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1:00 pm - Color Adjustments

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Color & Tone

Ben Willmore

1:00 pm - Color Adjustments

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Color & Tone

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

7. 1:00 pm - Color Adjustments

Lesson Info

1:00 pm - Color Adjustments

now. Ideally, I would to shoot in raw file format, and I would adjust white balance in camera, and that would handle the majority of color correction that I need. But on occasion, instead, I might have shot JPEG file format where the white balance in camera is not as effective. And I might have to do this in addition to it. Or sometimes I just get files from clients and just old files that I have, where they weren't shot in raw there J pegs or tips or something else. And I need to, you know, be able to color correct them. So it's nice to be able to know how to do that. But then there are other things weaken do when we're working on this. Let's see if I might be able to take this image and I would like to be able to take this bird and put him in the other photograph. So I'm gonna cheat to get selected, and I might not get the absolute most accurate selection because we're not talking about selections today. We're talking about adjustments, so I'm not gonna be as concerned with what the ...

edge looks like, But I'll do a simple adjustment, which is lasso tool, magic wand tool and with the magic wand. Hold down option Alton windows and click on what you don't want within the selection Boom selected bird. All right, so I'm gonna take that crap. Yeah, yeah. If you have a thing in a selective, it's surrounded by simple background. Why not do what? I just did make a simple selection, so it doesn't have to think about the entire picture. And then magic wand tool with the option key held down option means take away. You say take away the simple stuff. So after I do that, I'm gonna double click on the name of the Slayer. So it's not called background, and I'm gonna add a layer mask. Right layer mask is the icon. It looks like a circle inside of a rectangle. So now I get the background gun. I'm gonna drag this image over to the other file, and I'm just guessing it's not gonna look right now. The edges could be improved around here, and I could do that with something called Refine Edge. But there was a different class that I gave on advanced masking where we cover that kind of stuff. What I want to talk about is simply the color. So when I see this bird sitting in here, other than the fact is a little white around his edge, I think just the color. It doesn't look like the warm light that's in the other photograph was really lighting the bird. Does that make sense? So let's see if there's anything we could do to try to get that warmth into our image. So I'll hide that layer for now so we can just look at this background. I'm gonna pull this out so it's not a tab anymore. Just click on the name of the tab and dragged down to get us a separate window, and I'll do the same thing for the other image. Just so I have him is to separate. Windows were consume out, can see them both, and I would usually end up doing this before I even end up removing the background. So just for now, all disabled a mask. Remember when we talked about adjustment layers? Yesterday, I said you could hold shift and click on a mask to disable it. So now we're pretty much looking at the original two photos. Well, let's see how we might be able to get the warmth of that photo into this photo by doing reverse color correction. Normal color correction looks at the brightest and darkest parts of your image. It makes them neutral, so there's no color in it when you have a color cast. In this case, we have what I would call a desirable color cast in one image. We're going to try to copy that color caste, enforce it into the other picture. To accomplish that, I'll create a curves adjustment layer. And if you remembering curves, we had those auto options. I went to the side menu to get to them over here auto options, and that would perform automated color correction, which had just tried to do to this image. It found the dark and light colors, and it clicked on them with the eye droppers. Well, here's something that's special, though. When we're in here, if I click on this rectangle where it's a shadows, Ah, color picker should appear and it's asking me, what color should I make the shadows? What color should I make? The dark part of the picture So why not move my mouse over into the other photograph in, click on a dark area to pick up whatever color is in that photograph? Then I can click on the rectangle for highlights and go over to the other photograph and look for a really bright area and click on it and it's gonna grab that color, enforce it into the bright area of this image. I can also click on the middle one if I need to, and if I could find something that would be neutral in here, I could click on it. But I'm just gonna click on one of these medium brightness tones to see if we grab that color. So now you see how we have some of the same color cast within this. And if I do that when I click, OK, it'll ask me, Hey, do you want to save those as the default colors? If you're working in a co workers machine hit? Yes, every time, every time, the color correct. From now on, it's gonna look like that Aziz longest. They're using the automated color correction. Otherwise, click No to say no, just trying to apply this once. Not all the time. So now we have that. And I'm just going to again turn on that mask again by shift, clicking on it. And when I have this adjustment active, do you remember We talked the other day? There was an icon with a little don point arrow, which means only affect the layer directly below that thing. I'm gonna click on that so that once they drag it over to the other file that it doesn't affect the entire picture in there. It's only affecting this layer that contains the bird. So now I want to get it over it, either there to the other image. I'm going to make sure I move both layers because we have the adjustment separate from the image. So I'm just gonna hold the shift key and click on the name of the layer that's not selected already. And I can use my move tool in photo shop and just drag it over to the other file. And does it look a little bit more like it belongs there when it comes to color? I could do better at masking it, but you notice that we have some of the same color And if I show you what the other one looked like in comparison, I think the one on the right looks like it belongs there a lot more when it comes to color. So you can think of that as reverse color correction were forcing a color cast into an image We didn't have it to begin with, and I do that any time. I have an image that has what I would call a desirable color caste. The desirable color caste would be sunrise, sunset, dinner by candlelight or fireplace, or just any kind of fire where that's the light source within the photograph. In that warm color of light is in everything in the photo and you love. Look, that's a desirable color caste. Now I want to take something else, like a product in an inserted into that photograph. Well, if I just throw it in there and it was not lit in the same light, it's not gonna look like it belongs there. But if I do reverse color correction where I used the automated color correction feature and I just tell it what colors to put in the highlights, the gray areas and the shadows by stealing colors out of the other photo. I can make it look like it