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Day 21: Color

welcome to day twenty one and today's topic is the wonderful world of color color of course is a lot of stuff we do in force up unless you're taking a color image of making it black and white and up until now we've been looking color just been kind of there we've been neither adding some color in a layer style or we've been adjusting colors using adjustment layers but this is a more global discussion of choosing color applying color color modes color swatches color everything do with color and like a lot of things in photo shop you could make your life simpler if you know the end result of why you're doing a project so for example if you're creating something for print ultimately and by print I mean sending it out to a company that will do printing for you on a traditional printing breast they're going to give you some specs including we want see m y k and we want this and we want that we'll use that as your a reference point and we'll talk about things like should you create the whole...

document see m y k or should you use rgb and some of the differences we'll also look at how to access the color picture more easily and to share swatches between applications and where even creative cloud comes in and the wonderful thing called cooler all kinds of things to do with color so let's get started shall we so here I am in good old photo shop and all I've done is to have something on my screen I have the color picker open that's accessible by clicking on this little button down here and it opens the foreground color picture of course if I clicked on the background swatch it would say color vicar slash brackets background color so this is one of the overall ways to choose a color so whatever I'm going to do next I'm going to either makesem type in a particular color or paint with my paintbrush or I wantto choose a color for some other purpose the color picker is one of the places that's very useful because it gives you all these different options as to how we display and pick a color so let's say I wanted some shade of blue I'm gonna click somewhere in the blue area now also over here in the swatches still saying it's black haven't done anything yet I'm just clicked on here to say give me the range of cars I want to be somewhere in the blue family I'm gonna click on this color of blue right here as you do you may see a little icon appear this is suggesting to me that this is a color that's not quote unquote web safe now here's the thing with web safe colors it used to be a bigger issue in the early days of web design because people had to worry about some people had lower quality monitors there was only a certain number of colors that were universally appropriate so frankly I would not pay as much attention to this if I get a different warning I'll show you in a second for printing that's a little different but for this website color I personally don't worry about that anywhere near as much as I used to now if you have working an organization where they still are very much concerned about website colors that's a little different than you have to worry about but I'm not going to however if I went to a very vibrant color like this blue this warning symbol with the triangle that one I would worry about if I was preparing something to be printed on a printing press if this was a web design or video or I'm going to print it on my own in chet I wouldn't worry so much especially for an onscreen use but this little warning symbol is telling me this color you've chosen cannot be printed on a cm like a printing press and what's crazy is if I click on this little swatch it'll show me the next closest coloring gets a look at the shade of blue that I have and I say I want to make sure it prince properly in a cm like a printer so it's in what's called the gamut of colors hoo look at that what a difference between the color I want and the best color I can get and that's one of the important issues to consider when you're preparing files that ultimately will be printed in cm like on a printing press is that there's these things called color gammas which is the range of colors that devices are able to reproduce and the c m y k gamut is a lot smaller than rgb so you could be working away on our g b file and think well this is great everything looks beautiful and then when you convert it to see m y k to prepare for printing all your colors kind of give it de saturate you're like wow that's so that's important so what this means is when you go into color picker should you just arbitrarily pick some color and say that looks good perhaps but is always the case that depends on your end result if you know you're doing this in preparation for printing then you wantto look at it and say yes that is something I do need to be concerned with any time we have chosen a color let's just say that we pick a shade of green and we click okay so that's our current for run color until we choose it again so whatever I do next paint phil whatever anytime you see for example if I go to the phil command and you'll see that it says use for around color that means this color over here if I click okay it will filled background there the whole canvas with that four round color if I go back to the color picker and start to choose maybe a slightly different color you will see now it's showing me here is my new color and here's my current one so this is a nice little feature that lets me compare if you're trying to make a subtle difference between the two then this is one of the ways you can do that it's kind of see because you're seeing comparisons you click okay that becomes your new four run color now one of the ways that I take advantage of this let's say I wanted to fill this background with a grady in't that went between two shades of the same color so I've chosen my four round color let's say I want this state of green to be my foreground color I want to create a grady in't that goes from that green too a darker green of kind of the same family but when I click on the background for around color picker it really doesn't give me any frame of reference to say what shade of green is that but what I could do it is with this background color picker open click on that foreground color