Lessons

Lesson Info

Hand Tinting

You guys have been in my painting class, you've seen my mom, but this is a great old world war two vintage photograph of the world's most beautiful mother. This is where we're headed with it. This is a hand tinting job done here in adobe camera fantastic, probably done literally if you want to do it, if you spend more than sixty seconds, you're probably spending too much time on it really quick, you're going to see how sloppy this is done, but I think what I'll do is because most people have seen this file is we're going to start off with this one. This is a book, krystal, obviously a contemporary full color shot, but she's got a little bit of a retro feel that the hairstyle and stuff like that is a little bit kind of ah, retro feel to it. So we're going to use this one for doing a hand tinting and let's see if we've got one in this case, we've had all sorts of different hand tinting here. I think what we'll do is we'll start off with this one right here for the start of our hand tinti...

ng, and maybe we'll come up here let's do exactly what we were just doing in this case, you can see this when I actually did convert to gray scale. Using that targeted adjustment tool, I can fine tune it so I can click on that skin tone if I want to lighten the skin tone a little bit let's see what color that background is that background color has got a lot of blue in it so I can darken that background, which is going to give me a little bit more color in the dress as well. So I like that you know what I think I'm going to kind of reverse that I like her being a little bit darker and having it pop around having her pop off because of the difference from the background will flatten out the tone a little bit again give it a little bit of an antique field and maybe speaking about that tango well, come up here and soften it using a little bit of anti clarity in here remember usually will not add clarity to a portrait certainly a female portrait, but in this case, doing a little anti clarity is going to allow us to soften up that image. Maybe I'll also exaggerate that then yet a little bit and I think I like that dark in her lips a little bit that red of the lips remember I can isolate out all these different elements here I think I like that okay, so we've got our black and white any time like I said, I I see something I like so we're gonna go ahead and we'll do that one let's go ahead and do the camera default so we can see where we're coming from do that as a zero and so now we've got our image to do our color work this is done using the adjustment brush the great thing about the adjustment brush is that it has this great little option down here the color swatch and this color swatches going to allow me to dio hugh and saturation there is no luminosity associated with this tool meaning it's just a tint of color that goes over the inherent luminosity of the file you can't change it you can't make it darker or lighter with his tent which is exactly what you want it's like a nice translucent die as opposed to a pigment normally you would not color photograph with pigments you do it with dies you'd want the original luminosity of the file to show through which is exactly what you want so this tool right here is going to be exactly what I'd like the great thing about it is not only does it do this nice translucent die toothy image but it also has access to of course everything else that's part of the adjustment brush and that's where it really stands apart from what you could do in photo shop because of course photo shop you're always isolated the one particular adjustment at a time and the thing with the dough became a raw is adobe has given us this ability to do a dozen or more things with one simple adjustment. Okay, um, so back to our color, the concept here is that, um, when hand tinting was done in the olden days, it was usually done with a very limited palate, very quickly, you can think of a whole series of, you know, gold miners waiting at the door to have their shots done, or all these civil war, you know, soldiers wanting to get the image to send home toe instagram to the folks back home, and so they're all lined up, so you you actually would do it very quickly, only the very richest people would get the, you know, really detailed with a lot of colors, but most hand tinting was done to give the impression of color back then, there wasn't even the concept of making it look like it was really it was not wasn't make it look technicolor was just to give it a little bit of of tint to it, especially so you could tell the difference between the different sides of the civil war is always good to know the difference between the blues and the grays, so what we're going to do is we're going to use a minimized set of colors as I said before you've got up here is your hugh aside drag this around you'll see this huge number changing and also as I go up and down you'll see the saturation is changing you'll notice there are no darks and lights and because of that there's really no browns in here you don't have a dark orange which would be a brown so you're going to be choosing this you and the saturation the nice thing as with everything else within a doping camera raw everything you do here is not destructive so you confined to knit later, which is great because you probably will once you get your colors together. The awesome thing about digital paintings you confine tune it after the fact if you did a hand tinting using real dies in a real thing, you kind of go oh, that really didn't the orange does not owe have and there's no undo with paint what a bummer that isthe so I'm gonna come up here and we'll just choose a on orange for our skin tone you'll notice there's a siri's of swatches here and I've actually already changed them if I come in pierre and I can't let's do a little blue here if I hold down my options are all key just so you can see the change you can actually add whatever color you're selecting into your swatches palate and just like in the olden days, option key on the mac all can the pc if you've got five colors at your