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Lesson Info

Color Adjustments in Adobe Photoshop

And we're back with a whole 'nother session. Photoshop CC, the complete guide. We're in week two. And today, is day eight out of 20. Not quite halfway done yet. And today's topic is color adjustments. There's a lot we can do with color and we're gonna explore the general concepts right now. So let's pop over into Photoshop so we can spend as much time as practical in the program. I'm gonna concentrate today on two main adjustments. These two main adjustments that we concentrate on will relate to the vast majority of the other adjustments in Photoshop, but but concentrating on two, we can spend more time and get more in-depth with it. And what's most important is the general concepts of how to work with color in Photoshop. If you can understand the general fundamental concepts that are going on behind the scenes, then those same concepts apply to all of Photoshop's adjustments. And so that's why we want to kind of concentrate there. So, the first thing we're gonna do is work with a type...

of adjustment known as an HSL adjustment. That would be the category it's in. And HSL stands for hue saturation and lightness or sometimes luminosity. It just means brightness. It just happens to be that they use the letter L to describe it. And we'll do that primarily through an adjustment called hue and saturation. And so let's take a look. In my layer's panel, I'll go the bottom, click on the half black and half white circle. That's where I get an adjustment layer. And that's where I'll find the choice of hue and saturation. In hue and saturation, you can probably see why it's known as a HSL adjustment because if you were to put this an an acronym, wouldn't it H-S-L? So that's one category of adjustment in Photoshop where whatever adjustment you're using happens to have sliders of those names. And this isn't the only. This is just what I consider to be the most powerful one. So we spend the most time with it. So let's take a look at what these three sliders can do. First, if I move the hue slider, hue means basic color. So by moving this slider, it's going to change the basic color of everything in the picture. So when I move it, if you look at the image, you see all the colors changing around. In somewhat odd ways. That particular slider is not very useful all by itself until you learn how to isolate one particular color. So you're not working on the entire picture. If I were able to isolate on the reds in the picture and then I use that slider, I could make all the reds in the image a little bit more orangey or you know a little more yellowish, that kind of thing. And it could be very useful. But when you're working on the entirety of the picture, it's not that great. Then the next slider down is saturation which controls how colorful the image is. If I increase saturation, you'll find the image becoming more and more colorful. And if I decrease it, it becomes less and less colorful. Bring it all the way down and you'll have no color whatsoever. That'll also become more useful once we learn how to isolate particular colors. If I could work on only the blue window that's here and then brighten it up a little, that type of thing. Then the bottom slider called lightness is going to lighten or darken your picture. It's not an adjustment I would apply to the entire picture. Things like brightness and contrast levels and curves would be much more useful when applied to the entire picture. This is way too basic of a slider but if I've isolated a particular area of my picture so that I'm only working on a small portion, like a particular color, it can be useful. So when you first get into the hue and saturation dialogue, if you're just trying to learn it on your own and all you're doing is moving those sliders around, the only one that seems to be all that helpful is saturation because you move it up and make your image more colorful. Or move it down and make it less colorful. Otherwise, the other two sliders just makes your image look weird. And not that useful. But then there are these two color bars, down here at the bottom. And they're the most useful part. But if you look at them, there doesn't seem to be anything to click on, to do anything with them. And therefore, they're hard to figure out. And that's because those two little bars have to do with a menu that's found up here at the top. And they also have to do with the little hand that's right there. Let's see what that menu and that hand does. With that hand tool pushed in and my mine was turned on automatically because back when we talked about tonal adjustments when we're adjusting the brightness and the contrast of your image, when we were in curves, I went to the upper right of the curves adjustment and found a little menu on the side. And there was a choice called auto-select targeted adjustment tool which I turned on when we talked about curves. And that same setting flows over to this tool so that its hand tool is automatically turned on in that case. If yours isn't when you get in there, go to the side menu. Choose auto-select targeted adjustment tool. And if you do, you only need to choose it once. Then every time you get into hue and saturation, that little hand tool will be turned on. Now I'm gonna move my mouse on top of the image making sure the hand tool is active. I'm gonna click within the image. And I'm gonna drag left and right. And look at what happens. Do you see how I just made the red area in the picture black and white? Or I can move it the other direction. And make it ridiculously colorful. But what happened is the moment I clicked on my picture, Photoshop looked at what color my mouse was on top off. So let's say I come over to this and I click. Then when I drag, it's moving a slider called saturation to try to change how colorful things are that are similar to that. And the way it's doing it is through one little feature. And that is this menu right here. This menu tries to isolate various colors. So when I clicked on my image with that little hand tool turned on, it chose a choice from this menu to try to isolate whatever color it is I was clicking on. And when it did that, let's say I choose one manually here like yellows. Down here at the bottom, this became active. You see this weird looking thing? Anytime you either click with the hand tool within your picture or you change this menu. You're gonna get something showing up in between those two bars. We'll be exploring that in detail. And we'll see what we can do with it. What it does is it tries to isolate a particular color. So I'm gonna go find an image where I might want to make some changes. Take just a moment to get one. And let's say that in this particular image, I hate the color yellow. I can't stand yellow or my client can't stand yellow. I don't really hate yellow but. And so the client sees this picture that I want to use in their advertisement. And says, I'm sorry, I hate yellow. We can't use that. And we don't have the budget to go out and shoot a new photograph. And so I need to do something to get all the yellow flowers to become a different color. So, what do I do? I do a hue and saturation adjustment layer. And in hue and saturation, that little hand tool's automatically turned on. I come out here and I click on the yellow flower. And that attempts to isolate the yellows. Now I can change the yellow flowers using these three sliders. And we have to remember what they mean though. Hue means basic color. So if I no longer want a yellow flower, hue is what I want to go to. And so if I start moving it, now you see we have green flowers or go the other way. Now we can maybe get red or other colors. The main problem with doing the yellow flowers though are the stems of the flowers are greenish-yellow. And so they're gonna be shifting a bit as well. So for the purpose of this demonstration, let's pick something where the color we're trying to change is not found elsewhere in the picture. Because otherwise, we'd have to do some masking 'cause the highlights in these stems and things contain a lot of yellow. And so it's not gonna be as easy to isolate the yellows here. Let's look in here and if I look at the purplish kind of colored one, I don't think I see purple anywhere in the picture other than where those are. So let's use those as an example just to start with. I'll click on one of the purplish flowers. And now let's see if we can change the basic color by coming over here and moving our hue slider. I'm gonna try to make them red. Now when you move this though, you might need to move more than one slider to get the desired result. Because once I get them over towards red, they might not look at colorful as the other red flowers. And if that's the case, then I need to come down here to saturation and adjust how colorful they are. So I can then bring up the saturation until they look just about as colorful as the other red flowers that are contained within the picture. And let's say they're just a little bit too dark compared to the other red flowers. Well, that's when I come down here to lightness. And I can brighten it up a little bit or darken it, depending on what's needed. But you see how those sliders become much more useful once you've learned how to isolate a color within a picture? And so what's happening here is when we have the hand tool turned on and I clicked within my picture, it shows the closest color from up here to what I clicked on. Because in this list, there is no choice called purple. We just have six colors listed there. And so it shows the closest one. That caused some little bars to show up down here. And when I clicked on my picture, these bars got centered on the color I clicked on. What these bars do is they isolate color. Let's look at how they work. Do you notice that there are three sections? There's this middle section. The section on the right. And the section on the left. The middle section is where we have full control over what's happening to everything that's in this general color range. So any change we make with the sliders that we have in hue and saturation will completely affect all of the colors shown above. Then these outer right and left sections is where it's gonna fade out. So you don't see an abrupt end to where the