belongs there a lot more. Okay, I might call that reverse color correction. Then let's try to shift the color of things where we try to match two things. Very precisely. So in this case, we have a tan line that I would like to eliminate. Now, right now, we're gonna talk about the adjustment that would be necessary to do that. I might not talk about the masking that's needed to get it to perfectly fit in here. But we might get to that in the last session today because there's something special I do to get that transition to look just right. For now, I want to concentrate on the adjustment part. So this is going to be very similar technique to what we did with Hue and saturation number with hue and saturation with the info palette open. We had a readout for the color we wanted to match. We're gonna read out for the color you wanted to change and somehow we had to get the two to match Same concept. So how do I think about wind to use the technique. I'm about to show you versus wind to use the hue, saturation and brightness technique. Well, I think of HSB as being for manipulating color, meaning I have a blue car and I wanted to be a green car, a red car, a yellow car. It's a dramatic difference in color from what it used to be. If, on the other hand, the two colors that I'm trying to adjust are related to each other in their somewhat similar, then I would instead use the technique or about to talk about. So these are two skin tones, so they're related. They're some ice similar to each other, once darker, a little more colorful or another way to think about it is if I have two photographs that I'm gonna composite together, what's I'm gonna use my hand from one photo in my arm from another, and I need to put him together. They need me to perfectly match the other. So I think of that as we have two photos that were shot maybe with different cameras, different lighting and everything else. But this subject is the same, and I needed to match. That's the other time that I'm going to use this technique. So it's trying out. I'm gonna open the info panel and just like before, I'm gonna come in and use the color sampler tool, and I'm going to click on the area that I want to match, which is gonna be this area right in here, and I'm gonna click on the area. Want to change? Okay, so in my info panel, I have to read outs. Number one is what I want to match. Number two is what I'm changing. And so I just need to get this number to end up becoming that one in this number, becoming that one and so on. Yeah, I'm gonna do that using curves. And let's figure out how I'm gonna get this so I can see these two at the same time because right now, curves is kind of getting truncated at the bottom. Ah, a couple different ways of doing that. I find that the info palette puts too much stuff in here. I never look at this document numbers that are here, they're at the bottom of my document to in the lower left. I could just seem there, and I never look at this little tool tip thing that's there. If you want to clear space out of the info panel, just go to the side menu and there's a choice called panel options and in their turn off all the junk you never look at. And therefore when you click OK, that thing would get smaller. It will be easier to see curves at the same time is it has not taken up so much space, some in curves. Here's what we're gonna dio in the past, when we have adjusted in area, we've primarily done it to like adjust the brightness where you just click on your image and drag up and down. Well, there's a special feature in here where what it will do is it will look at the numbers that are in the info panel in somehow input them into curbs. And here's how it's done. You grab a hand tool that's in the curves. You move your mouse over the area you want to change, which would be right where that little color sampler is. And here's where you have to something special. Hold down two keys on your keyboard. Not just any two keys, though. Hold down shift in command that shift in control of your windows. I have those two keys held down right now. Then click in the area you want to change click and it won't look like anything happened within curves because what happened didn't happen to the curve that affects the brightness. Instead, it happened 23 curves that affect the color. If I go to the red curve, there's gonna be a dot on it. That dot indicates how much red light was in the area clicked on. If I got a green will be a different dot that indicates how much green light there was in the area clicked on. Go to blue Guess what will be adopt and it tells you how much blue light there was in the area that clicked on. All it did is it took the numbers from the info panel to figure out how much light was in that area red, green and blue, and it typed it in here. Now all I need to do is to go to the bottom of curves where I see input and output numbers. Input is what we started with. It measured that off my picture when I clicked on it. Output is what I want to end up with. And I'm just gonna steal those numbers from number one up here. Number one. If you look at where it is on my picture, it's in the area. The skin that doesn't have the the more tan. So all I'm gonna dio is I'm gonna look at the numbers in the info panel. I'm looking at the numbers for number one because that's what I want to match. And I'm simply gonna type them in right down here. Where's his output? So right now I'm working on a red eye. Look at the our number for red. I see 1 91 Sit down here. I type in 191 Ignore what she looks like right now. I'm gonna go over here to green. I see the number 1 75 So I'm gonna type in for output. 175 Then I'm gonna come in here to blue in in the info panel to see 1 50 I'm just gonna type in 1 50 for output. So now let's see if I did this 105 2150. Okay, so now I'm just looking in the info panel. And this is the color we were trying to match right here. And this is what we're changing. That's what we previously had and what we have now. So compare these three numbers on the right side and just confirmed that I got it right. Yeah, they match, don't they? The one the left over here is what I wanted to match. The one on the right. Over here is my end result for the area. I'm changing in those numbers match. That means the color matches. Any time I make this kind of a change, I look through my curves because sometimes you end up adding a dot to curve. You make a slight change in the rest of the curve. Ends up going way out of the way if it ever ends up. When you look through these that one year curves abruptly bottoms out or tops out just really hard and abrupt, I usually make it a soft landing by adding a dot near the one that caused the problem and just kind of steer it into a soft landing Here. We're not bumping in the bottom. Let's check green. No, we're not there either. In less check blue. We're close to bump into the bottom just to show you what I'm talking about. I'm gonna force it to bump into the bottom by moving. That stopped further down. OK? Do you see it hitting the bottom hard? So if I saw that in any one of my curves, I would just add another dot right about here and pull it up a little bit, just so that's a soft landing instead of bumping into the bottom. But I think I was up here, so I'm not. Don't need to do it on this image. So now we've done our adjustment. The problem is, it's affecting the entire picture. So the whole picture got darker. The whole picture got warmer. If I turn off the eyeball, you can see the whole image. So now it's up to me to paint on the mask that's attached to our layer to control where it happens. So