4.2 – Color Correction, Touch-Ups, and Framing with Adobe Photoshop Lesson

Lesson Overview

After creating and upscaling your images with AI tools, refining them in Photoshop is a helpful next step for a cleaner, more cohesive look. This lesson focuses on fine-tuning your visuals by adjusting color, framing, and making small corrections—steps that can make a big impact on the quality of your final movie.

You’ll see why reframing your images to popular movie aspect ratios, such as 16:9 or 2.39:1, can help your work match industry standards. Photoshop’s crop tool and generative fill feature make it possible to keep important parts of your image while fitting the desired format. Color correction ensures that scenes look consistent throughout, helping your movie appear more professional.

While these steps are optional, they are commonly used by creators who want strong visual presentation. Whether you’re fixing a distracting element in an image or simply making colors pop, small edits here support a smoother video editing process later. Free tools like Gimp can handle basic adjustments if Photoshop isn’t available, though some advanced features are exclusive to Photoshop.

Who This Is For

If you want your AI-generated images to look more cohesive and cinematic for video projects, this lesson will be valuable. It’s especially useful for:

• Filmmakers using AI images for storyboarding or video sequences
• Content creators producing visuals for presentations or social media
• Educators preparing high-quality teaching materials with generated art
• Marketers polishing graphics for campaigns or ads
• Hobbyists learning visual editing basics for personal projects
• Anyone seeking simple techniques for consistent image quality

Where This Fits in a Workflow

This lesson is used after you’ve generated and upscaled images with your AI tools, but before assembling them into your video editor. Image adjustments here—like reframing to 16:9 or enhancing colors—set up your images to match the rest of your project.

For example, if your AI images don’t quite match standard video aspect ratios, cropping and filling empty areas lets everything fit together smoothly. Or, if one frame looks warmer or cooler than the others, a color correction pass brings everything into balance. These edits streamline the later editing stages, reducing surprises or mismatches as you build your movie.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Editing images in Photoshop at this stage offers several improvements compared to skipping this step or using only free tools. Manually cropping to match precise aspect ratios without fill tools can cut out important features, but generative fill preserves them and naturally extends backgrounds.

For creators who need to remove unwanted objects—like stray marks or AI-generated inconsistencies—Photoshop's generative fill replaces them much faster and more convincingly than manual retouching. Color correction tools enable quick, targeted tweaks, making each image match the rest rather than relying on basic auto-filters.

These options speed up your workflow, improve output quality, and help maintain a consistent look across your project. Time saved here means less frustration and fewer fixes later during video editing.

Practice Exercise

Take an AI-generated image you’ve previously upscaled and open it in Adobe Photoshop.

1. Use the crop tool to change the image to a 16:9 aspect ratio. If important parts are cut off, extend the canvas edges and apply generative fill to complete the scene.
2. Apply the Camera Raw Filter and tweak white balance, contrast, or black levels to achieve a more balanced look.
3. Export your edited image and compare it side by side with the original.

Does the final result better fit your project’s needs? What differences stand out in terms of composition and color consistency?

Course Context Recap

This lesson is part of the process where you prepare your AI-generated images to work well in a movie context. Previously, you learned how to generate and upscale images; now you’ve learned to refine them with targeted edits in Photoshop. The next step will guide you through assembling your images into a full video sequence. Continue with the course to see how each stage builds toward a finished movie using your edited images.