change happens. Instead, it blends in to surrounding colors. So what happens is, the colors that are found up here at the top, those get the full change we're looking for. Then the moment it gets to right here, it starts to fade out into these. That means it applies 100% to here and it applies less and less and less and once it gets to there, it's at zero. And on the other side, it's the same thing. It applies 100% to everything up to right here. And then it starts applying less and less and less and less when we get out to there, where it completely stops. So none of the cyans in the image is changing. None of the yellows. None of the greens are changing at all. And so this is nice because you can grab these and say it's blending into too much of the reds in my picture. So I need to limit it more to say fade out more abruptly. And maybe the blues in my image are changing a little bit. So I say, no, don't extend that far. But the distance between these little things is consistent when you first start. And it's up to you if you need to customize it. You can even grab these inner bars to say no, I want to narrow and isolate a much more limited range of colors. And have it fade out quicker on the ends. So now we're only isolating what's in there. Now when you're isolating colors, it's doing it based on hue. Hue means basic color. What that means is it's ignoring the brightness. It's saying that everything that contains this color regardless of how bright it is, is being isolated. It's also ignoring saturation which means how colorful it is. So it's saying everything that contains this color regardless of how strong of that color it is, if it's just a hint of it or there's a whole bunch of it, you know, it's almost black and white, but there's just a little hint. It's still being isolated because this isolates based on what's known as hue. So remember that these little sliders you saw at the bottom did not show up at all until I either grabbed the hand and clicked within my picture or I changed this pop-up menu. 'Cause that's what causes those little bars to show up. So let's see if we can find some things we might want to change. Here's the image. The client hates the red leaf. So somehow, I need to make the red leaf look, for the most part, exactly like all the rest of the leaves. 'Cause we can't re-shoot it, right. So let's try to do it. I'm gonna do hue and saturation. The little hand's automatically turned on 'cause I have that choice on the side menu. Remember it was called, what was it called? Auto-select targeted adjustment tool. That's what made the hand available. I click within the leaf. It does two things. It chooses the closest color from the menu above. And then it repositions this little thing here to more precisely isolate it. And now let's just see if that's good enough. Let's see, I might need to fine-tune the position of those or it might be good enough 'cause I don't see a lot of other red in the image. I do see it in the stems, coming up here. So we'll probably have to paint on a mask if we don't want those to change. But now, I'm gonna change the hue. I'll move this one direction. See if I can get what I want. No, move it the other direction. Oh there we go. Oh, check that out. That was pretty easy actually. I didn't have to do much to really fine-tune it . Most of the time, you do have to fine-tune it quite a bit. It looks a little over colorful. Like those leaves are just a little bit more colorful than the others. So I might bring that down a little bit until it looks like the rest. And I can see, do I need to brighten or darken at all. But if I turn off the eyeball at the bottom of this panel, you can see before and after. You notice that not only are those three kind of leaves that have red in them changing but you see the stems changing? Well, hue and saturation isolates things based on hue. Hue is the basic color and it can't do anything other than that. So if I need to isolate things even further, then I need to use something like a layer mask. Now you're adjustment layers automatically come with a layer mask attached. So in order to make it so it doesn't affect the stem that are there or the stalks or whatever they're called, I don't know. I don't have the terminology of this stuff. I'm gonna invert the mask. To invert a mask, usually you can choose image, adjustments, invert. Or I have to do it so often, I just use the keyboard shortcut, Command + I. Control + I in Windows. Watch my layers panel when I do that. Command + I, you see my mask turned black. Then I will grab my paintbrush tool and I'm only gonna paint where the leaves are that need to change and I'm gonna avoid painting where the parts are that I didn't want to have change. And I don't have to be overly precise in there. Only where the stems are do I need to be precise. So I can get over spray on the surrounding leaves because we already isolated reds and so it's okay if I'm painting out here on these green leaves. We weren't changing those in the first place. It's only where the areas are that still contain some red that I have to be careful. So now I'll turn off my adjustment layer. Turn it back on. Now I'm not sure if I have another image where I have to be more precise but let's just look at a few other examples. And then there is a way of being more precise. Here it might be that the greens and the browns within here should be more red. Do you see the green coming through here? There's green over here. I want it to look like the reds. So let's do a hue and saturation adjustment layer. Come over here and click on the green leaf. So that it isolate greens. Often times you'll find that the menu over here will not change to greens, it'll be called yellows because a lot of the times those things you think of as being green are really dark yellow when it comes to how Photoshop is thinking about them. Then I'm gonna come in here and change my hue. Now if you wanna know how hue actually works, let me show you. It's thinking about a color wheel. And when you move the hue slider, it's spinning around this color wheel. What that means is if you're starting with a green leaf, when you move the hue slider in one direction, you'll be moving this direction around the color wheel. So that means in one direction, you're gonna go to yellow next. Then you're gonna get to red. Then you're gonna get over here. And if you move the hue slider the opposite direction, you start out with a green object, you're gonna be heading this direction instead, around the color wheel. And if you were to take this color wheel and somehow straighten it out, so that you just like cut it right here where red is and then you just unbent it so it's a straight line instead of going around in a curve. Then, that's what you would have right here. Do you see red is on this end? Red is on that end. That means you can bend that into a circle and it'd be a color wheel. So you're just spinning around the color wheel. So what that means is it's kind of weird sometimes the way you need to think about this. If I want the greens to become red, what I want to do is look at the colors that are in this bar and find green. Then look at what direction and how far I'd need to move within the bar to get to red. So if this is where green is, I could move toward the left about that far to get to red. And that's what I'd have to do to this slider. The slider's always pointing to blue here, this cyanish blue here. So, this isn't gonna point to the color you're thinking of. So you just look here and you say I need to move that far to the left, so I do. And that should cause those areas to shift from their original color which was green over to red. I notice it's set to master which means it doesn't think I've clicked on anything yet. So let me click on something first. There, greens. Now let's do it. So somewhere over in this area is gonna be the reds. And good, in this case, it looks like I'm gonna have to be more precise 'cause it's not isolating the greens well enough. If you look on the right edge of my picture. I might zoom up over here so you can see it. You notice that not all the leaves are changing? I was hoping something like that would mess up. So there's a way of being much more precise about what we're doing. And let's figure out how it's done. Do you see these eyedroppers? They can be used. The eyedropper on the left. Watch what happens down here when I click with the eyedropper that's on the left. Ignore the change in the picture. Just look at what happens to that bar down at the bottom. When I clicked, did you just notice it moved over to the reds? This bar. Didn't it get centered on the reds? If I click on the green leaves over here on the right, it got centered on greens. If I were to find some other color in here. I don't know if I have too many other colors that, red and green, I have some orange or yellow in here. If I click on it, do you see how it just moved to the orangish yellows? So what that eye dropper does on the left side is it centers these little bars on whatever color I click on. So I'll center it on the greens. Then, let's see what the other two do. There's an eyedropper with a plus sign on it. So again watch these bars. And look at what happens when I click on like the red leaf. Remember I have the eyedropper with the plus sign on it. Here it goes, watch the bar at the bottom. Do you see how it just expanded? It expanded to also include the color I just clicked on. I'll choose undo. So, if I click on the surrounding colors here. It'll expand. So, sorry I got off of that one. I chose undo. Okay, here we go. With the plus sign, it'll expand to include more colors. I'm gonna grab the one with the minus sign on it. And if I use that and I click on things, watch those bars. Do you see them getting skinnier? Skinnier? Much skinnier? So by doing that, let's figure out really what they mean. This means center this stuff on whatever I click on. So that means concentrate on this specific color. This means, expand to also include these other colors that I might click on. It just expands the range that's being isolated. This means avoid this color. My making that middle bar skinnier. So all three of these are effecting only the middle bar. This gets it centered on a color. This expands the range to include other colors. This compresses the range to exclude the colors. Does that make some sense? From what you saw? So now let's figure out how to really be good at using that and how it can help us. I'll start over 'cause I messed with that adjustment layer enough. I just drag it to the trash. And let's see if we can isolate these greens over here. And do it with precision. I'll do my hue and saturation adjustment layer. We're gonna use a slightly different method. Here's what I'll do. I'm gonna choose any color from here. I actually don't care what color it is yet. Because in the end, we'll use the eyedropper on the left to get it to move to where I want. The only reason I need to choose a color here is those bars at the bottom don't show up at all unless I do. So I really don't care what name but I'll just choose reds. Then, before I click on my picture, I'm gonna take these sliders and slam them together. I just grab the end slider and pulled it into the others. I'll slammed them together. See 'em? Because wouldn't that isolate the narrowest range of colors possible by getting it really skinny? So we're gonna start off with the narrowest range. And I knew when I slammed them together they're gonna move. So that's why I didn't care what color I chose. 