since it's a small area of my photograph where I want it to happen, I'm gonna take the mask and I'm gonna inverted, get it full of black and black Means don't apply anywhere. One method of doing that is the type command I control I and Windows, which all type right now. You see, the mascots turned black. We got the opposite because we inverted. And now I could grab my paintbrush tool and I'm gonna paint the adjustment into my picture. Let's see the works. I gotta paint with white, though not black. But you see my tan coming in there, and it's gonna be hard to blend it in over here. What I'll need to do it when she's undo here is get a larger brush. What happens is the larger your brushes, the softer the edge becomes. So if you need a soft transition, you need big brush. And it's okay for me to get over spray beyond it because I can always come back and remove the over spray. I just need a soft brush. Big brush means soft, so then I will switch over and paint with black to get rid of the over spray. And if it's a little bit too much, sometimes it is a little too much because the area you chose to get the color from just was a little too dark, little too bright or something I can always click on the word opacity at the top of my layers panel. I could bring the opacity all the way down and then slowly bring it up to say How much of this do I think would really look good. It's hard to say. Maybe somewhere in there you have a little look at your screen. It might look different somewhere like that, and on occasion you'll need to do more than one adjustment because you have a lot of variation. For instance, here, this area is not as tan as this part of her chest over here. And I just picked one of the two. I could do a secondary adjustment where this time I use this part of the image as a part of adjusting in this part of the image of matching. And I have to use secondary adjustment paint that in to get the top. But it all depends, But is that getting a little better? Let's try that on a different image and see we can come up with the technique will be identical, so all we're gonna do is go to the color sampler tool. We're going to click on what we'd like to match in color. So I'm thinking about what should it look like in this area if this wasn't here? And so maybe I go right over in here and then I'm gonna click within the area. I want to change, so to read outs, Number one is what I want. Number two is what I want to change. I'm gonna go to curves and with that little handle active, I move my mouse onto the area. Want to change? And that's when I had to hold on to keys. It's shifting command shift in control on windows, which means work on the individual red, green and blue curves. Not the main one. And you click that. Just put in my input numbers for me. And now I go to read and all I need to do is type in output numbers. So I go of here and I look at the numbers right here. That's what I want. So output for red is Output for green is 1 An output for blue is Oops. I accidentally clicked in an area outside of curves which made it so the dot is no longer active. If the numbers just end up going blank, it means somehow that dot got de selected, So just move your mouse onto it and click on it to make it active. So for blue, I want 1 Now I just double check my curves to make sure I have soft landings if they happen to hit the bottom or top. I don't know that I did hear because blue wasn't much of a change green. Not much of a change, and Red never bottomed out or topped out. But I do check it now. I zoom out and the image doesn't look good because it's applying to the entire picture, and I only need it in a small area, So I have a mask to paint on. If it's a small area where I need it to apply, invert the mask command I control on windows, and now I can grab my paintbrush tool. And if I paint with white, I'm gonna paint the adjustment in wherever it is a paint. So let's see what happens now. One problem is with your perception. When you paint often times, it will look really weird here. I the reason for that is longer. Your eye gets used to a color paint with black to get rid of over spray. Um, the more that color is kind of ingrained in your head. And if you suddenly get rid of that color cast, your brain sees the opposite color. And I don't know if that's what's happening right now or if I have a little bit 200 blue in here. I'm gonna find out by just looking away for a while. Look away. Go look at your thing. Go grab a beverage and then look back into me. It still looks a little blue, and so either I put in the wrong numbers. Let's see 209 1 99 or one. Anyone 1 81 Note the numbers match or the area where I happen to put that little cross there was off a little bit. Maybe there's a *** of noise there or something else. So sometimes you're gonna need to find Tunis. So I'm glad that happened. I'm gonna go back into my curves, and if it's too blue, I just go to the blue, and that means that's too high. So bring the blue down a little bit, so it no longer looks to blue, and you can other also find tune other things. If you think it's not yellow enough, well, yellows the opposite of blue. So just keep going. Or you could move your mouse to a different area in the surrounding to see what what's different about the numbers. So if I look at this area in my image and I just look in the info panel, I look at that and compare it to the numbers I have and say Where they the furthest off? It looks to me like the red is considerably off because the number in the upper left of the info panel that's the one for my mouse is I see 2 42 and I only have 209 in here so I could come in here, work on those shades as well. There we go, I think, just adjusting to read a little bit. So I just looked at a different area, and the surrounding saying the area originally sampled from might not have been the most ideal so before, after I started looking better. If it's too much lower, the opacity of layer quick, quick question. Yeah, Tie. Ask what technique would been use for correcting a harsh shadow running across the subject's face? Would it be any different from, um, you can use the exact same technique, but you're gonna find no matter how hard you paint to try to get it. So the changes only happening in the harsh shadow. The transition will be impossible to get toe look smooth. So there's a special technique I use, which is to create a new layer in. Use the healing brush to heal across the transition, and it will blend it for you. Let me see if I can do that on the other image. First, let me get rid of those color samplers because they're a little distracting. And what I can dio is just create a new layer an empty one and grab the healing brush. Get a brush wide enough to span the transition between the area you've changed in the areas surrounding it and go to a smooth area of skin like this. An option click. They're all clicking and windows to say This is where I want to copy. From What I'm saying is make the transition as smooth is what's right here, huh? Now, if I click here and drag it should, uh before I do this at one other setting, I need to change at the top of my screen. Right now, this is set to current layer, which means it will ignore all the other layers. And I'm working on an empty layer right now so it wouldn't see the stuff it's underneath. I need to tell it to be able to see what's underneath, too. I always have my brush sent to that. So I assumed it was already saying right now is try it. I'm gonna go over here. I'm gonna click right here, drag. And it should take the colors that are surrounding this area where I'm painting