pictures shows me well that's the green you had now let's pick a darker color of that same one now I've got two shades of the same color here not goto a tool like migrating tool and tell it I want to do the foreground to background radiant and I dragged from one side to the other and now I've got this nice grady in appearing on my screen whenever you're in the color picker and you choose a color I was just doing it visually but I can also see how it's described here the rgb values here's the c m y k percentages even other modes like hsb in l a b the most common ones we probably use are these ones this is kind of interesting here is a little thing that says it's just some number this is called a hexi decimal number which is used in html web design but it can actually be quite useful because let's say that I want to use this green somewhere else so let's do this let's click okay for a second and let's say now I'm on a sea will just open uh document here let's just open this one for now open it as it is and I decide that I want to use adjustment layer likes a photo filter and I want to see what happens if I use that same shade of green as a color filter well the problem is I don't remember what those numbers were so how can I get this color and use it over there will a simple way to do that is go to the color picker instead of trying to remember thestreet numbers are these four numbers just take this field select it and copy it now I go back here go to the photo filter adjustment layer and in that same field hit paste and now I know I have exactly the same color it's gonna be very hard to see any difference here because putting a green going to see it's doing it's slightly but the main point of that is it's a simple way to copy color from one document to another now one of things that I want to very quickly do here is save myself time because I spent a lot of time going to the color picker to choose color instead of me constantly going over and clicking on that I would like to give it a keyboard shortcut now before I do this I'm gonna quickly add I'm not in any way advocating you should immediately go and do this I'm showing you this is an option that you can decide whether it makes sense for you so you go to edit menu to keyboard shortcuts going to go to the tools and here's every single tool in photo shop that has all those single letters and if I scroll all the way down way down here there's foreground color picture now I want to say this was sorry was either cs five or c s six might even see a six but I can't remember now where they included the option to edit this particular tool kit in the past you could sew the challenges what single letter can I put in here that isn't already spoken for and here is my theory now again I'm not suggesting unit so I should do this this is the thought process you go through those the way I looked at it is what would be a good shortcut I can remember and I thought how about p for picker but when I do that it's telling me pia zarian use will be removed from the pen tool if accepted so now I have to make a decision because I do use the pen tool occasionally but honestly not that often anymore so the the thinking that I went through it I thought to myself how many times on average day do I use the color picker four hundred and ten I have no idea but it's a lot how many times on average day using photoshopped to use the pen tool minus ten I mean honestly I just don't use the pen tool anywhere near is much that for me personally using up this valuable shortcut doesn't make much sense to me so I personally will hit except I'm not suggesting you should all run out and do this but you khun decide maybe there's some other letter you might like personally for me I love the ability of the working just go pee and my color picker pops open so it stops me from having to go and click on this all the time what it means though is if I ever do need to use the pen to ally have to actually go click on it so that's kind of the thought process doesn't matter to you whether you if you use the pencil everyday you probably don't want to do this but since I used the color picker a whole lot I love the fact that I could just pop it open really really quickly when I do use it I have all these options that are built in here and let's say that I I wanted to figure out some other way of describing color and I worked with the company and they say oh our pantone color is some number well if you go to color libraries hears all these pantone colors and they say our color is five sixty six you say there it is now here's the thing with this ah pantone color is a particular printing ink when someone for example is doing say a two color logo they might say it's black and pantone would I say five sixty six so in a printing company pantone five sixty six is a standard color that you know will always come out looking the way you want in this case it's a little different because we're picking a pantone color by number but as you'll see in a minute as soon as I click okay this goes back into the color picture and says it's just a rgb color that looks a whole lot like that pantone color so in other words that does not mean that if I use this color will automatically print as a two color print that's not at all the case it's just a representation visually of what they're color looks like so if you're creating for example a banner for a website or you're putting a logo on a photograph you want to look very similar to their pantone color this is what you do you would choose the color in here that when you click okay let's go back for a second go back to the color picker you see it's just a ziff I clicked on a color and is showing me all the values including hexi decimal but really at this point it's just another color that's really all it is if I'm in the color picker and I've chosen a color like this I aside I want to make this available to me at any given time I can click this button add two swatches and I'll call it uh corporate color pantone by sixty six and that's just to remind me it's not really a pantone color just remind me it was based on that color so now when I click okay it means from now on in my swatches panel there is a swatch that wasn't there before which is the one that I just saved so any