'Cause it's not gonna end up pointing at whatever color I chose. Once I slam them together, they'll move around. And now it's actually become precise. Once we have them showing up, getting them to show up was choosing the menu above. And we slammed them together to get an isolated range. Now let's use these eyedroppers. This one first. Let's click on what we want to change. And watch what happens to the little bars we were playing with. Aren't they gonna become centered on whatever color I click on? Yeah. Then, just to see what part of the image would change, I'm gonna make a radical change to the image. Usually, I either move the hue slider as far as it'll go to get a radical change or I take the saturation slider and bring it all the way down just so part of my image becomes black and white. Either one, the main thing you're trying to do is just see what part of the image is changing. And so can you see in here where some of the little leaves are getting red spots on them? Then, that's not changing all the green leaves. So that's when I switch to this. That means it'll expand the range of colors we're working on. And so what I do is I go over to my green leaves and I'll be very careful and I click only on the parts of the green that haven't changed yet. And when I do, if you watch those little sliders, they're gonna expand to include that area, too. And I see another little part of the green leaf, I'll click on it until it changes, too. And I'll do that until I think most of the really green areas are changing. And so let's see if there are other, I see, I don't know if I'd call that a green leaf or not. It's up to you as far as if you want it to change. But I think I got the leaves that are vividly green are shifting to purple right now. Then, I need to make sure the transition. Oh there's one more right there that's still green. There we go. But until the vividly green leaves are shifting, then we need it to fade out and that's where I'm gonna pull out these little side things to say blend in into the surroundings. But I'm only gonna pull them out a little bit. And if I pull them too much, I'll see the surrounding image changing in ways I don't want. But. So I'll just pull this out, the littlest bit like that. Pull this out the littlest bit. So that we don't have an abrupt transition. We have just a little bit of fade out into the surrounding. Now when I was adjusting this and I moved the hue sliders as far as it could go, that's just so I could visually see what part of the image changed. Then when I'm done, I can move that back to the middle if I want. You will see the original image. And now that I've isolated the green leaves, I can move these three sliders to change in whatever color I'd like. So I'll zoom out of my picture so I see it as a whole. And I'll say, well maybe I want them to look like either the orangish or the reddish leaves. Let's try to get them to look more like the reddish leaves. So I take my hue slider and I can either randomly move it around to find where I want to go. Or I can say, where is the color I'm starting with from this bar. It's green. And what direction and how far would I need to move to get to what I want. Red. So I can move it to the left that far. And when I do, I should start getting more of a reddish color. Can you see it right down in here? If I turn off the eyeball, green leaves. Red leaves. Green leaves, red leaves. And I can fine-tune that. Then I can adjust saturation if it's too colorful, I can bring it done. Tone it down, make it look more like the others. And if it's too bright or dark, I can brighten or darken them. And if it's not working on a wide enough range, I find there's a little hint of green still around it, I can come over here and say, fade out into the, these other colors. See there's more greenish stuff over here. Or the more yellowish stuff. I'm thinking I probably don't want it to go to far into the yellows. But over here, this is more greenish stuff. I can have it fade into that. So if you want to see what I've done, I'll turn off the eyeball. Before, do you see green on the right side? Small areas of green. After, you see the red. And you see the one right down the middle? By the barrels? It looks a little dark so I could possibly bring the lightness up. Or the saturation up. So I'll do this once more just because it's a little different way of thinking. And so it's not the easiest thing to necessarily remember the steps to. So I did a hue and saturation adjustment layer. And when I was in hue and saturation, I needed the little bars to show up in here. And the way you do that is you pick a color from here. I don't care what color because we're gonna move the bars around so it's not gonna stay on this color. Just pick anything. The only color I usually wouldn't pick would by cyans. Because look at where cyan is in that bottom bar. And if I choose cyan, look at what happens. It's going all the way around. Remember it's like a color wheel? And it's like wrapping around the two ends. It just makes it harder to deal with. So anything but cyan. Then, what I wanted to do was be precise so I took those bars and I just grabbed one of the ends and slammed them together. And now we're gonna use the three eyedroppers to do the work. So I'll use the eyedropper on the left and in this case I'll click on the red leaves. 'Cause I'll do a different change to the image. Click on the red leaves. That got the centered on that color. I'm gonna make a radical change to the image just to see what have I isolated within the picture. And if I can still see red leaves, I grab the eyedropper with the plus sign on it. And I click on anything that still looks red. Until all of the red leaves don't look red anymore. I'm leaving the orange and the yellow leaves. Anything that looks red. You see any red leaves? Maybe that might be considered red. Hmm, I'm gonna choose undo there 'cause it affected too much of the rest of the image. So I'll choose undo. And what I'll do instead in that part is I'll just make it fade out to more gently affect those. 'Cause that would be the oranges and things. So I'll say something maybe about that. Usually I have both sides out at least a little. 'Cause otherwise, you can have an abrupt change where it looks like you're using an xacto knife to cut something out instead of an edge you can't really notice. So I don't really see any red. I see orange and I see yellow. So now, I'm gonna move my hue slider back to the middle 'cause I was only having it moved so I could see what part of the image I was changing. And now I can judge the image. And let's say I wanted these to look more like these. More orangish and stuff. So I look for red in here. I see red in two spots. But I'll look at this red 'cause it's the closest to what I want. I see the orange there, too. And you see how to go from red to orange, you'd go to the right a small amount. Isn't that right? So I'm gonna move this slider to the right, a small amount. And it should make my red leaves start to go orange. But those red leaves might be a bit darker than the orange leaves that are in there. So I can do here to lightness and bring that up if I want. Lighten them up. Also, those red leaves right now might not look as colorful as the orange. So I could adjust their saturation to say to that they need to become more colorful or less, like that. So let's see what we've done. I'll turn off the eyeball. We'll look at the image as a whole. And do you see anything that use to be red is now orangish. Now if I wanted to also change the green leaves 'cause we're trying to make everything orange. I could either make a brand new hue and saturation adjustment layer that's on top of this one and do that. Or you can just choose a different color from here. You can adjust up to six colors at once in here, in one adjustment. So I could come over here to greens. And then just start the process over again. I wouldn't usually do it as a same adjustment because then we have one mask for it. And I would rather have the greens in one layers. The oranges in another layer. So I could mask the two separately. Or if the client asked me to make a change, I could turn off the eyeball on the green one and it goes away. It doesn't make both changes disappear. But you can change this menu to a different color and continue changing that second color. So that's hue and saturation. It's gotta a lot of power built into it. But if you try to learn it on your own, and you just wander in there, it seems to be pretty useless, just moving those sliders around. But we can come in and isolate things in amazing ways. And if you change too much of your image in the process, paint on the mask to further isolate areas. Because maybe there's a red car you're trying to change and there's also somebody with red shoes. You didn't want their shoes to change. So change all the reds. And then paint with black in the mask on the area you did not want to change. But when you move the hue slider, you're moving it around this thing which is how it's thinking. But see, remember, we had a different color leaf in there. So I wouldn't