and make it blend in all the way across the edge. It's just gonna look at what color surrounds this and say, Let's blend it together as smoothly as the content and putting in there. How choose, undo. You see how that's fixing that transition were used. We'll see a slight line. And so that's the trick that I use. I can again copy from here. And if I want to get rid of this other kind of line. As long as they still have smoothness that I'm copying from, maybe go all the way over to there, it'll try to smooth it out. That one might not be quite as good, but I had just have to go over mawr of the image to get it to be smooth this out. Just bring all the way over to that other color se blend all those together. So you want to see before I'll turn off this adjustment layer? Do you see how you could see a lot more of that? So that's what I end up doing where you have the transition so you can use the exact same technique to take the face out of that really dark shadow that's there by making the dark shadow looks similar to a bright part of the face. But when you painted it in, the transition will be obvious. So used the healing brush hell right across it. It will blend the two sides. So that was the technique. I was thinking of showing you on that. So I'm glad somebody prompted me toe. Do it. All right, let's get into something else. So far, We've been using warm, cool adjustments, and we've been mainly using curves. We also talked about using color balance. I find it doesn't give them as much control as curves, so I use it as much. But some people feel more comfortable, just more natural in there and, if so, feel free as long as it gets the job done. But there is another adjustment found in here that is a warm, cool adjustment that we've talked about that's rather unique, and it's called selective color and let me see here. And if you look in the adjustment layer pop up menu, selective color is available is an adjustment layer as well, so anything that's available is an adjustment layer. I would usually apply in that way because then I can easily undo the changes later. Changed them at any time, that kind of stuff. So let's take a look at selective color. What's unique about selective color is it can isolate areas based on color. So if you think about it when we worked with color balance, we had the choice of shadows. Mid tones. Highlights that's based on brightness is not. When we don't curves, we can click anywhere in the curve, but it's always based on brightness, whereas here it's going to try to isolate individual colors. And that's what makes this particular adjustment unique. Also, when you're able to isolate individual colors, one thing that's very rare to find is the abilities toe Isolate whites, neutrals and blacks. So if you need to work on individual colors or whites, neutrals and blacks and do a warm, cool adjustment, this is where you want to pay. The other thing that makes us overly unique is it's the only adjustment I can think of that allows me to work with C M. Y Que That sigh in magenta, yellow and black sliders when I'm not in seem like a mode, my pictures an RGB mode. But yet it offers me those sliders, and that's unique. So let's see what we could do with it. There's a bunch of things we can do with it, but I primarily use this, especially when working with whites, neutrals and blacks. Let's go to blacks and you see at the bottom of the photograph there's a dark area that is either solid black or close to it, so I can come in here and grab the black slider and say, I can use more black in there. I want my increasing it or I can say Let's use less black in there. Pull all of the black out of there. So now we don't have our dense shadows. And let's replace that black with some science and maybe some yellow. I should give us green and maybe a hint of black. But do you see how I'm able to take things that used to be black in my picture in suddenly shifted colors? This could be a logo. You want to change its color very quickly without making any selection whatsoever, that kind of thing. This could be. I have shadows in my picture, and I want them to just take on a particular color because I'm creating a fine art image. It's not supposed to look like a normal one supposed to look more interesting than that. All sorts of things you could do with that. I'm gonna set things back to normal, so I'm not making a change. Another thing I could do is work on whites in with whites. I can come in, and if I push up black I would darken them. That's going to make him look dull if I bring down black, so I should be able to brighten them a little bit and let me see if I can bring him even more or get a little color in there. If I push some scion in now, this particular image isn't going to show me all that much. But in general, if you ever have chrome objects in picture and you want them to look shiny, er but you polish the chrome a little bit. You can work on the whites because the whites within chrome of highlights and if you pull black out of it, you're going to brighten up those highlights. And sometimes they push a little bit of science in it to cool them down. Because chrome is usually you think it was a cold metal. It's not necessary. That's always cold to the touch, but usually looks cold in so I can turn this on and off. And if you can notice the chrome in the image, changing a little bit, becoming looking a little bit shiny. Er visually look around the car's wheels and a few other areas, but otherwise you can isolate individual colors and then adjust the amount of science a gentle, yellow and black that Photoshopped thinks that that area is made out of. So you can do some special effects and interesting stuff. But this is selective color. It's available either as an adjustment layer, or do we be applied directly to your picture? It's not an adjustment I use every day, but its really useful on occasion for those specialized times when I want to get into just the whites, just the blacks, just the neutrals. So then, quick question just, um, sees reflecting in the queues room here. Creativelive dot com slash chat. Um is saying on selective color Why can't you select purples or oranges? Um, when you're in most things in Futter shop, you will find that the choices you're given are red, green, blue in science, magenta yellow because those are the three colors your image is made out of, and the opposite of those three colors. It's just the way your images constructed makes it easy for Photoshopped to try to isolate those particular colors. If you need different colors than what I would do is instead of using this I would probably end up using the Color Range Command to select the area and then go in and adjust it. Or I would come in here and adjust more than one color. If you adjust reds and then magenta as together the same adjustment, you're probably going to get into the purples because the purples would be a combination of those two colors where it might be reds in a little hint of blue, I don't know, but it's just the way the documents are constructed behind the scenes. There's certain colors that are much easier for to isolate than others, and also just when they program this. It was a long time ago, and back then, those are the colors they happen to come up with, and they haven't modified it in ages. They could easily add other colors. It's just not too many people use that adjustment, so they don't see very many people asking, Cool, Thank you. So we've talked about HSB adjustments, huge saturation, brightness. We've talked about warm, cool adjustments. That's where you move it, one direction. You warm it up