time you choose a color using some of the means will be talking about you always have the option of saving it into this watches panel so it's accessible at any time so that's kind of method one of choosing color is using that color picker and honestly it's got tons of options in there of different ways of selecting color by the percentages and all that other stuff or visually all that good stuff is option and for us to see what we're doing now let's assume that we wanted to just choose color off the image and you saw this in the previous lesson when I was using the paintbrush and I was just picking color up off of the background let's close this up so we can continue when you're using the paintbrush let's add a new layers like it actually looked like I was going to be painting and I'm going to go back and just get a regular old brush and make sure it doesn't have any weird leftover things on okay we're good to go and a bigger so we can see and of course it will paint with whatever my four run colorist well if I want to sample a color from this photograph I can hold down option all to temporarily gives me the eyedropper and now I can sample the color I can click and drag my eye dropper around and pick different colors here's what's happening when you click and hold the eyedropper it puts a gray circle or ring around the outside just to separate the colors so you can see them the top color top half of the ring is the new color the bottom half the ring is your current color so now you can see if you want to compare what you had with your new color that will allow me to do that if I wanted to I could have the color picker open and as my move move my mouth over here you will see everywhere I move don't watch my mouse watch the color pick your c it's constantly changing to say well here's the new color your hovering over and showing the both the where it is like what the new color is what the percentages are and not that I would probably have in this case but if it happened tohave an area where you suddenly got a color that gave that warning for cm like a so color picker is is really the main place going to use but a very common thing is to option or click sorry optional click with the paintbrush held down I should say so you're using the paintbrush you wanna temporarily get the eyedropper of course you could be on any tool and press eye for eye dropper to switch to that tool and then press some other letter to go back and that will again keep our foreground color the same the background color serves a couple of purpose is one of them is as we saw before if you're creating a grady in between colors but the other thing the background color does is let's say for example that I went to canvas size and I decided I want to add two inches of canvas all around the outside by default when I do that is going to say okay and let's actually hold on one second let's make sure I'm on all right let's let me start again with this one I realized for me to show this properly just needs to be a regular background layer and let's make our background color something obviously different like yellow ok so sorry about that now you'll be able to see what's happening so I decide I want to add extra canvas I go to canvas size and say give me an inch all the way around the outside it says what would you like the campus extension of color to be white or foreground background usually it defaults to background I have changed this previously that's why it's popping up here but normally he just says backgrounds going tell me remind me my background color is yellow so I click okay and scale the image down you see it's got a big what appears to be a yellow border because I added more canvas and the canvas color is that yellow just a reminder even though I've got foreground and background colors of weird blue and odd yellow at any time as soon as I click on the added layer mass button it automatically reverts to black and white since I'm painting on a mask I can on li yu's grayscale sometimes I click on the layer itself then I've got my colors again now one of the interesting things about using the eyedropper especially when you have the color picker is once the color picker is open that's actually closes for second I'm gonna move photo shop down like this so I can see something in the background this could be in this case it's bridge it could be a file browser could be anything I goto my color picker as long as I start in the image window I can actually drag my cursor anywhere outside of photo shop and say I like that color or this color or that color whatever it is if you can see it I don't know what is down here but I can choose a color so it's that visual that you can drive outside a photo shop so imagine you're trying to make something look like the same colors as there is on a website that's where this could be very useful say okay and that's good click okay and then we continue working again in photo shop let's talk about thie swatches panel for a second this is one of those things I'm going to reset this back the way it comes out of the box that I always make the point about these kind of pre sets just because they're in here doesn't make them good it just means these are colors that adobe said here's some colors for you the end so for example this scares me just a little bit that people say oh look adobes giving these colors let's use that blew right there it's so nice but then I go to the color picker and I find out it's one of those colors that's meant for rgb but not see m y k so once again just because these colors are in here doesn't mean they're safe to use just means adobes giving us some toe work with as we saw a moment ago I can say I really like this color I would like to keep that in my swatches panel and just added in we also have the option of using this pop up menu and here's a whole bunch of different styles of swatches including various pantone colors and other color matching systems that are available so that if you knew you were working on a project where you needed something to simulate pantone colors you could also get them through here as well what's interesting to me is that it is also possible to create sets of swatches so let's say for the sake of argument I'm going to select this color and added in here and