue/Saturation adjustment tab is a pull down menu that is defaults to custom. You can click on this menu, and  go through the different preset PhotoShop offers.

Step 8

My Nebula is looking pretty cool now, and I think I am almost done. One thing I don’t care for much is the brighter plain greens around the outskirts of the nebula, although I like the turquoise a lot. To adjust this, I will simply take another color range sample of the greens, with a relatively low intensity, and make another Color Balance adjustment. Bringing up the reds and turning down the green midtones will help blend these greens into the surrounding redish-browns.

Finishing up

I like the way this looks.  If you are not happy with your image, continue making adjustments. Now I am ready to save, and export the image as a .gif. The easiest way to do this is to click File, and select Save for Web and Devices. To see my final cut, click here.

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