other direction, you cool it. But then there's everything else and everything else would be what I would call the specialty adjustments, the ones that do not conform to the ideas that are found that we've shown so far. So let's take a look at a few of those one. We've already talked about photo filter. Remember, we use photo filter to push color into our image, where we had a warm looking big rock in a picture and I forced the opposite color into shifted and get rid of that color will often times I'll use the photo filter adjustment layer to make it feel like I had more of a sunset. Look, this image was originally looks looked a lot more like this. I just converted to grayscale, and in order to get it to look the way I wanted, I first needed to be an RGB mode because he can't do a color adjustment when you're grayscale and I can come down here to photo filter, tell it what color I'd like to use in. Push up my density here and try to get some of that color in there. If I turn off preserve luminosity, it'll be able to do a little more, but I have to experiment there If this color isn't enough, I can click on the little square of color there and choose a different one, maybe one a little more vivid. Or, if I need even more, just duplicate the layer. Drag it down the new layer icon. You'll double it up. That's just like stacking filters in front of a camera lens. You know, this was that strong enough, but two of mine, and so sometimes I just didn't quite get what I wanted. And it's a simple enough enough image specially fit to silhouette like this, that if I use photo filter, I can just shove color in there and make it look a lot more appealing. That's a pretty simple adjustment. Let's look at some others. We've already talked about the next adjustment I'm going to use, which is also a specialty adjustment. We used it yesterday when we made an image black and white, but we didn't want plain old, black and white. We wanted a hint of color in it. So we ended up doing is who went down here and we chose Grady int map Ingredient map replaced the various brightness levels in my picture with the colors that appeared in here. Well, you don't just use Grady int map for, um, black and white pictures. You can use it on color pictures if you've ever seen people presenting you with, like, an antique look in their images sometimes, or a look of what's known as cross processing, which is when you'd use, like, the wrong kind of chemicals to develop your film and come out with weird colors. We can simulate that using the ingredient map. So what I can do is here at SHURIKEN switch between various presets, but you could also create your own presets in your own settings. So let's do that. If you click on the little arrow that's in here, this guy, you will end up getting to the presets. You're fine. To start with one of those, you might want to just choose one that has the number of colors you want. But then, if you want to edit it, click instead of on that triangle, click in the middle of the Grady in or just anywhere within the Grady in, and that will bring up this the great Ian editor and in here at the bottom is where you can add colors. If you double click on the colors that are currently here, you should get a color picker And I'm gonna choose black for the dark part of my picture. And I'm gonna choose White for the bright part Just so the highlights and shadows aren't messed up Then I'm gonna add some additional colors by just clicking below this Grady int Any place where I want to put a color So I'm gonna put one approximately here and I will double click on it and I'm gonna make this blue Nice little blue Then I'm gonna add one in the middle Double click on it I'm gonna make it green And then I'm gonna add another one closer to the end, Double click on it I'm gonna make it yellow. You might be thinking, Wow. He tapes in these numbers off the top of his head as if he knows what those numbers mean. Well, one of the bonus things I'll try to record tomorrow is what those numbers mean so that if you looked at those numbers, either RGB numbers or HSB numbers that you could close your eyes and somebody could just read them to you over the phone and you say That's a dark blue, You know, that kind of stuff. That's not an easy thing to Dio. If I have time tomorrow because we have a limited amount of time to record stuff, I'll try to give you a sense for how to think about those numbers more. So anyway, look at what I have. I have a black, a dark blue, I have a green and yellow. So I'm telling you, shift between all those colors across this spectrum If I click new over here, I could give this a name in Hit New. Now it's gonna be in here is the last preset. So if you want to use in the future on, we have to know how to make it Once I'm gonna click, OK, And so now this is often the colors that you might get with some cross processing techniques. It's this a little strong, and I would like some of the original colors to show through. So I'm gonna simply click on the word opacity going to drag to the left and I'm gonna bring it down. That's gonna allow me to see through these colors to some of the originals bring a hint of the original back. I might bring it down to 50%. 40% all pens. How strong I want that effect to be. And I can change the blending mode menu. I usually would use overlay. So let's see what it's doing to my picture. My picture in general looks normal, but if I turn this off, let's see the difference. Here is the original. It looks like a normal picture. Here's after it just has an interesting color feel. And so if you experiment enough with radiant map, you can, um, develop some presets of the colors you like, and then set them to overlay mode and lower the opacity. Let some of the original color show through, and so if you want to specialize, look, you might get it. But radiant map. It's one of the features we can use to do that right, But all Grady it map does is first, it takes the color out of your image, and then it replaces the brightness levels entering your picture with whatever colors you end up putting right here. So whatever used to be black, it's this whatever used to be 50%. Greg. It's that what you ever used to be white gets that same with everything in between. But if we lower the opacity on that, we'll get some of the original color showing through. So could be kind of interesting to look at question. Can you buy Grady and Matt presets from places? Can you, by ingredient map presets? I'm sure you probably can, but I don't know where I mean. Heck, if you pay enough, I'll make you some presets. So it's just a matter of experience landing, and I'm sure somebody's come up with them. I just don't know that it's a common practice. You should know, though, that in there when you go and do your Grady int map on you go to the side menu, we have your presets. Now, that is already some presets in there. You're probably not using. If you click on the little gear that appears right here, click. You're gonna find a list and this part right in here. These are all presets. So if you haven't explored those yet, you probably want to load those in when each time you choose it, it will ask if you would like to append those colors. And that means Adam to the list you already have. Whereas clicking okay would replace the ones you have with ease. So if I hit upend now, if I scroll this list, I'm gonna have bonus ones at the bottom. And so you might as well start by loading all these presets in. So you got more to play with. Metals upend now, this list to be longer. Yeah. Question Ben Net ingenuity and Austin's asked, I have scans a