now I have two colors and I'm gonna pick one more that someone told me that they said well we need you to use our pantone color which is two sixty seven so I choose that and then add that in there as well so now I have three colors that are say the corporate colors of some clients that I'm using or some project that I'm working on well I could make those into right into a set of swatches so the way I would do it to make it easiest to make sure I have only got those three and we will talk more about this later on the preset manager is the place where I could go and say let's go to our swatches here's those last three click shift click on the other to save set now I'm goingto save them I could save them into the swatches panel I'm gonna put it out on my desktop it's called something and that is a swatch set now so now I have the option and this is where you can decide how you want to do this this is an option that I like to do if I want to really simplify things and not be distracted by other colors I go into my swatches panel and I choose replace swatches now I go and find those colors that I saved and I click open and now all have been here for now is those three colors so I'd work away on this project once I'm finished if I wanted to then I could reset this back to the standard colors so that approach means I'm giving myself generic colors and then temporarily placing with the set of swatches for a particular project now the other option that's kind of interesting is what if I want to use the same colors in a different adobe application like illustrator in design or bring swatches from those back to photo shoot so let's once again shoes replace watches and get those colors now those were the only three now if I take those and choose save swatches for exchange it re names those I can call something dot a s e which is adobe swatch exchange so if I call it something now if I were to go to a different application like illustrator and design I could load those in so let's take a look and see here here we are an illustrator I havea swatches panel here and I have the option of choosing open swatch library and I'll go on find the one that I created is open and there it is there's my little set of color so now they're built into illustrator as well I could also go the other direction say this is an illustrator file I want to save these swatches as an a format and go back the other way so either way it's a very simple way to do things now I don't want to spend a lot of time here talking about creative cloud because I know not everyone is has created cloud yet as a way of working on it but just so you see one of the added nice little benefits of it here I am in my creative cloud membership and I've got a bunch of files that I've uploaded here's an illustrator excuse me in design document that I started working on I click on it and as soon as I do it tells me here is some information for you including the typeface I used but equally importantly here's the colors that I used in this document and if I want to emulate those in a different program like photoshopped once again I can choose download a s e and that will bring those in down from micro cloud membership in that same a format that I can then load into photoshopped if I go back here of the same thing applies two files like it'll be illustrator there's the swatches there but what I find interesting is even if I have a photograph so let's just find a photo here is just a typical photo in photo shop and it's sort of pulling out and saying I average for you here's kind of the swatches so it gives you an idea of the swatches that are available so that's kind of interesting option a is well so let's go back here choose replace swatches and see if I can find those swatches that I just downloaded and there it is right there that s e file I hit open and there's the swatches that air in there and just as a reminder you don't have to choose replace I'm just choosing to do that I want on ly see the swatches that I want to work on it the moment I could also choose upend and that means every time I'm loading and swatches I'm adding to my swatches pound and that's okay too but I like this method frankly for me personally because seeing all those other generics watches that adobe just gives us doesn't really help me at all I prefer this method now there's something else that you might be interested in knowing about I think this is really amazing technology I'm really impressed by this whole concept and that is an ability to grab color from anywhere using a smartphone and then using it in my software so I have a nap here that's called cooler and I'll show you in a minute the what the cooler website actually looks like and I'm going to say I need to someone's given me this scarf and say I'd really like to use these colors in photo shop so I use this app to try and angle it so khun see what's happening as I move this it's saying here are the colors that I can pick up from this image and once I like it I say all right let's use that and there's the colors that has now given me at this point I say that looks good to me I like it I'm going to share this I just have to do a quick little type in here just chat amongst yourselves at this moment and I hit send now I called it the very clever theme seventeen so I'll have to remember that and cooler is a free app and it's a web site you can access a service from adobe that's really interesting because one of things you may struggle with is you're trying to choose a color scheme and you're kind of running out of ideas in terms of what looks good and what combinations look good well cooler is it comes in available and various versions of photo shop as an extension it's built in to c c and c has six and you go under window and extensions to cooler and then and says well let me browse the cooler collections are out there and I'll look theme seventeen I just did that a second ago awesome let me add that to my swatches panel and there's the colors that I just added in now it doesn't look to me a whole lot like the scarf but that's because I realized I press one other button that kind of inverted but you get the idea that it's capturing color from anywhere turning into swatches that you can use now let's look further at this here are our