instantly go for the most precise thing where I slam those sliders together. I would first just try with the hand tool, clicking on what you want. And then moving the three sliders. It's only when that's not good enough when it didn't isolate things enough, that I would say, fine, I'm gonna have to do it the manual way. I'll slam the sliders together. I'll start using those little eyedroppers down there to fine-tune it. Yes, question. For me with color but I do a lot of paintings and sometimes at stores and somebody wants to change like say a red, to more like a brown. I don't know how you find browns on this. Uh browns, they are probably either yellows or oranges that are not that colorful. Okay. And so you might need to do that. And if it's a door where there's other things in the picture that are the same color, you can just make a selection, meaning use the quick selection tool or any other selection tool to isolate it. You don't have to use those little bars at the bottom to isolate, you can just make a selection. And then go to hue and saturation and change it. Just make sure that the area that you're changing is a single color. It's a red door. You've selected everything that's red. It's not a red door with a blue sign on it. If it is, you'll have to use those bars at the bottom to isolate the red from the blue, that kind of that. So. Yes so if I have an image like this one. I'm often gonna be fine-tuning it using hue and saturation a lot. Or right here in camera raw, you're gonna find a similar choice. There is a choice right here called HSL. H-S-L. And this will allow me to change the hue, the saturation and the luminesce of various areas of my picture. It just doesn't give me as much control. I can't, I don't have those little bars to mess with. This is more like just using that hand tool that was there. The one thing to know about if you're in camera raw is there is a icon up here that you need to use. This guy, that's called the targeted adjustment tool, that's the accruement to that little hand we had. And in here, then I'd choose, what would I like to change. The hue, the saturation or the luminesce and just make that tab active. And now when I go in my image, I can click on the reds and drag left to right. And it will make the reds less colorful or more colorful. I could do down here to the greens and make them more colorful or less. Or I could go over here to hue. Hue means basic color. And I can say I want the blues to be different so I click on the blues. And I say I want more purple. And so, it's the same concept as far as hue, saturation and luminesce. It's just implemented in a different way. And in this case, all you have is you choose what would you like to change. Hue, saturation or luminesce. And when you move your mouse on top of the image, you need to have this thing active. And if you do, what it's gonna do is it's gonna figure out what color that area use to be and it's gonna grab the proper slider to move. So if you look at the right side of my screen, it thinks that this bird cage that's here is yellowish orange. So it's moving both yellows and oranges there. Just slightly different implementation of a similar concept. So anytime you see HSL, hopefully you know that hue means basic color. Saturation means how colorful things are. And luminesce means how bright or dark. So if I want everything that's red in the image to be a little darker. I can do so here. But when something like this in camera raw isn't enough, I can't isolate things precisely enough is when I need to open it in Photoshop. And what gives me the most control is the hue and saturation adjustment layer we just talked about. And so you might find HSL sliders in other parts of Photoshop. Great, use them. Whenever that particular tool doesn't give you enough control, head to hue and saturation. That gives you the most control. So we go there when we need it. So often times, I have images I just need to fine-tune. In this case, the yellows in the image, I might need to fine-tune to make them stand out from the greens. That type of thing. But the problem with this is if I go to hue and saturation and all I use is that little hand, yellows and greens are really similar to each other. And if you look at this bar down at the bottom, look at where yellow is and look at where green is. They're right next to each other. And so if all I do is click on the leaves here to isolate it, look at how much the change is spreading over into the greens. You see that? And so therefore, I can just click on my image. And if I drag, it will choose, change the saturation. But you see it's not just the flowers? It's also the background changing. So just you know, a little trick, if you hold down the command key which is Control + Windows. Then when you click on your image and you drag, you're not gonna change saturation. You're gonna change the hue instead. But you wouldn't know that unless you happen to hold down the command key. So since the yellows were so similar to the greens, and so I tried to isolate the yellows and I noticed the greens shifting, that's when I say let's do it the precise way. I grab those sliders at the bottom and I slam them all together to say, get a narrow narrow range. Then it's the left eyedropper to start with. I click on the yellow flowers. Make a radical change to one of the slider. Just so you can see what shifts. In this case, let's make it black and white. So I can see black and white flowers. I grab the eyedropper with the plus sign and if there's any part of the flowers, the yellow parts, that don't look black and white, I click on them. Until the vast majority of the flower looks black and white. Now out here, it looks kind of greenish. I can try but I don't know if I can get that. Yeah, okay. Pretty much the tops of the flowers. These are canola, I think. They're all black and white now which means they've been isolated from their surroundings. Then most of the time, I need these to spread out just the tiniest bit. Just so the transition doesn't look abrupt. 'Cause it can look weird sometimes. And so I'm just gonna pull this out. I think I can safely pull it out this direction because in the rest of the image, do you see any orange? Do you see any red? No, so this is probably not critical. I can pull it out quite a distance before it would affect anything else. But on this side, I have to be very careful to not pull it too far. Because these are all my greens. So I probably zoom up on this. And see what it looks like when I pull this out. And I see the background changing pretty quick. So I'm just gonna pull it out the tiniest bit. Then, I only brought saturation all the way down so I could tell what I've isolated. And I will now bring it back up. And now I have complete control over those flowers. I want a different color flower, fine. What color would you like? All right. And then the flowers need to be more colorful or less. The flowers need to be brighter or darker. All right. But what if, they need to match the colors in a different photo? Wouldn't that be hard? It doesn't have to be. Have we figured out how? Let's go open up a different picture. Ah let's say I want the flowers to be the same color as uh, something in here. Let's pick a flower. Maybe you want the purple one's. 'Cause that looks like a unique color. We have to decide do we want the brighter or the darker, you know. Kind of what should we shoot for? 'Cause they do vary based on brightness. Why don't we go for the color right in there? Well here's how we can do it. There is a way to get Photoshop to precisely measure the color of something. And describe it using numbers. And then we can just grab a sheet of paper and write down those numbers. And if so, we've written down the color. And if anybody here has a pen 'cause I don't, I'd like you to help me out if you don't mind. Here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna go to the window menu and I'm gonna choose info. The info palette, you see a bunch of numbers. Those numbers in general, don't mean anything to you. But they mean everything to Photoshop. Because they are an exact description of the color underneath your mouse. There are many different ways of describing colors. You can describe them as being made out of red, green and blue. That usually means you're talking about light. They can be made out of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. That's what you do if you talk about ink. Or if you click on this little tiny eyedropper, you can change to different ways of describing color. I'm looking for a way of describing color that is the most similar to the sliders I have available for adjusting my color. So when we're in the adjustment we were just using, what letters would you describe the slider. Isn't it HSL? I wish that choice was here. But do you see one that's anywhere close to it? HSB. HSB stands for hue, saturation and brightness. That's pretty darn close to hue, saturation and lightness, isn't it? So, I think it'll be good enough. If this was HSL, it'd be perfect because that would mean moving one slider within the adjustment we have, would only affect one number that's listed here. And moving saturation would only affect saturation. But the fact that there' not exactly the same means that that won't be the case. It'll be just a little bit more difficult. So I'm gonna set it to HSB and I did that by clicking on this little eyedropper right here and that's where you get the list of choices. And then I'm gonna move my mouse on top of the color that I want to try to match which I have right now. And then, what I'd like you to do is whoever's got a pen is write down the numbers in the info palette right now. If they're too small for you to see, hue is 314. Saturation is 73. And brightness is 75. In essence, you just wrote down this color. Even though the numbers don't mean anything to you. To Photoshop, that's a precise description of the color. If you want to see what I'm talking about. I can click on my foreground color. You know, like, where you choose a color to paint with. And you see all the numbers on the right? Different ways you can type stuff in. What was the hue number? (faint dialogue from audience) 314, what was saturation? (faint dialogue from audience) 73 and what was the other? (faint dialogue from audience) 75, okay. That was the color right there that my mouse was on top of. If you compare that with what's right here. It's the same color. I might not want that color. I might want something a little darker or something else. If so, I should get on it. 