disposal, say a skin tone and hair foliage dirt, maybe an accent, red that's, the colors that they would work with every single person would get those same colors. So that's, what we're going to do here so I've got a little skin tone color that we're going to do here I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to choose my brush and I use a nice big soft brush like I always like to dio I do not use auto mask, I'm not going to try and find out follow any edge in the file, I'm going to a big, soft, sloppy tinting of big areas and you going to see how a big and sloppy that is? So I've got my skin tone here remember, if you click on the plus or minus it resets all the different sliders. It's a really good habit to get into that you always reset everything else so you don't accidentally had a sharpening or blurring or whatever you're doing last, I'm going to come up here and I'm going to go this, I'm going to go over everything, including her lips and teeth in that whole area said here you can see him also going part over part of the hair, so there is the skin. If we take a look at that mask, I can hover my cursor over the pin and see the mask, you can see how sloppy it is with that mask visible, visible now what I'm going to do because I think it's much quicker to erase what you don't want rather than do a little teeny brush and go around the eyes it's much easier just to hold down my option or all key and then get my eraser and now come up here and I'm gonna just a race again, not using the auto mask, I'm just going to erase the areas that I don't want the skin tone on and again, you can see it's, a big, soft, relatively brit, big and soft brush, maybe later on I will clean up some things around the neck, but for now I'm just taking out the eyes and the teeth, which is really scary looking but appropriate for halloween, right? So there is our skin tone done hit new click on our swatch that's come up here and we'll do our background or background was but let's actually were to add a little green, just kind of a muted mint green up here you can see I've already got one here, but I can and I can use that option key set that will use that for the background um here and again, I'm going to even go over portions of that image I can tap that. Why key that's going to allow me to see what I'm working on, okay? And you'd see again, I'm getting that overlap of the hair that may be a bit bit much, so I'm going to come up here and get a little bit, not be quite so sloppy in that file, but again, it's that overlapping of colors that's going to give it a really organic feel to it tapped the y key? There is our background hit new make sure and hit new, because if you change the swatch, well, that's still active it's obviously going to change that I'm going to come up here and now well dio I've already got kind of a little bluish one chosen we're going to do that in the olden days, just like with superman, there was no such thing as black hair, there was always a color that comic books, so if you wanted to do something like black or even white, what you'd do is you'd come up here and you'd add a little bit of a blue tint to the area and we're going to do that same thing with her dress I'm gonna add just a little bit of color even though there is no color associated with it and again holding down that option or key for a little bit of the spill where I'm getting a little bit of carried away in here and say I'm going to do a little bit cleanup on that skin and again even something like that where I'm staying away from the edge is fine with me okay, so there is a little bit of blue you'll notice that the blue is almost non existent down on the white because it's on ly taking where there's an inherent tone and changing that it is translucent or transparent and therefore if there is very little tone it's going to have very little effect but in the second will be able to change that again that's the great thing about adobe camera um and let's do another one let's do a little red because we do have some accent colors going on here I've got a little red already chosen we're gonna come up here and we'll come up here too the lips and we're gonna come up here and we'll do a little bit more detail work yesterday I mentioned if I am doing retouching on a portrait like this and I've got these very sharp little corners I'll do one hold down that option or old key and it's much easier to a race to get that sharp corner than come up here with a teeny tiny brush so again, that is something I'm going to do I'll do the lower lip and then hold down that option or old key in order to point in that shape you'll notice again, I am using my walking here and even if you're not doing a lot of painting work, any kind of retouching is always going to be better with welcome in their stylists this is the new into us pro, which is awesome highly recommended let's do one other little touch here I'm going to do the cheeks I'm at a little blush to it I can try going in here and just happen that actually it looks like a pretty good level remember you do have density if I wanted to do different intensities of red throughout the file like the lips would be a brighter red and that cheeks would be less there's nothing stopping you from changing density and then clicking in that area and you actually connected in the sense too different intensities of that same red but in this case, that little tent right there is working for me, so I've got my cheeks I've got my, um, skin tone I've got my hair that skin tone I can click back on any of the areas that's the the skin tone right here I'm going to hold down my option or all key and there's just a little bit too much spill in the hair want to keep that my nice color there so now I'm fine tuning it if I want that skin tone should she have blue eyes or should she have brown eyes blue? So if we have blue eyes we're simply going to come up here on our blue for our hair again I could use his numbers any number of colors just because I have swatches doesn't mean that I have to you know I'm limited to those five I can make it whatever I'd like so let's come up here