bold print photos that had cross processing. Can I use this color adjustment to correct what was wrong with the prince? If you can find out exactly if you can analyze the picture to figure out what colors air going in different areas, you could choose the opposite of each color and then use color mode and push it in. Uh, I've never tried it, but if you can look at the picture and you say, Oh, the highlights are all yellow Well, what's the opposite of yellow? Opposite of yellow is blue, so let's push blue in there and then you see the shadows air all red. So the opposite of red is science. Let's push that in there. You'd have to figure out the opposite of each color kids space, right? You'd use the color blending mode and you'd push it in there. So, having never tried it, it's hard to say what the end result would look like. But there's a possibility, if it is that you have various colors. Highlights midtown shadow. Hard to say. Then there's a new adjustment. E believe they added it in photo shop CS six. That is somewhat unusual, and that is, if I go to my adjustment layer pop up menu. There's one called Color Look up color. Look up when I choose color. Look out! This is what I get. I have three choices on what type of color. Look up. I would like Ah three d lut file. That means look up table L u t look up table file an abstract or a device link. This is really designed for people that shoot films like movies. Uh, and you can create a special kind of file kind of file is something you cannot make within photo shop. Usually make it another software design for the film industry, and there's a piece of software I've never used that Adobe made. It's called Adobe Speed Grade. That could make these, but that's just not my area, so I'm not used to doing that. But when I click here, there's a choice of load. And that's if you had one of these files that was made another software. You could feed it to this, but otherwise, below that, they're a bunch of presets, and these presets could be pretty cool. The names aren't always great because you look at it, What the heck is, you know, horror blue, you know, in edgy amber and all these other things. But this is gonna give your image a unique look. Just going through the three different menus. You find that you have a bunch of presets under this one bunch of presets here and a few of them here. I should mention that under the abstract menu, you'll find that this menu, I believe, will be shorter. If you're working in Windows. I think there's six of them that don't show up in Windows. I don't know why, but it's not there, so let's switch through a few him, see what we get if I just come in here and try one. You'll see the look of my image change, and I can switch through one at a time and get all sorts of interesting looks. If any of the looks are too strong, you can lower the opacity of the adjustment layer to, ah, lesson it letme or of the original show through like this ones. That's a bit strong. So are lower my opacity, and I can still get some of that look within my image. The problem is, there are so many darn presets in here that who the heck wants to sit there and go through every darn one? Wouldn't it be nice if they would add a preview? We're in this menu. Instead of seeing these names, I would see this picture in what it would look like with all these different choices. Wouldn't that be darned nice? Well, I spent some time and look what I made here is each one of those presets applied to this picture. And if you zoom up on it and you scroll around, let's start in the upper left. Here, let's see what kind of looks weaken get Based on this particular image, that one looks kind of cool, but some of them are really not as usable is others. And then if we start going down here, there's a bunch of others. The problem is, I use this darn picture and it's not your picture. Don't you wish that I used whatever picture it is that you want apply this to. Wouldn't that be convenient if you could suddenly see it applied to your own photo? Well, because of the way I constructed this document, you can. If I go into my layers panel, you see there's a whole bunch of layers. There's one layer for each one of those pictures on top of each one. There's an adjustment layer that is that kind off adjustment, and it's clipped, so it only affects one layer, which is the particular image. But what I did is I use something called a smart object. What that's gonna dio is make it so if I double click on the little thumbnail image for any one of these layers, double click here. It's going to show me the original picture, and then I can go and grab any picture I want in. Paste it in here and if I dio it will update that document. So all those little previews are gonna regenerate, and they're gonna show you what it would look like with the image I put in. So let's go grab a picture. I'll grab a very special picture. Look at this guy. You see what it says? What I love is, they had to put the arrow in case you couldn't figure out, You know where in the photo? The world's largest underpants are, Uh okay, so I'm gonna take that image. I'm just gonna select on copy. I'll close it. And now this is the file I was in when I double clicked on the thumbnail on it popped open in a separate document. All this come over here and paste to put it in here. It's a little on the large side. It's the world's largest underpants what he expects. And so I might need to come over here and transform it to scale it down. A little trick is after you go to the edit menu and choose free transform. If the handles we're going beyond the edge of your screen, you can type command zero that's control zero on windows toe. Have it automatically zoom out, you can see him. And so therefore, I could put that in there. And now if I save enclosed this all I'm gonna do is type command s. I'm not saving it on my hard drive. When I typed command desk, I'm saving it back into that image that had multiple versions. So I'm typing Command s right now and then I'll close this and now you see it being applied to that picture. And so that way, instead of having to go through each one of those presets one at a time to see how they would affect a particular image, all I do is go in my layers panel. I double click on this thumbnail image. It opens the original contents, a zits own document I paste in, whatever it is, I want to see what the effect would look on I just to save. And when it's done, I closed that in the other document updates completely, and therefore I can see which version I like. Once I figure out the version I like and for me in this particular image, I'm actually like in this version right here. There's a little trick If you're in the move tool, you can move your mouse right here. And there's a way to get photo shop to target whatever layers underneath your mouse so you can figure out what later it is. Within this document. You could do it in two ways. One is you can turn on this check box called Auto Select. If that's on when you click, a photo shop makes the top most layer that contains something active when you click, or to temporarily turn that on. When you're in the move tool, you can just hold on the command key that's controlling windows and click. I just did that. It targeted the layer that contained that picture. Therefore, the layer directly above it is the adjustment, and I could grab that adjustment and I don't know what see, grab it and just drag it with the move to up up to adopt different tab and down onto my picture and let go if I get rid of any adjustment that was already in there. Now I have that effect applied to this