'Cause that looks more pink. And that's where the sun was coming through. It's a little more pink. We could go for maybe this or how about over here? That looks more purpley. Let's write that one down. Write down this as an alternative. 311. 64. 46, all right. That's another color Now, let's go to our image. And see if we can get that change to happen. When you revisit an adjustment you've already made with hue and saturation, this will come up set to master meaning you'd work on everything in the picture if you move these sliders. And you'll have to remember what color you were working on when you made your change. All it would do is if you look down here, you don't see little bars, is switch between these until you see the bars for what you're working on. That's the ones that look custom, doesn't it? They line up with the change I'm making. So that's how I go back if I'm gonna re-edit an adjustment. Now let's see how can we get these to end up with the exact same color. Well I'm gonna pull out the info panel here. If you just go to the window menu and choose info, it'll show up and you can click on its name and move it around. And when I'm moving these sliders over here to change the color, I'm gonna be looking at those numbers. And when I look at those numbers, if you look at them, can you see there's two sets of numbers? You see that? The numbers on the left is what you started with before you made this adjustment. The numbers on the right is what you're ending up with after the adjustment. So I'm looking at the numbers on the right. Those are the after numbers. So let's see. I have my hue currently selected. Do you see this number is highlighted right here? That means if I use the arrow keys on my keyboard, that's the number I'm changing. I'll move my mouse on top of the image here. And what was the general hue that I wanted? (faint dialogue from audience) 311, okay. I'm gonna move this one direction. And the other direction and see if I can get to 311. 230, no, going all the way that way, I can get to two something so I have to go the other way. 311. I can get to 310 or 312. If you're within about three in the numbers, you're close enough, you're in the ballpark. So you see that the general color of the flowers is getting somewhat close? But then, we have saturation and we have brightness and so usually the next thing I adjust is the brightness. What brightness do I want? (faint dialogue from audience) 46, right now I'm at 52. Do you see that number in there, 52? So I'm gonna use the up and down arrow keys once I've clicked on lightness there. And I wanted say it again? (faint dialogue from audience) 46, okay. 47, 46, there we are. Okay, I've got the same brightness. Then, I'm gonna move up to saturation. And you can click on it or I'm hitting the tab key. Tab cycles between the little fields. What did I want for saturation? (faint dialogue from audience) 64. So we're at 96 right now. That means I need to go down. And. 64. And now I'd have to review the numbers. Because these letters in my info palette don't perfectly match the sliders I'm using. We have HSB instead of HSL. It's not precise. So review the numbers again. What was the hue we wanted. (faint dialogue from audience) Okay, we got that. What's the brightness? (faint dialogue from audience) Okay, so that's off just a little bit. 46. And what was the saturation? (faint dialogue from audience) We're at 64. Okay so now, the numbers are within three of being dead on, right? So now, the colors of these flowers, don't they look similar to the colors of the flowers in the other photo? Now, because I chose from an area that was a certain brightness in the other image, I might not have the exact brightness here. 'Cause I might have been in a shadow area in the other photo. In here, when I had my mouse on this image, I was on a brighter area. So I'll probably want to fine-tune the lightness in here. And fine-tune the saturation. But I can get it so it's visually pretty darn close by using those numbers to help me. So we're gonna do that again on different images using something other than hue and saturation though. 'Cause we need to explore other adjustment choices. I just wanted to show you, you can do this. You can do it with precision. And it just takes practice. Practice is what you need. That's why with the class, if you purchase it, you can practice images like this one. And if you practice on this image and practice on the other practice images and do your homework that come with the class, by the time you've done that, you can start feeling comfortable with it. So when you hit your own image that needs it, it's not like it's your first time. And so. That's what we're doing. So, so far the kind of adjustment we used was thinking about a color wheel. And the hue slider went all the way around the color wheel like that. And now we're gonna use a different kind of adjustment. It's still gonna think about a color wheel. But instead of rotating around it when we make color changes, we're gonna move across it. So, with the adjustment we used thus far, let's say that we have flowers were both red and yellow. And we isolated both, red and yellow, at the same time. In here, if we were to shift it, it would spin it around the color wheel and it might be that what use to be yellow would spin all the way around here and become blue. If that happened, the reds would spin the same direction, the same amount and they'd end up over here by cyan. Well now instead, we're gonna say, instead of spinning around this, let's go across it. Let's push things towards yellow. Let's push things towards red. Let's push things towards blue and so on. So the things we've done thus far are mainly when we want to do what I would call color manipulation. I want a red car to be a green car. I want a yellow car to be a purple car. You're blatantly manipulating things. What we're gonna do now is more color correction. Or color refinement. Or color matching. Like I have two of the same shirt, shot by two different photographers in two different studios. They're the exact same shirt. But the colors are off. I want them to match. I don't want to make the blue shirt a red shirt. I just need it to shift a bit so that's it's more similar to what it was shot in a different environment or something like that. But in the process, we're not gonna be going around this circle. We're gonna be going across it. Just pushing things towards various colors. So first let's just look at conceptually and with conceptually, it's not gonna matter as much exactly what picture we're working on. We're gonna be working with sliders or other tools that are not called hue, saturation and lightness. Instead, they're gonna be called red, green and blue. The reason why they're gonna be called red, green and blue is if you were to pop your eyeball out and open it up. (popping) And look at what's inside of it. It has the cones with the sensors in it that are only sensitive to three colors of light. Those three colors of light are red, green and blue. Do you remember in the olden days back when people would have a projection TV. And it would have to be this massive thing where you could look at the front of it and it looked like this. Do you remember those? Well look at what colors they used. Do you see red, green and blue? What these actually were, were black and white projectors. Three of them, side by side. And they just had a color filter on the front. So this black and white projector setting this up is going right through a red filter. The middle one's going through a green filter. The other one's going through a blue filter. And they just happen to be focused all in the same spot. And it was creating the color TV you saw using three black and white projectors that had color filters in front of them, okay. It's kind of weird but that's how it worked. If you were to get your face really close to your computer screen right now. I mean really close where it's like a millimeter away, and you can still focus, you'd see that your computer screen is actually made out of little dots of red, green and blue. In everything you've ever seen on your computer screen was made out of only red, green and blue. It's the same with your TV at home and all that. If you ever get a magnifying glass, I mean like a microscope kind. Put it up to your TV. You'll see red, green and blue dots. And all it's doing is varying how bright they are. Photoshop does the same thing. You might not be aware of it but everything you see on your computer screen and on TV is made out of red, green and blue. And that's why, when you come up here to mode, it says, you're in RGB mode. That stands for red, green, blue. Anytime you make your picture out of light, where you capture it using light, it's red, green and blue you use. And it's all due to how your eye works. Inside your eye, there's the cones for sensors for only those three colors, okay. So, here you see this full color image. I can take this thing and just pull it apart into red, green and blue. Ignore the pink guides. I can take this little color wheel and it's made out of red, green and blue. That's all you need for any picture you've ever had. If I put these back together, you'll see the full color again. It's just doing all that behind the scenes so most people have no clue it's happening. We're it's actually happening is a part of Photoshop that most people are afraid of. That part of Photoshop is called channels. And that's where it shows you what you're picture is actually made out of, red, green and blue. We won't need to be looking at those. But, the reason why we're gonna have sliders to play with that are called red, green, and blue, is because that's how your eyes are set up, it's how your screen is set up, how your TV is set up. If you were to open your digital camera and tear apart the sensor, it's got sensors for red, green, and blue in it. And because of that, we're gonna have that as a choice. So we need to learn about red, green, and blue a little bit. There are only a couple of concepts that would be useful to remember. So far, the first concept