and I'll be adding a blue tint to it so now she has blue eyes I want and clicked back on that skin looks like I got a little sloppy with the eyes and I don't want you know I want the um going around the eyes do don't mind the whites of the eyes being white same thing with teeth you could add a little bit of blue to the teeth if you wanted to like I said there's no white per se but we'll just say that is our hand tinting effect but now we're going to find two new first off let's get rid of those pins because those are a little bit annoying let's click on that blue so we have that active and again, that's our area that we've done for our blue how do you hide the pins? B b for visualize? So those pins air now hidden? I know when a fine tune this image we've got our before and after the preview is going to give us our, um there is our black and white till they like that, but we want to find tune it. I've got the blues activated and I mentioned the issue with I'm not being able to change the tone or really add a blew in here and that's because we have hugh saturation where does luminosity coming with luminosity? Fortunately we have all these other sliders at our disposal so there's nothing stopping me from coming up here and darkening those highlights so you can see weaken brighten it up and you can see that I can take down. We'll do it a little bit harsher will take that exposure as well as highlights down and that's giving me maur blue inside the blouse inside the dress same thing khun go with the background. Not only can I take that background because it's mask off and I've got my little green color down here, I can also come to that background and maybe had something like that anti clarity over that anti clarity is going to be kind of a diffuse glow. Around it on this case, it's also doing a little lightning of the file so I can use that exposure and concert with that. So now what I'm doing now, you can kind of see what the clarity is doing if I take up clarity that's obviously going to exaggerate the detail, but by taking down that clarity, I can soften that I could, even if I want to brooke, when she shot this picture, it's obviously shooting with a nice, wide open f stop, but I could even use that little trick of softening that background a little bit, especially as it transitions around those edges because that sloppy edge is actually a feature, not a bug. So by taking down that sharpness now, that background is not only green it's, also a darker green, so so slightly more out of focus. So I have that ability to find tune that if I click on my lips and I want to find tune those I can come up here and maybe change the saturation, I can go back to the swatch itself. You can see I can come up here that's, where the cheeks get a little bit crazy. Yeah, I'm actually liking that in the lips, but the cheeks are, should he used a smaller brush, so actually we can you know if we wanted to do that there is now I can see why I got a little carried away with that so let's go ahead and just fine tune that again this is just what I love about it is actually it's quick and it's easy and I come up here with this small brush and let's change that density as I mentioned before since we're using a bright I'm red for the lips tap tap hide that and now we have intense lips settle rosy cheeks the same read the same areas being done and again I just love doing this sort of effects so I don't say that's good enough because I'm talking about it I'm being a little bit more expressive it took more than sixty seconds but here is our before after before after the thing that I love about this technique is also the fact that um it definitely looks hand tinted there's no way that you would have do a command f and run a filter and get this effect and therefore when you present it give it, sell it it comes across as a hand tinting there's no way of it being looking like it was some automated process and with that the person is receiving it goes this is a piece of a very unique hand done artwork done for me in the case of a client or friend or family or whatever okay and when you're done, of course will come up here now and we'll do another snapshot to actually how do we do our snapshots? And now that we know since who was that? Who is the person out in a computer land? Jim, who gave us the command shift s the shortcut for taking snapshots that went out tio from yesterday a c let me look well, they want to get it right we'll give him another heads up or her head's up whoever it was and thank them for it. But that is your keyboard shortcut for making snap shots because you should be doing them all the time command shift s for save or control shift s save for on the pc that is our short cut in a landscape again in that situation khun go justus quick in terms of doing the coloring, you just come up to the adjustment brush the same thing, come up and choose it, and we'll just do one couple little colors here, so something like a landscape. What I'll do is usually I'll do a couple of different shades of green um and the shade of brown, so we'll come up here so we'll do these leafy trees in one color well say new click on our swatch make one that's a little bit more of ah maybe even olive green here and more saturated and now that will be the green for things like the palm trees and the banana palms so you get some variation on that that's a cool photograph that was dpt cam thank you gpt cam and actually we another shot out to a handful of people I believe michelle in narva also shattered it out so a lot of our fans are a lot of people were way smarter than me that is cool so thank you so I just changed it so you can see where I'm coming up there with a couple different variations on green for a landscape is nice I can say knew we'll do that same kind of little brown and there's going to be our you know street dirt's and you get you get the general idea even though I d'oh you can say when it when you really get going on this it's this fast ok to do it there's our sky new tap let's do a little purple for a church something like the church if you do want to take advantage of things like auto