ones these air all ones that obviously people just added and as I looked through him like that's kind of interesting let's take a look at that and I can edit the theme and see the base color and you can choose who you want complementary colors or custom colors all kinds of things that I wanted to be complementary colors so as I move it around it's showing me so even though I started with someone else's theme I'm creating it completely myself so cooler is this kind of community this free community that's growing that just says here's a bunch of color combinations you can access it's not tied two creative clouds you do not have to have created cloud account I believe at this point that the app on the smartphone is on ly iphone may come for android others later on but if you don't have that part simply having a panel built into photoshopped that says here other people's opinions as to what makes a nice color scheme it's a great way if you're ever stuck to kind of go well I'm just not sure what colors I should be using so that's a pretty neat aspect to me is that ability so you can browse through you can create your own all of those things that are just built in as this cooler app and you can also go to the whole cooler website to see even mohr information and if you happen to have a nap like that borrow colors from elsewhere that's pretty cool too so I'm just curious yeah I definitely hit a button that said invert when I did that because that's not what I had intended to do so anyway you saw the idea though that's the important thing is it let me that's let me just get back and make sure I'm out of that okay good all right so let's go back to this document for a second and I'm going to double click to go back to camera and I'm going to deliberately really really over saturate this I want to really make it an oversaturated image and I doing this for some project as I'm working say ok on top of that I want to add some other colors so there's are nice vibrant color that we picked up through cooler and I'm gonna maybe had some text on here I don't know I'm just making this up as I go as always so I'm doing all this and then I think oh okay so now that I've done this and I'm deliberately kind of going about this the wrong way to help us remember what we need to do is now I think okay now that I've finish this and I love the way it looks what will this look like if I said this out to print on c m y k printer but some printing press making postcards or whatever it might be well one of the ways we can tell that is there is an option couple of options here under the new menu one is called gamete warning and what this will do is overlay with gray any areas where those colors are will not be able to be printed in cm like so this is warning me all of these areas where you see great will have to shift colors so it's not meaning they will turn gray is just the gray is the warning to tell me these are all the areas I should be concerned about so if I turned that off and instead go to proof colors now it's switches and you can see there's a subtle difference but if I go to the original and now it's telling me there is going to be a little shift in color let me make it even more obvious by making a selection here on really turn that off and let's pick blue is about the most the easiest to see because it's such a dramatic difference so I'm gonna add uh blue hold on let's take off that proof color here we go so add some blue and let's just add a drop shout to that because look so pretty so this I'm doing to be a more obvious difference now if I choose prove colors at saying look at the difference between what I wanted and what I'm going to get for printing so every so often people ask me about well what if I know right from the get go I'm preparing a file to be printed in c m y k should I just change the mode to see m y k and that's a good question because you could write back at the beginning I could just say let's change the mode to see m y k I'm goingto ask it not to rast arise anything and not to merge anything okay so now every decision I make is in context and frankly the on ly reason for not doing that because it makes good sense to say let's just stay in c m y k is that you will find certain things for example some of the filters are great out because some filters quite a few as you can see don't work in c m y k and for me and photo shop see see one of the bigs ones is camera raw filter so personally I would say let's not do that but what I want to do is make sure as I'm actively working that everything I do I'm making a decision that's in the right context of what will it look like and see m y k in other words I don't want to do an hour's worth of working at the end convert the mode and find that don't like the results so that's why I use this proof colors if you look really closely at the top of my document now says rgb slash see m y k that means technically I'm still working in rgb mode but it's previewing as best it can what will the file end up looking like when I finally send this to see m y k but what it does mean is now I can do things like still apply all these filters that I wanted to because technically I'm still in rgb so I can make adjustments and tweak results but every time I make any change it showing me in the context of c m y k now this is very much a personal preference I like to look work this way if I am preparing something for cm like a because I want to make sure the colors look all right but I want to give myself access to all the controls they're available in photo shop personally at the end I would say this is an rgb with all my layers psd and then when I go save as along with saving it as a flattened version I'm also going to change the mo to see m y k so are same recurring theme of master psd file and flattened version in this case there's one extra little step and that is that flattened version also has been converted to see m y k so that's another option that's available if you're working on a document with this whole c m y k thing there's one other little trick that I find very useful if you're using the color picture a lot and I just noticed as I did that that I clicked on the color pictures that are pressing pee because I was so used to not doing that for the last number of hours