picture, so you command clicking the layer to figure out which layer is it. Grab the layer that's above it because that's the one that's making the adjustment. Use the move tool. Drag it over another document. You have 10 documents. Open Dragon Dragon on top of each one and apply it. The problem is you don't have this document, but if you happened by the course, you get the document with the course. Uh, it's better than Instagram, So that way it makes it much easier. Because otherwise, if I'm just randomly clicking on the menu in seeing all these kinds of of facts, then uh, it's just not all that fun. Whereas BMWs peruse your image like this eyes much more interesting and much easier to find Any particular setting that might be useful. That one looks kind of interesting. So I'm in the move Tool command, Click on the layer directly above. That should be my adjustment. If I go on open that picture, the original already closed it. Now I'm gonna just have that layer active. Use my move tool click within this image, dragged to the other drag down. Let go, got it. And then I can always change the blending mode to whatever I'd like here. When using this, I find it's nice to experiment with the various blending mounts, and here's a tip for doing so. If you're in photo shops, move tool. Then there's a keyboard shortcut for switching the setting in this menu, and therefore there's a way to cycle through all the choices that are available here, and what that is is when the move tool is active, I end up holding down the shift key and then hit plus or minus on your keyboard. The requirement is you have to have a move too active. Then hold on shift and hit either plus or minus on your keyboard, and therefore you can cycle through all the blending modes to see which one you think might make this look interesting. That looks pretty wild difference mode. And just when you see one you think is interesting, remember its name. So I like difference Mode was really funky in hue mode. Looks pretty interesting. So once you get all the way through, hue and color look interesting and you get back to normal, then you know which ones to try out difference mode. If I want it really funky. Otherwise, Hugh mode or color mode for me in the If the effect is a little too strong, go ahead. Lower the opacity to let some of the original show through, huh? But that's a new adjustment if you go to the bottom of your layers panel and shoes color. Look up really designed for the movie industry, but we can use it because it came with a bunch of presets. And those presets simply become a little bit more useful when you have that document that can show you what they all look like. So you don't have to spend all day cycling through okay, Linda is asking what would be the difference if you chose relative instead of absolute in the selective color matching example? Okay, in selective color at the bottom is a choice where you can choose between relative and absolute. The difference is when I choose absolute and I move the slider that's there. If I put it at plus 10 it means add 10 toe. However much you had previously, uh, let's say it's science you did plus 10. It means, take however much we had before and add exactly 10 to that. That's what I end result would be relative means. Look at how much we started with in increase it or decrease it by a certain percentage. So if we had 50% and I say plus 10 well, it looks at what did we start with? What's 10% of that amount? So we're at 50% originally, plus 10 on that would be 55 if we were at 10%. To begin with, 10% of 10 is one, so it would just bring it up to 11. So it means you want to bring it up an absolute amount, meaning the exact amount you're typing in to have that much added. Or do you want to just take what used to be in there in bring it up by this percentage from where it used to be? It's kind of stuff that makes sense. But yeah, thank you. So if you pretty much if it's on relative and you find that you've maxed out the sliders and you just not getting what you want, switch over to absolute because if you're amount you had of any color was just 10% of your image, and you bring it up a Zayas, it goes well relative to 10% you made a big change, but relative to what you could have done, it's not huge. Click over to Absolute. And now you can push it much further because it can push it all the way up. Very cold. Well, to kind of go back again to your negatives. You go where the question related to film pick. So 37 us if I take a photo of an old color negative 35 millimeter film, can I How can I get rid of the orange Mass? To get a good scan of the original image? This is of a 35 millimeter negative. Well, if you just inverted, that's not gonna get rid of the orange mask. Uh oh. There was something in either Photoshopped or something coming up in photo shop that was designed for doing that. But my brain is not thinking of it right now. Uh, my guess is that it was built into Wait a minute. Let me look. Education in real time, folks. Well, it's something I don't commonly need to do because I don't scan negatives, but let me look. There might have been one in here, See if it says film negative anywhere in here. Film. Negative film, negative color. Negative right there. So use the setting called Color Negative, although I have not practiced this because I don't scan negatives typically. But if I come in here and I do a color look up adjustment layer, then I go to the one called Device Link. There is a choice called color Negative. Hopefully, that's gonna put some orange in my picture because there's the orange base that you don't usually end up with. So if you started with the orange base when it does this, I hope it's going to get rid of that. If it doesn't, I could invert the end result. Invert and this should be the opposite of that orange negative, and I could try to push that in and color mode. But it's not something that I typically do, so I don't know the exact right solution. The most elegant solution. The main thing is, if you're scanning them, I would try to use a scanner that has a setting for color negatives, because then it should have designed into it an algorithm for removing the film based color, and that would probably be the most effective But I just don't typically scan images anymore. I'm creating them from a camera. I think, um, nut D from Palm Beach is asking, Is there a recommended recipe for the order of adjusting the colors? Do you have kind of, ah, general work flow? I usually do color correction first, because the images untouched in front of shop is able to really look at what's in there without having any of your adjustments get in the way. So usually do adjustments first, and then any time you end up darkening a picture, it ends up making the much more colorful so often times. I'll end up adjusting brightness before I adjust color just because otherwise, later on, if I just brightness, the colors probably become more saturated. But you don't have to do it that way, to be honest, most of the time I start in camera raw in the way I think is I attacked the biggest problem first, and then I think I said this before. I look at the image again and say, Now what's the biggest problem after I fixed the 1st 1 and I continue doing that until I either run out of time patients or problems, and that's the way I pretty much work it. But if I'm done with camera raw and I'm now in photo shop, I will try. Teoh do Color correction is my first step. I might think about doing brightness before color, meaning before fine tuning or or manipulating the color, because any time you dark and it becomes more