mask you can come up here and it actually you'll notice that I'm just going through right over a lot of that white and for the most part it's isolating it out hold down that option are all key get the eraser and I can clean up that white so I can actually do this um targeted really hard edged coloring there's my mask because I turned on the auto masks even though I don't typically do it for this one because it is a piece of architecture if I want to take advantage of it, they're in a sense, is a little hand tinting that one was more toward the sixty seconds that I mentioned before. Also, I love it. I mentioned before things like the sky um, where I've got that done, I can do things like that anti clarity to kind of soften that sky, throw it back in the distance, but I could also for things like the church, I can increase the clarity and that's going to give me a little bit of that kind of art deco airbrushed edge look to it, and I can also do things like use my sliders. So if I wanted more of a pastel purple now you can see that clarity is doing that little bit of a you know, halo effect around here, that's him up so you can see it. So here is I removed clarity the sky now adding clarity for the church and, um, love it amusing command zero to fit two window and there's the v and here is our before after before after by the way, that is a very cool church it is a very cool photograph it's an infrared shot taken in hlava valley on molokai. So this is the sort of stuff that we shoot on my creative photography for the soul is this wonderful little area that very few people on the planet have ever been to hlava valley on mollica of by okay, this one I'll just show the result of it. This is a wedding shot by buried davis on alumni from creative photography for the soul over and why wonderful photographer and here we did the same thing with the adjustment brush was tapped that beaky and, uh that should show us where our pin is and it's probably off sometimes if you crop your file, your pin could actually be off off the edge of the file so let's, just we'll go right to our last image here that's why it had been crump so here is the image let's save it what you call this our one and we'll do our little default so we don't get that crop that's the one thing I like about you using this little feature appear in this menu came around defaults is it sets everything back to the way it was shot except for the crop so you actually get it good before and after, so here is that same file taking advantage of that adjustment brush where we're coming in here and doing a d saturation for it to do kind of this hand tinting effect, but it's a great shot to begin with. But for me, I love the fact of just something like that d saturation brush and you can see where there's that brush you see? Not only did I de saturate, I took that clarity all the way down, and I took my exposure up. So that's, obviously, why? It's ghosting what's known as ghosting the background s o I've left the colors intact, but by doing this one thing, we're not on ly are we doing the d saturate here? You can see the clarity, how it's doing that wonderful misting of the background and the exposure here's the normal exposure just de saturated and how something as simple as that can make the image pop dramatic pump. And now what was a nice portrait is obviously now, um, something much more likely to be thrown over the mantel place. I don't know anybody who puts their wedding pictures over the mantel place, but you get the idea they may buy a nice big print for ok, so there are a few things related teo hand tinting either actually hand tinting as we did here, using the adjustment brush to add color. Or simply in this case something like this or like this where we're using the adjustment brush to remove color but that does show that we can take since we've got that background you know if we want to make that area pop and add that anti clarity you can see again how that khun dramatically change the flavor of the image jack you ready for a question? Yes I am could we go back to that wedding shot please? Okay first I got it I got a fine tune the orange light in the skin tone on this file remember that luminosity so cool so we'll take our luminosity but let's go back to the winning shot. Yes, great. So pam hawking's from new newton newjersey asks and and a handful of people have the same issue says jack, I do production do product shots and glass sculpture shots a lot and I need those two hundred fifty five white backgrounds I've tried to use the adjustment brush on the white backgrounds teo whiten it but sometimes there's weird areas around the subject and such can you advise how you would advised product photographers t use this technique and a c r to make those pure white backgrounds? Well, that's a good point if you I think with the product shot in the catalogue shot is that you have to make sure that it is absolutely, positively pure white because any little speckles we talked about yesterday anything that subtle on screen, you know? Ah two percent five percent tone on screen is very, very subtle that two percent or five percent, when you printed out it's going to jump to the next closest one, it doesn't have their billions of colors at your disposal, so it made jump from five to ten. In other words, it may plug up and all of a sudden it's very obvious, or it may dropout completely so that you're never quite sure, depending upon where it fits in the gamma three principal range of colors of a particular printing method. So if I was to do catalog work, would I use this? We certainly tio if we wind up here back to our adjustment brush and we clicked on this there's nothing stopping you from coming up here and throwing the kitchen sink at it, you're goingto lighten up every single thing that is inside that area. You can see that mask was still pretty, um, sloppy on there, so if I take up and noon, do the clarity, we won't mess with sharpness if we take all the things that are our disposal for doing luminosity, basically our exposure, which is our mid tone values contrast, is going to exaggerate and make whatever