of video but anyway so instead of me clicking and having to constantly be looking at this little swatch to see if there's a warning once I go into color picker I could go to the view menu and turn on gamut warning and what that does is overlay in gray so check this out this is saying all of these colors if you choose them they'll have to shift so if you want to pick a blue would be better off staying outside of this colored overlay now some of them like if I picked the color over here it's not going to shift that dramatically but it's still telling you anything where you see gray that color is gonna have to change so if I switch to a different color like you can see something in the magenta area there's a lot less of them that is a problem so I can still pick a fairly vibrant color so this little option is really nice because it means as I'm looking through all my colors I can see and you can see it tends to be the more neon vibrant colors that are the problem because that green area you can see a whole bunch of it is unavailable and as I shift around you can see it's constantly moving now I would not normally have this on unless I knew I was preparing something for c m y k because I wanted to make sure ahead of time I wasn't causing myself trouble by picking a color that I just know more print so once you're finished working on this project you know you're not doing c m y k anymore then you just go back and turn off that gamut warning and that way from now on you're back to his kind of square one in terms of picking color and choosing it everything else okay all right so let's get rid of this and this now in typical photoshopped fashion there's always lots of different ways to work with color and I'm seeing that we've got the swatches once that I've loaded in previously I also have that color picker that I can open up and use all of its settings including all these numbers and there's even a little mini color if you just want to mix colors like for example again you know you're in c m y k as you move sliders or if you know the percentage of c m y k and you can pick between the various ways of choosing color in here so if you know you're working rgb or cm like a and so on you can do that as well now when we're uh trying to figure out a color to use as I said there's always lots of options one way that's kind of interesting let's see if I can get an example for you that might show this fairly well so I'm going to kind of fake this a little bit take this color and just kind of changed that color temperature so it's a little yellow wish just for the purpose of demonstration and I wanted say looking at this image overall is there any kind of overriding color in here if I was average out all the colors what would it be instead of me trying to figure that out there is a way to do that where dues choose filter blur average and that's as well when I average all the colors this is the color that I get and one of the ways people use that is they have a problem where they feel like they're image has a color cast so I would take the eyedropper sample that color and then undo the photograph and then we're gonna add a new solid color adjustment layer with that color and then I want it was a solid color be easier if I just do a regular layer and then run invert this commander control I in that will invert the color to the opposite and then I change the blend mo to uh you know I think it is color and I just have to lower the opacity and it's more than I was thinking and that will take away some of that kind of color cast that I had and I'm doing it mostly by at this point but the idea is that blur filter called average will just average out all the colors in the image so if you're trying to get a feeling for what kind of color is there overall that's one of the ways to do it now as we're working away and we want to add color as you saw we can previously weaken choose a paintbrush and I will use whatever our four wrong color is we have also the pencil tool we're not gonna talk about all these other tools the other one I want to spend more time that was on this grady in tulle and let's just put our everything backto white for a second and make a new layer and talk a bit more about the grating because it's actually a very effective way to add color it comes with this thing called the radiant picker which means here's a list of existing grady ints if I had chosen a four round and a background then you'll see when you go to the color picture the first one is for round two background the second one is foreground a transparent in the third one is always just black two white no matter what your foreground background colors from within their aiken do further editing so this is just the picker that kind of picks up and shows you here is all the different options available if I want to edit it I click right on this little grating itself and opens the grady in editor and this is a really interesting possibility because now we can take our foreground to background car and say I want to play or out with it even further I want there to be way more red and just a little bit of yellow so you can move that around or I can say I would liketo have a intermediate color like right around here I'd liketo have white so now we have a grave that goes from red to white to yellow and I just want a little bit of whites I'm gonna move these little diamonds website clicked in the wrong place all right make sure I'm clicking right on that little diamond there we go and that determines where that little transition it so I want to have just a little tiny bit of whites I'm wearing red little white over to yellow now one of things that's kind of interesting here is that when you if you are going to create a custom grady and created first and then click the new button so a lot of people would think you click knew and then start editing it but it's actually easier too make it look the way you want say yes I love this let's pretend it's really nice and then you say ok now I've done that I'm gonna click and add this new little grady in't swatch to my picker which is now another option that's available if you look at one that's already there and say I kind of like the look of this but I don't like the colors it still shows you here's how they did it