From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Natural adjustments made with color wheels

Natural adjustments made with color wheels

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

Natural adjustments made with color wheels

- [Instructor] Color wheels only really give you two adjustments. But because they're often divided into three, with each wheel applying adjustments to only the shadow, midtone, or highlight pixels, the results can be quite nuanced. When I first learned about color wheels, I struggled to understand what qualified as a shadow pixel, midtone, or highlight, until somebody pointed out it's actually arbitrary. Software manufacturers aim for a reasonable threshold between each of these three levels of brightness, and some applications give you manual control over where that threshold lies. When speaking about shadows, midtones, and highlights, we're literally speaking about darker or lighter pixels. This is useful because human vision treats color in these three bands of lightness a little differently. For example, the part of your eyes that see color need more light than the part of your eyes that see luminance. That's why when it's dark, everything looks colorless. Part of your eye can't…

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