is your picture is made out of red, green and blue. You don't have to know more than that as far as what's going on behind the scenes. But now, let's learn a few things about red, green and blue. Let's find out what a balanced amount of red, green and blue looks like. If we use the exact same amount of red, as we do green, as we do blue. So here, do you see that this is fully red. That's fully green. That's fully blue. This is 50% red, 50% gree, 50% blue. I'm gonna move these so they overlap. Okay. So equal amounts of red, green and blue equals gray. That's a concept you should store in your head. Because it is amazingly useful. Equal amounts of red, green and blue make gray. All right. Now here, just so you know, usually this would be in your channels panel and I'd have to be playing in there to do that. In this case, the only way I was able to get this to work where these are three separate layers that I could pull apart like that, is I have in my layers panel a black background. I have these little parts of blue, green and red but I needed to get these to act like they're using light to combine each other. Well do you remember, there are blending modes and one of them acts like light? These are set to screen mode so they act like light. You don't have to know that or remember it. But just so you know, this is a different kind of document that usual in that these layers are set up in screen mode. So they interact with each other as if we're using light to do those. But so far, what I'd store in my head is all my images are RGB. Balanced RGB equals gray. Or equals no color. Then, let's look at one other concept. And that is if we look at these numbers 'cause we're gonna have to deal with RGB numbers. I want to figure out what saturated colors look like verus unsaturated ones. So first I'll chose something that has no color what so ever. White has no color. You can have white in a black and white picture, right? And look at the RGB numbers. You noticed they're balanced? 'Cause balanced means no color. Then, I'm gonna go for the most saturated color I can possibly get which is always up here in the corner. And I'm gonna cycle through all of the most saturated colors you can make which are all right here. What I'd like you to do is look down here and see if there's any sort of formula you can come up with that tells you how to make a saturated color. And don't worry, it will be relatively easy but it might take you a few minutes to figure it out. So just watch those numbers as I scroll through here. And see if there's anything at all consistent about the RGB numbers. Is there a formula there? Go back through them again. I don't know if you're picking up on the formula yet. One number is always, 255, okay that's one part of it. There's one other part. One number is always zero, do you notice that? Right, it doesn't mean you have to truly understand it or anything but what that tells me is those numbers can range from zero to and here's the knowledge that would be great to know. When red, green and blue are balanced, we have no color. We have a shade of gray. As they become out of balanced, we have color. The further out of balance they get, the more saturated it is. And if you max out where one goes as high as it can possibly go which is and one goes as low as it can possibly go, which is zero, you've got the most saturated color there is. So what did I just learn? Balanced means no color. And out of balance means color. How out of balance means how saturated. Okay? If you could remember that, you don't have to. But if you could, you'd know more about color in Photoshop that 98% of everybody using it including the people who do color correction all day, all right. Then couple that with the one thing we learned in the previous exercise which is the info palette is a precise description of the color under your mouse. If you write down the numbers, you wrote down the color right? And you want to get the info palette numbers to match the kind of adjustment you're using. So we're about to use adjustments called RGB one's. So in the info panel, if we happen to use it, what do you think we're gonna have it set to? RGB. All right, we haven't learned anything yet (laughing) in an image, we haven't played with an image. Now let's start using that knowledge. When I go to the image menu and choose adjustments or I create an adjustment layer, you're gonna find that we have many different adjustments in here that use the concept of red, green and blue, all right. And if you move a slider towards red, your image will become more red. If you move it towards green, your image will become more green. And if you move it towards blue, your image will become more blue. 'Cause all we're saying is use more red light, use more green light, use more blue light. Then, let me see if I can locate a particular image. Well here, we can find out. Now let's find out the opposite. 'Cause every single color has an opposite. I want to see what the lack of blue looks like. If we have absolutely no blue what so ever, but we have everything else. So if I put green and red together, what do I get? Yellow. Yellow means the opposite of blue. It means the lack of blue. If we absorb all blues so there's just none in the image what so ever but we have as much of everything else as we can have, that's what we see. That's why you have yellow ink in your ink jet printer. When we print yellow ink, it means don't let any blue bounce off this paper. Let's find out the opposite of red. What does it look like when we have absolutely no red what so ever? This color, cyan. When you print cyan in ink on a sheet of paper, its sole job is to absorb red light falling on the paper. It's actually the opposite of red. Then, what do we have left? We found the opposite of blue, didn't we? We found the opposite of red. We need the opposite of green then. The opposite of green would be putting these two together. Magenta. Why do you think you've got magenta ink in your printer? Because its sole job in life is to absorb green light. So when we print, we use the opposite of red, green and blue. I don't expect you to remember those. But here's an easy way to do so. If you set up the info palette. So one side says RGB and the other side says CMYK, the opposites are directly across from each other. All right. So if this number is ever really really high, I'll guarantee you the number on the right will be really really low. Because it's like a sea saw or a teeter totter. It's saying if there's light in this hand and I want as much red light as I can possibly get, I need very little of the color of ink that would absorb it which is the color directly across. And so it goes kind of like this. Why you want to know that? Because now you can know, why when you choose something like color balance, it has the opposite color on the other side. Do you see red? There's the opposite, cyan. You see green? There's the opposite. You see blue. There's the opposite. These are all opposites. And it's really good to know them because here if I move it towards the right, we make the image more red. We move toward the left, we make it more cyan. That's great. But when we get into the more powerful adjustments, it doesn't tell us the opposites. When we get into something like levels. You see RGB? I go to red and I move this slider. It makes the image more red. But if I move it the other way, it doesn't tell me what's the opposite color. So I don't know what to expect when I move it the other way. Well if you knew the opposite color, you'd know what to expect. So all that is telling me is have the info palette open on occasion. And if you're ever using an adjustment that has the choices of red, green and blue and it doesn't tell you the opposite within it, open this up an it'll tell you the opposite, directly across from each other. All right, now how does color correction fit into all this and how does this just help me with all sorts of different images? Well, let's find out. I'm gonna use the most powerful adjustment in all of Photoshop. Curves. In curves, there are three eyedroppers on the left. You see them? One's full of black. One's full of white. One's full of gray. All three of those eyedroppers, all they do is when you move them on top of your picture they look at the numbers in the info panel and say, hey, are these out of balance or are they perfectly balanced? If they're not perfectly balanced, it's going to balance them. Balanced red, green and blue makes gray, doesn't it? Balanced red, green and blue makes gray. So what I want to do is look at my picture for something that should be gray. So in this picture, can we see anything that should be a shade of gray? I don't care how bright it is. So white's a shade of gray. Black's a shade of gray. Anything that can be on a gray scale or a black and white picture. So do you see the handicap painted on the surface. Wouldn't that be white paint? That's a shade of gray, isn't it? Are they clouds? Might be a shade of gray. There's a sign that's sitting here on the building that's probably painted white. There's a sign there, painted white. This metal that's in here. Possibly because what color is like a brushed aluminum or something? It's somewhat of a gray. So I'm gonna move my mouse on top of the picture and click on one of those areas and see what happens. What the heck just happened? It just measured what color was contaminating this picture. What color there was an excess of by looking at an area that shouldn't contain color and just seeing what's in there. So if you want to see what happened. I moved my mouse on top of something I thought should be gray. And when I did, Photoshop looked in the info panel. Do you see the numbers for red, green and blue? Do you see they're out of balanced which means there's color in there? Do you see which numbers is highest? There's a lot of red in there, isn't there? So that number's real high. When I click, watch the numbers. They got closer to being equal. If I didn't move my mouse at all right now, they would have become perfectly equal. But I moved my mouse when I clicked it so I'm not longer exactly on top of the part I was when I clicked. But it just looked at an area that shouldn't contain color. It clicked and it suddenly adjusted the image to make it balanced. And so we can use those. And