An Easy Way To Find Neutral Gray
One Blend Mode Makes All The 'Difference' When Color Correcting Midtones in Photoshop
When it comes to color correcting images in Photoshop, removing any color casts from the highlight and shadow areas is usually pretty straightforward since it's quite easy to find the brightest and darkest areas in an image. But what about the midtones? How do you find that area in the image that's supposed to be neutral gray? Well, usually, you guess and hope for the best, since Photoshop doesn't seem to have any way of easily pointing out those midtone gray areas for us. Or does it?
Of course it does! And it's incredibly simple, too. The only problem is that it's not very obvious how to go about it, but as we'll see in this Photoshop tutorial, just because it isn't obvious doesn't mean it isn't easy to do.
Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:
One thing to note up front though is that not all images actually have any areas in them that are supposed to be neutral gray, and obviously, you can't find what's not there, so if that's the case with your photo, no technique for finding midtone gray will work. In cases where there simply is nothing in the image that's supposed to be gray, your best bet is to color correct the highlights and shadows and leave the midtones alone. If there is an area that's supposed to be neutral gray though, this technique will find it.
And now that the little disclaimer is out of the way, let's find the neutral gray area in this photo and correct those midtones.
Step 1: Create A New Layer
With our photo open inside Photoshop, the first thing we need to do is create a new blank layer, so click the Create New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette to create a new blank layer above the Background layer:
We now have two layers - the Background layer which contains our image, and a new blank layer above it which Photoshop has gone ahead and named "Layer 1". Normally you'd want to rename the layer to something more appropriate, but I won't bother doing that since this new layer won't be with us for very long.
Step 2: Fill The New Layer With 50% Gray
Next, we need to fill our new layer with 50% gray, which is the exact same neutral gray we're looking for in our image. To do that, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and select Fill, which brings up the Fill dialog box:
The Fill dialog box is divided into two sections - "Contents" and "Blending", but all we're concerned with is "Contents". Chances are, you'll see "Foreground Color" selected beside the word "Use" (if a different option is selected, it's because you've previously used the Fill option and made changes, which is fine). Click the down-pointing arrow to the right of "Foreground Color" (or whichever option is selected) and select 50% Gray from the drop-down menu that appears, as you can see in the image above.
Then click OK, and this will fill our new layer with gray:
This will also cover our image on the screen with gray, temporarily hiding it from view, but that's okay for now.