is a little light. A little a lot lighter it's going to take darks and make them darker but hopefully we've already fixed that so there's only subtleties left so that's gonna go lighter? Yes highlights like shadows like everything that we could possibly do. I don't know if I would use clarity and here depends upon how hard or whether that was soft that transition and what they were trying to do whether you were trying to fade off and keep some of say that the drop shadow underneath the product or whether you were literally isolating it with a hard edge but that's the best that you could do in terms of that one thing that you could do then is you're going to come up to your basic panel and remember your whites and blacks here if you pull down your option key on your mackerel can the pc it's going to show you the levels of your white if it's pure white? So this is gonna be your check and I can see right here that even though that looks pure white this is what we're talking about now you have to be really careful you go oh that's great that's gonna look great in a catholic that's pure white right? Come over here I'm holding down the option kion the mac all key on the pc I mean the basic panel basic panel I'm on the whites or blacks that's how you can check the eggs, the extremes of the whites or blacks, and I can see that I'm nowhere near close to having a true pure white you can I just simply take that up until it is pure white? The problem with this is that this right here is global, right? And the problem is it's also affecting everything inside the mask it has this basic panel has no knowledge of the mask, so you're actually changing the white point for the actual file itself, so you really can't do that. S so the bottom line is, well, I've already thrown the kitchen sink at it. I've selected the background no matter what I do with those, I can't take it to pierre white, so you're gonna go into photo shop, the masking and photoshopped, especially when you've got this hard edge transition is something were photoshopped shines as a matter fact, if you're doing a product shot, you're probably going to be wanting to use the pen tool and do a vector outline of the shape. The great thing about using the pen tool is not only will give you a perfect edge for used as a mask to make your background white, but you will also, of course, use that pen. To cut out the file for printing purposes in other words, it will print with a razor sharp edge around it. You save that off is a pdf or something like that. You can actually have that path isolate the image from the background with a razor sharp edge which, again for catalog work often that's done so, um, you could take it as far as you want. The little trick that I'll give you to check your background inside of photo shop is you can use the magic wand sometimes known as the tragic want take the magic wants that your tolerance to zero said your feather to zero and whatever you click on it will select with these, you know, marching ants so even though it looks like it's pure white, if you click on it and you see a little speckles of marching ants, you know that your got a long way to go then you need the fine tune it if you're painting out that background or racing it but that would be the easy way had to check your background inside of, um photoshopped great thank you you're welcome. Yes, just real quick with this what happens if you duplicate the pins so it duplicates the adjustments you made because I know like yesterday you did the grady it filtered twice to darken you double it up that's a good question if we come back over here to our adjustment brush and take this file here you can right click and duplicate on it okay, which is really is a cool little thing here so let's let's do that so now I've thrown the kitchen sink at it twice they're right on top of each other so it's going to be hard to see that we've got our the adjustment brush doubled up but there is actually just moved that mass by moving it so we don't want to move that mask that does show as we did yesterday we moved our healing brush and you can also move now are adjustment brush we have doubled it so there's two on top of each other now we go back to our I like how you're thinking say that's what mentioned going come up here we're gonna goto white we're going to hold down our option or old key and were much better that's great. Okay, so everybody awesome that's why jesus class thank you huge good as you do need to find a creative live t shirt that was worth it to she can't get away t shirts right here what you have to give away some kind of trance keys these sorts of things so the tip here because we've gotten obviously much further along in terms of isolating out that white um, and again, thiss mass was never used to create this what we're doing in terms of cutting it out. So it wasn't nearly as clean as I'd like it to be, but we're coming up here. We have our adjustment brush. You can click on it to activate it. Right? Click on it. Yes. You need a two button mouse you can probably control. Click on it with a single and come up here into a duplicate it's goingto duplicate the intensity of everything. All those settings, including the kitchen sink. So now we come back over here, to our white and again that should, with the option or all k even be better that's an excellent, especially since that does show you with that little option. Or all let you check the actual values in there. And if there's any issues. So it's great. Excellent, fantastic tip. I'll steal it. Wonderful! Wonderful tip that's what I actually I love about teaching these classes. I think I know toby can. We're all pretty well, but that's. A new feature in c c. So even I am using adobe kamburov, like may have been done in the past. This is the first time that you've been able to in the pushup cc, version of adobe camera raw where you could duplicate or move, or do things like that. Before that, that was impossible. You couldn't move the pan, if you, you know, you just couldn't do it. So it's, a brand new things, so that's your thing. Okay, uh, and I love that so great, great tip.