it said, that there was an excess of red. Remember the red number was really high in my info palette. So it lowered it. And it thought there wasn't enough blue so it brought it up. But it did it for me. So there we have three eyedroppers. This one makes things really dark. This one makes things really bright. And this one doesn't change the brightness. So, you can use these eyedroppers if you'd like. You use the dark one and you find the darkest part of the picture and click on it. Because the dark test part of the picture is usually where's it's so dark that color can't show up. It's just so dark, it couldn't be that dark if you had color. And if I had guessed in this case, I'm guessing over here, I'll click. Did that improve the picture? You grab the white eyedropper and you find the brightest part of the picture because in order to be really really bright, you usually can't have any color showing up. And you click there. Did that improve the picture? Then you grab the middle eyedropper and you experiment. You look at areas that might be a shade of gray. You're not certain but they might be. Like this white sign is a shade of gray. So you click on it. The metal, click on it. This sign, if I get away from the blue and green text on it. And see which one gives you the best look. All right. And what we're trying to do is figure out what do we have too much of? By looking at areas that shouldn't contain any color. And the areas that shouldn't contain color are the really brightest and really darkest areas. Because in order to have color, you can't be overly bright. If you look at things that are in color. Like for instance, these flowers. Look at the brightest part of a red flower. The absolute brightest part. Do you see any red in it? Look at the little highlight on here. Is there red in there? Maybe the tiniest bit but in general, no. Look at the brightest part down here of the greens that are holding up this. Wherever you get to the brightest, in order to be that bright, you can't have color showing up. And if you look at the darkest part of the image, there shouldn't be color in it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be all that dark. And so, we can adjust the brightest, darkest areas with those little eyedroppers. Just so you know, those same eyedroppers are found within levels as well. They do the exact same thing. Remember when we had a picture of some canola, this one. We somehow made the color of this match a color in a different picture. But the way we did it was with what I could call color manipulation. By manipulation, I mean the blatant change we were looking to make like making a red car a green one or something. Now I want to do a similar kind of color matching but one where it's not so much manipulation. It's just shifting a bit. It's like, I have a picture of a person in two different photos. In one photo, their face looks a little red. And in the other photo, it looks normal. And I want that red face to look like the normal one. What I'm going to do in this case is see if I can find an example composite to show with you. These are not images I can share with you. I just don't have the licensing rights to give them away. So I'm sorry you can't have these to practice on. But this is a composite that was made. I own that bus that's sitting back there. And here's a guy in a little rocket sled made out of camera gear. You see, those are lenses at the bottom? Those are lenses shooting flames out the back. This is a hand grip for a camera. You're looking at the bottom of the camera right here, stuff. He's hold a cable release, yeah. But this was all put together and let's just tear it apart a a little bit and show you how when you put together images that were made from separate source material that sometimes you need to match the colors between things in order to get it to work. So here's the guy isolated, just his sled. And that guy was originally sitting in this chair. That's the photo we started with. Well we turned him into this. Now in order to turn him into that, we needed to do something to get his legs bent up like that, right? So let's concentrate on his legs. His legs came from this photo, yeah. Now in Photoshop, we can flip a picture horizontally and so there's a choice. It's just edit, transform, flip horizontal. It does that. So she can do (playful banter). We flipped it. Now we could use the quick selection tool to select her leg and add a layer mask. We did layer masks before, didn't we? So we can isolate just her leg. Does that make sense? We can take that leg and drag it on top of the other picture and just plop it on top of him. But it doesn't look right. Because it's not the right color, right? We need it to look like that. And so I want to show you how to get that color change to happen so that his leg, if you look at this part of his this part of his pants, I want it to match. See there, it's the right color. So when we put him back in there, we can have him have those legs. But the, do you see his arms? Like that? That's not his arm, the end one. This one is. But that one isn't. And that's not his sleeve. That's somebody else's sleeve. But I need to make it match in color even though they came from different photographs. You wanna see how you can do that kind of stuff. All right. It's a very similar concept to what we did with the flowers. The yellow flowers making them look purple. It's just we're using a different kind of adjustment. Instead of using one that's called HSL. We're using one that has choices for red, green, blue. So let's figure it out. First the info palette. Down here, this takes up too much space. I'm gonna make this smaller just so it doesn't cover up more of my image. If you go to the upper right corner, you can choose panel options. And just turn off all this stuff at the bottom. See how short that got? That's just so it doesn't cover up my picture. It's not essential. When you're working on a screen as small as mine, I'd do that. If I have a big screen like I do at home, then that's not critical. But I went to the side menu and chose panel options. All right, so in here. Let's see, we've done a little bit of work ahead of time. And let's see what we have to start with. Here, I have let's see there's my guy. I have a layer that contains her. And it's got a layer mask that I pre-made. And we're just gonna get those two colors to match. Then, if we have time afterwards, which I kind of doubt we will but we will have this arm and do you see the two colors of green on the arms? They don't match. We can use the exact same technique after we mask it to get that far arm to look right. Then we got a hand out of a completely different photo. And we could mask it so we only have that and somehow we'll make those two match. Finally, I'd put a cuff on that sleeve. 'Cause the one that was there was somewhat cut and we would have the whole thing and all we need is the colors to match. But it's just layer mask and using selection tools and then you use free transform to scale and rotate to get it in there. So does it make sense how we kind of got here based on other sessions? So I'll turn off some of these layers and get down to just the pants 'cause that's where I think we'll have time to work. Now when I did the previous image, it was a little bit of a pain to do because when I was using the info panel, you guys had to write down numbers for me 'cause I didn't have a pen. And when we worked on the image that I was adjusting I had to keep my mouse on top of the flower the whole time and I was using the arrow keys to change numbers to get it to work because I couldn't move my mouse away. Otherwise, the numbers in the info panel wouldn't be thinking about the flower. Well, if you come over here. There's a tool called the color sampler tool. It's underneath the little eyedropper. And check out what it does. I'm gonna come in here and add a color sampler right here. Click, you see that little cross hair? And then I'm gonna add a color sampler right there. Click. They're numbered, it says one and two. I got to that by coming over here. In my tool panel. And under the eyedropper is a color sampler. That's what I was using. When I clicked on the image twice like that, look at what it did in the info panel. These read outs down here weren't there before. They're gonna stay there. I don't have to keep my mouse on the shorts or the pants to get the numbers like I did. I could have used this on those flowers. Would have been much easier if I did. I could just click right on the yellow of the flower and those numbers would stay right there. So now all I need to remember is that I need to change the number one read out, 'cause that's the pants to match the number two read out. If the numbers end up matching in the info panel, the colors will end up matching. So I need number one to look like number two. I make sure the layer I want to work on is active. And I'm gonna do a curve's adjustment layer. And I need number one to look like number two. Curve adjustment layers. We're gonna do it where you don't need to know much about curves. The only thing you need is to have little hand tool turned on. And move your mouse on top of the area you want to change. So do you see where I am right now, the mouse? I got the little hand tool turned on in curves. I'm moving my mouse right there, the area I want to change. Now you've got to hold down two keys on your keyboard. So this is where you have to like write stuff down and have a Postit note to remind you until you've done this 10 times and then you'll remember. The two keys are shift and command. And just click. If you hold down shift and command, that will be shift and control in windows, when you click, what it just did is it looked in the info panel. And it measured the numbers for that area. And it wrote it down for me. If I want to see what they are, I can just come up here and switch this to red. And you'll find there's a dot sitting there on red. And right down here is the number it wrote down. You don't have to know what that means or understand what it did but it just measured how much red was in the picture. If I go to green, they'll be a dot on the curve and down here will be the amount of green it measured. Go down here to blue. They'll be a dot and here's the amount of blue that it measured. Do you see these numbers down here? They're called input and output. I hate those names. They should be called before and after. 