but then each of these stops you can go in and decide I want to use my background color from color or my own color user color to say I want to be this color instead and you can edit it and then make a new one from that there's also a whole list of other options that are all very interesting including a whole bunch that are specifically designed for photographic toning to try and kind of do like a color tone to your photograph now let's just click okay and say all right so now we have a great and how do we apply it well like any tool we're going to use the grady in tool we're gonna have to go through a little process okay which great I want I want my lovely one that I created then it has some options for you as to how this great it will be applied you wanted just normal as a radio one or a number on these ones are all called but basically let's just go normal and then it's up to you to click and drag so if I want to go side to side if I click and drag just a little bit it will draw the grady and then fill the rest with the remainder if I draw a line all the way across it's goingto be fairly even if I drag tiny the line so each one you'll see it's up to you to control now on top of that I also have normal and opacity so if you want to put grady and on top of grady and you could so you might be asking yourself right about now why on earth what I want to create something that looks like this and that's a really good question and you probably wouldn't want to do this exactly but one of the ways we can start if you just want to say some background combination of colors to put behind some graphic you just want to kind of start randomly creating something here's an interesting option let's change the blend mode to difference which is not one we use a whole lot and just start dragging some circles and each time I do or say circles but I'm dragging because their radio radiance every so often it's going to go kind of color negative color negative and I just keep doing this and eventually I'm getting wow crazy effect now what I leave it like that probably not but it's still kind of need so on top of that I might experiment and convert this to a smart object so I once again have all of my options for things like motion blur if you do a really heavy duty motion blur at different angles now is just creating kind of an interesting background effect and of course we can always edit that if we want to now grady ins could also just simply be I want a gray that goes from medium blue to dark blue auras we saw before you can use the grading on a layer mass what doesn't have to be in color but that grady it is actually quite a useful tool because it does this really nice gradual kind of fact and it's a very nice way of applying paint very very easily the only thing that's you can't do here which is unfortunate is because in art to create this I did a smart filter before that I did I don't know how many grady it's just dragged all over the place is I can't edit those so if I went right back to the beginning let's just delete this and said I'm gonna add a new layer and for now just fill it with some color and I want to apply a grady into this just a simple one that goes from say corner to corner if I drag go back to normal if I just drag this from corner to corner and get my lovely grady in't there once I move on I can't edit it so similar to when we talked about things like patterns I could also go into my laywer styles and use one called grady it overlay and it basically does the same a concept you khun click on the radiant and then say I would like it to be this angle but you can also scale it or on the fly decide maybe it would look better if I chose this one or this one or whatever it might be so this means that grady in't becomes editable it's not quite the same as me dragging it myself but at least you have the option of changing the angle or changing the scale and just by coming back in any time and saying let's put it to this angle and scale it even mohr and click okay so even though it looked like red well that was just the fill of my layer but then I put grady in overlay on top of it if I decide hey maybe wouldn't look nice if I had it with red then I can use some blend mode to get the effect that I want and change it even more so as is always the case lots of different options here for improving origin say approving but adding more color by using things like the grade aeons even if you just use the built in one's alone it's pretty interesting but adding the ability to go in and try some of the existing greens then you make your own and experience different blend modes lots of different possibilities there so as we're working on an image the things that you need to remember is we're constantly thinking okay what color do I need foreground or background so I used my pee for color picker to choose the color keeping in mind all of these different factors or go to these watches panel to say well I already have swatches there remember that a lot of the other things we do for example when I create styles when I'm saving a style it's saving information there is any color in there like in this one I made earlier that had gold kind of effect in built into that one of the things in that let me just add a layer so we can remind ourselves if I click on that it's saying well there was a colored overlay and it is this color so that's built in if you were anywhere in photo shop and you see a color like you see a swatch it looks like this that means that's the existing color but if you click on it it's a color brings up the color picture so in all the different layers styles anywhere else in photo shop where if you see a little colored box beside some option like in this case here that means you khun change the color by getting to the color picture if I was working with the type tool and I start to add some type I'm reminded right away be science fact that I can see that it's red that up here is telling me your texas currently red so once again I could choose any color that I want now there was one thing that I was reminded of as I was doing this because it is worth mentioning one of the adjustment layers that's a little different most of the other adjustment layers were thinking I want to alter the look of something existing have