The Info Palette

Photoshop’s Info palette is a important and often under utilised tool in your colour correction workflow, whilst it does not make any changes itself, the information it provides is vital to help you correct colour casts. No matter how well your monitor is calibrated or how god your eye’s are subtle colour casts can be difficult to see and correct – is it a blue cast or red. The Info palette provides no nonsense answers.

The info palette should be open and visible when ever you are doing colour corrections (Window  - Info or F8) it provides the values and location of the pixels under your cursor.I recommend you change the setup of the info palette to the following….

First Colour readout – RGB (Or actual colour,which displays info for whichever mode you are working in)

Second Colour readout – CMYK

Mouse co-ordinates – Pixels (Same as edit- preferences – rulers)

What Do The Color Readouts Mean?

If you have your Info Palette set up as the one above, it shows you RGB numeric values and CMYK percentage values of the point beneath your cursor on the image. RGB numbers represent intensity values running from 0 to 255 for each of the three color channels. CMYK percents represent percent of cyan, yellow, magenta, or black making up the color under the cursor.

No matter what your monitor displays, you can always move your cursor over a given point in an image and determine the values that make up that color in the Info Palette. In the Info Palette shown above, green predominates at a value of 146. The pixels under your cursor should appear green.

If you are working in one of Photoshop’s color working spaces such as Adobe RGB and you move your cursor over a value you know to be neutral in your image―black, white, or gray―each of the three color channels should display the same value. If one of the RGB values predominates, chances are you have a color caste. The Info Palette makes this color caste evident even if it is too subtle to be seen on your monitor.

Color Sampling Using the Info Palette

You can use the Info Palette to store and display sampled points from 

your image. If you select the Color Sampler Tool from the toolbox and use it to click on a spot in your image, the values for that spot will be stored and displayed on the Info Palette. You can store up to 4 values using the Color Sampler Tool.

Storing sampled values is an extremely useful feature when trying to color correct an image. A useful technique is to sample and store a black shadow value, a white highlight value, and a neutral value. You can then use image adjustment tools to change the color values of your image while monitoring these sampled points.

The Info Palette just above has three sampled values: #1 a shadow, #2 a highlight, and #3 a midtone. The sample points are visible on the image itself and are labeled #1, #2, and #3 to match the sampled information in the palette.

In sample #1, the shadow value, note the blue value of 28 versus the lower values for red and green. This higher blue value likely indicates the shadow has a blue caste. If you know the shadow value should be a neutral black, then using one of the adjustment dialogs like Curves or Levels to lower the blue shadow value to 11 (and the green value to 11) will neutralize the shadow.

Likewise, the higher R values in samples #2 and #3 likely indicates a slight red caste for the overall image. Raising the G and B values of sample #2 to the R value of 253 will give you a neutral white and equalizing the #3 values at a midpoint value of 127 will give you a neutral gray midpoint. Simple corrections like this to remove color casts will frequently clear up most of the color problems for a given image.