'Cause that's what they mean. So if these mean before and after, this is the amount of red it measured from the picture. And I need to type in right here, the amount I'd like to have. Well the amount I'd like to have is right here. We've got a little marker on it. It's called marker number two. So all I need to do is go over here in my info panel. Do you see the number 176? I'm gonna type it in. 1-7-6. Then I switch this menu to green 'cause we have to change all three settings. I select the number for output. And I'm trying to match number two for green. I've got 142. 1-4-2. Then I need blue so I go to blue. And what do I got for blue on number two? 114 so I type 114. Now, I might not have clicked on the exact area but let's see if we're getting close. These numbers in here. They make my head just gloss over 'cause I don't care about the numbers. I'm just like, I don't know what those numbers mean. But to Photoshop, they describe a color. So number one is the pants. This is what we started with. It's on the left. This is what we're ending up with due to this adjustment. And I'm just gonna look straight over here to compare it. Right now, these are close to matching. They're not exact but they're close. If I want them to match exactly, they don't have to but they should be close. Right now I'm working on blue. I can use the up and down arrow keys. Watch this number. It matches what's over there now. Let's go over here to green. And right now it needs to be a little bit lower. So I'll use the down arrow key. Now it matches. Let's go to red. It needs to be 176. Okay, do you see that these and these numbers match? That means that those the color the pants are when we're done match the color of his shorts were when we started. Now, let's see what's happening. I'll turn off the eyeball. Before. After. The problem is, it's affecting the entire picture. I want it to only affect the pants and you can do that by turning on this. Do you remember on our session about layers? We had a picture of some icebergs that were black and white. Sitting right on top of some text. And we wanted the icebergs to only show up inside the text? And we ended up doing something where when we were done there's a down pointing arrow that was next to that picture of iceberg. And when that showed up, it made it so that the icebergs only showed up inside the text. I don't know if you recall that or not. But it was in our session about layers. This turns on the exact same feature. So that means it's gonna make it so this adjustment layer only shows up or only affects the layer that's directly below. So watch what happens when I click it. So now if I turn this off and on, look at what's happening to the pants. Because now the adjustment only affects one layer. The layer directly below. And if you were to look in the layers panel, you'd see that same arrow we talked about before. It means this only affects that. Alright. So that process will feel very uncomfortable the first eight times you do it. The first time, you'll be absolutely clueless. You'll just try to follow it word for word in the handbook kind of thing. The second time, you'll be, okay, I think I remember that one part and stuff. But once you've gone through it about eight times, it will actually not be very difficult. It's not difficult for me to do what so ever and it hasn't been difficult for me to do for about 20 years. It use to be that I had to use the Postit note though because we didn't have that feature called the color sampler. And it just is gonna take you practice. So we can try it again if you'd like so you can see the process. Let's make this match that. What did we do? We used the color sampler tool. We clicked on two areas. The thing we wanted to change. And the thing we wanted to match, right. Then we did a curve's adjustment layer. And in curves, we moved our mouse on top of the thing we wanted to change. Ideally, you get it exactly on top of that cross hair thing. And if you press caps lock, you might be able to, oh mine's not working. Caps lock will often give you a cross hair. And if so, you can see when it matches. Mines not doing it right now. But I'm gonna click in there. But I need to hold down two keys on my keyboard. Shift and command. Click. What happens is if you just click, it only thinks about brightness. And if you hold shift and command, it thinks about all three colors of red, green and blue. That's what that modifier does. And that's what caused these little dots to appear on my curve. And so I switched to red and I just select output. And I type in the output number from this. This is number, what does it save? Four, you see number four? So down here, I'm looking at number four. I see 132 so that's what I type in. Then I go to to green. And I look over here for number four, green, 141. Then I come over here and choose blue. And I see for number four, 110. And then, I can compare them by looking across. I'm looking at the after number. For the area I'm changing which is number three and the before number for the other. So it's just right across here. And do you see they're almost pretty darn close. They're just the littlest bit off so that's when I use up and down arrow keys. I'm working on blue right now. So I see 107, I need 110. There, I got it. Switch over here to green. I see 137, I need 141. There, got it. Go to red, 131. I need 132, got it. They perfectly match. Then, I click on that icon with the down pointing arrow which means only work one layer. You can't turn that on first unfortunately. If you do, the numbers in the info pallette only think about that one layer. And I need it to be able to read numbers off of the other. So I need to click it at the end. And you'll find that the brightness won't always be right because I might have chosen a dark area on one and a light area on the other. Like a shadowy area of one and a lighter are of the other. So you will often need to go up to RGB here. Click and adjust the brightness. You can also fine-tune things. There, I'm getting the brightness a little closer. You can also fine-tune the individual colors if you need to. If you find it just looks a little bit too red or something, just move this up or down a little bit to fine-tune it. And experiment. But if you do that over and over again, that looks kind of extreme. His hand being cut off there. But then you can get all these things to match up. The process is identical. When you're done, if you go back to the color sampler, there is a button called clear all. And that will get rid of those little marks on your image. And if you don't like those marks, you can use a Postit note that you write numbers down on. You can write your original numbers. 'Cause sometimes people get confused with the before and after numbers. There's just so many numbers showing up. But if you try this, about eight times, it won't feel so weird and foreign to you. Because all we're really doing is clicking in one spot and typing in the output numbers. That's what we're doing. And we could just move our mouse over there. Write down the numbers on a sheet of paper. We're gonna go click our picture we want to change it. And we're just typing in those numbers for our output. That's the process. It just feels so technical when you have to look at the info panel and look at the curve that looks all funky and all that so you need to practice and that's why when you buy the class, you get practice images and you get homework. Your homework will be a project similar to this one. So you'll have to go through it after you've done it eight, 10, 12 times, it'll be no problem. I can do this in my sleep. You won't be able to do that for a while. You just need to practice. So what you should know from this is balanced amount of red, green and blue makes gray. That's the basis of color correction. The basis of color correction is if the colors don't look right, look for something that should be gray, because if we move our mouse on top of it, and they're not balanced, then something's messed up there, and we can find out how messed up it is by just looking at how far off those numbers are. If we use the eye droppers and click, we'll get it in balance again, how it should have been in the first place, and that isn't trying to just fix that gray area, it's fixing the whole picture. We're just measuring it in those areas that should be gray. Then if we need to shift the colors around, we can work on the individual red, green, and blue, it's just if we wanna match something, we need to write down those numbers. Then we can do something where it can type in those numbers for output, and the main thing you need is practice. So this has been talking about color adjustments. We done simple things back at the very beginning of the course where we talked about Camera Raw, and that's where I do most of my original adjustments, that's where most everything happens, and it's only when things are still messed up after that point that I need to open it all the way in Photoshop and get fancy, and we got pretty fancy here, I think. So let's think about tomorrow. Tomorrow we're gonna get into retouching essentials. So if you need to be able to remove any defects from your image, you'll know how to do it after tomorrow's session. Between now and then, why don't you head over to Facebook and try this out with some of your images and let us know what your results are like, and when you have problems, ask about 'em right away. People will just kind of qualm on 'em and start helping you with it from my other classes. People start answering your questions before I can even have a chance to read 'em, and you'll get help with it. If you haven't been to the group yet, this is the web address to go to to find it, and if you get some successful images where you've been able to combine things together and get the colors to match in interesting ways, then why not post some of your results there, and if it didn't do it successfully, post your results still, and say hey, what should I have done different? And people will help you out. And finally if you want to find me on the web, here are various places to do so. Otherwise, I hope to see you in our next session on Photoshop CC, the complete guide.