a photograph and I add a huge saturation justin layer to change like the color of the guy's shirt or something like that but what if you just want ah color behind something but you won't be able to change it easily here's the difference so if I went to my color picker and I said all right I want to create a background which is in this color right here if I filled the background with that color and move on if I need to change the color than I would have to go to the color picker and then go back to this layer and choose phil again which is ok but one of the other options would be to instead use a solid color adjustment layer and I'll start off with the same color and I click okay but the difference is I didn't have to choose phil okay I just went solid color adjustment layer open the color picker then I clicked ok so now you see I have this adjustment layer called color fill so what would I do with that well let's do this just for the sake of argument let's place this into photo shop so have some graphic in here we take a moment to do so but that's okay here it is and let's just scale it down just a hair and say ok go with that well now that I do that I think well maybe I want to change my background color on the fly so in the previous scenario when I just filled the background I would have to constantly go back to the color picker choose a color film now I just click on this and it opens the color picker but you'll see this is life so as soon as I choose a color and move it around it's constantly showing me what it looks like so using a solid color of just solid color adjustment layer yes that is correct that is the name of it is offers us the advantage of both the fact that is very editable but also its live meaning anything I do if I goto a shade of purple and start to move this around I'm constantly seeing what does it look like with this context so if I for example had taken my placed graphic and change the blend mo to multiply that's going to be have another influence so now every time I look at the color look at the word ideas which is originally yellow now that I'm in multiply mode I can see certain colors are gonna have a better result than others because I'm changing the background color so therefore the way multiply mode is going to also alter and you may well come to the realization that if you want to have multiple I'm owed it ain't going to work very well because of the color combination so that's one of the ways you can experiment try things they maybe if I added a drop shadow to create some separation possibly it's better but still I might just give up on the whole multiply mod thing and instead go backto illustrator and affect this color changes so let's go back to our swatches and I'm going to reset everything back the way they were just so I can make sure from moving forward that I have the same original swatches now I did this before it is kind of clipped through it really quickly but this is a question you have to do it think to yourself now I loaded in two different swatches one that came from through the creative cloud and in design and one that was from that cooler method so I do have copies of those so when I get this dialog boxes as do you want to save changes to them I don't actually necessarily have to because I do have them somewhere else so that's a choice you khun make along the way if you find that having these air again the default set of swatches I could go to the preset manager and in here is where I find my swatches that are all the ones and if I find there are certain colors that I just never use I could go in and delete them or I could reorganized and say I really like I use this color all the time so let's put it the beginning and this color I like a lot too so you can reorganize and then when you click done from then on your panel will display that way that's one of those again from then on meaning I have just changed my default of the way this panel displays and I can move on from there now if you are working let's say we take our eyedropper tool and I sample this color and say let's add that here very nice if you decide later on you just that was a bad idea hold down option or all will go to the little sisters icon and you could just delete it right back out again so adding a swatch is just a simple is clicking removing this watch is a simple ous optional all clicking which would be the same it's clicking on the trash camp could have to select first this is often just easier and it's very visual because you get the little eyedropper symbol otherwise we didn't talk a whole bunch about these other color modes and we're not going to get into the whole discussion of eight bits and sixteen bits and thirteen bits at this point because we're just talking more about overall color so that gets you some good ideas about choosing color the ones that I'd stress for you to use is if you see color anywhere like you're looking at a website you say oh that's a nice color combination have photo shop open used the color picker and dragged over to that website you khun sample that color see what the make up of it is how it's described in rgb and seeing like a but more importantly just decided I like that color and I want to use it I would highly recommend that you explore the cooler community because there are some really neat ideas out there that people come up with is a this is a color scheme you like or could be a simple as you find a few swatches you like and you want to find what colors are complimentary and that's one of the many things that cooler khun do for you in for today's little assignment if there is anything at all it's really just get used to exploring different ways of choosing color so that when you're painting or using a layer style or adding type whatever it is you get in the color scheme you want so that's it for now we're going teo leave it at that and next we're going to talk about I keep forgetting to check hold on oh yeah that's really nice that can't wait for that we're gonna talk about the whole world of painting we've been using the paintbrush on off but now we're really going to get into using the paintbrush different paint settings how we can create our own brushes with all sorts of effects and all kinds of fun stuff so we shall see you tomorrow