saturated. Having said that, there's something actually show. And that is, if you ever do color correction in the process of doing color correction, you find the contrast of your image shifts in a way that you don't like. So here's an example. It's not the best example, but it's just one I happen to have on hand. This image has been color corrected with a curves adjustment layer just using the eye droppers, Azzawi showed before. If I turn off this, you'll see that before and turned back on after it looks slightly different color, a little less kind of greenish in the after version. But look at what happens to the brightness sieving. See it. It's rather subtle right now, and that's because I've already done the change on this image. Let me change it to normal and you'll see what it would have looked like. OK, do you see the change in brightness that's happening if you ever performed color correction in the process of doing so? The contrast your image changes the brightness changes in a way that you don't like. Then change the menu at the top of your screen. Well, the top of your layers panel. While that adjustment layers active and the choice you want to use is one called color, and it means make this layer on Lee be able to affect the colors there. In my image, don't let it affect the brightness at all. So by doing that, we're going to limit how it can affect the image. The opposite of that would be, if I ever do, let's say, a curves adjustment layer. And when I dio, I find that when I darken the picture, it becomes more colorful. So I just tried to dark in this image. You see it becoming more colorful as I darken Well, let's say I wanted to darken it, but I don't like that it's becoming more colorful than maybe that's somebody's face. When they become more colorful, they look sunburnt well, the opposite of color mode would be luminosity. And that's gonna take the layer that's currently active and make it so. The only thing can change on the underlying image is the brightness, and therefore it cannot change the color. When I change its luminosity, I should get back the original saturation that was in that area. So consider using color mode in luminosity, blending modes when you're applying certain adjustments, and it will help prevent a lot of problems. Thank you a tongue, Gibson asked. Can you match different sky colors in the same image? This happens with polarizer problems with wide angle lenses. Sure. All right, here's a panorama. Guess where we are. Does this look familiar over here? Okay. All right. So here's a panorama of Seattle, this one my wife, Karen took and I noticed the left side of the sky looks bluish purple and the right set of sky does not. And I think that might be because some of the stuff on the right side of the sky or the on the ground of the right side creates light pollution and is changing the color of some of that. Or it could have been that the sun went down and it went down in a particular location. That kept part of it bright. But I would like some of that bluish color to be the blue sperm on the right side of the photo. I want to transplant it over there. So to accomplish that, it's exactly the same thing as what we did with the red at the bottom of somebody's lips or the tan line. It's no different whatsoever. It's a matter of taking the numbers from one place, enforcing them in somewhere else so I could go to my color sampler tool. I can click on the color that I desire have to decide. Do I want the more bluish up over here or the darker purplish that's over here? It's a personal choice, and I'm gonna go for maybe the bluish. It's right there. So that's what I want to match. And then I put another one over here. Wherever I want to change the image, I want to change it right there. Uh huh. I read outs here. I just need the numbering system that's used to match the type of adjustment I'm going to use if these two areas air similar. Um, I'm gonna usually use curves to do it if they're dramatically different, like a red car needing to go to blue kind of thing. I would use hue and saturation instead. But these air relatively similar. Um, they're not two dramatic. So I'm gonna go to curves and in curves with hand tool active. I go to where readout number two is. I hold down to special keys on my keyboard that tells it toe work not on the normal curve that affects brightness, but on the individual red, green and blues. And that was shifting command, shifting control on windows and click. And that's where I should be able to go to the Red Channel and find a dot on it. All I'm going to be doing is typing in numbers. I'm gonna be looking at number one in the info panel, and I see that number one tells me for red I should have 27. So for output, I type in for Green. I need to have 34. So that's what I typed in and for Blue. I should have 76. So that's what I type in now It's made the change that I need, but it's affecting the entire picture. So I'm guessing the left side of the picture is going to be way too dark, way to blue. So in my layers we have that mask I could paint with black and what I don't want it to apply to or if I just need it in a small area, I'll invert the mask with command. I I'll grab my paintbrush tool, get a big brush soft, one bigger, the brush softer, the edge becomes. So I use a pretty big one, and I will paint with white white means. Apply it. So now let's come in here and let's apply our color. Here goes if I don't need as much once I get over to the middle of the photograph, just lower the opacity of my brush to say, How much do I need? Maybe I need only 30% here in the middle to get it in there. But now let's see what happens if I hide that adjustment layer. Here's before. Here's after that. Just remember when you're done, if you don't want the color samplers to appear, go back to the color sampler tool and they'll be a button at the top called Clear. And so that's what I can do. The main challenge is to mask it so it looks appropriate. So I might come in here and paint with black with even larger brush, In case you don't know. I mean, when we talk about this, if you have a small brush, how much space does it have to fade out half the width of the brush? It's gotta be soft on both sides, so let me paint with 100% opacity. Okay, this is a brushes, soft as I can make it. But when a small it has half the with the fade out, get a bigger brush. The only thing I'm changing is the size has half that with to fade up even bigger in size. Half that with. So the bigger the brush softer, the edge right, even with the same hardness setting. So if I need a really soft transition, I need a big brush. So that's why I have a brush. This darn big is I want a really soft transition, and I'll just come up here. Yeah, they see how that's much more subtle. Then, on abrupt transition

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Practice Files
Reference Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Shannon
 

As always, Ben surpassed my expectations. His easy style of sharing his experience is fun and inspiring. He is completely prepared and that makes his workshops flow smoothly. I feel like he's thoroughly comfortable with Photoshop. Thank you, creativeLIVE and Ben for bringing yet another terrific workshop to the masses.

a Creativelive Student
 

Wow, just watched the bonus content, loved it all, particularly the color theory basics! Thanks Ben for the extra effort and thanks CL!

a Creativelive Student
 

this sounds like help from heaven. I dearly wish i will be able to catch up with everything Ben has to teach!

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