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Understanding White Balance, Color Balance, Hue & Saturation

Lesson 1 from: Beginner Color Toning in Photoshop

Khara Plicanic

Understanding White Balance, Color Balance, Hue & Saturation

Lesson 1 from: Beginner Color Toning in Photoshop

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

1. Understanding White Balance, Color Balance, Hue & Saturation

Lesson Info

Understanding White Balance, Color Balance, Hue & Saturation

help me. Welcome back to the creative live stage care. A pledge image. You guys were gonna so much fun with this. We're gonna be talking about color toning in Photoshopped. So that means creatively manipulating the colors in are images. And before we get into all of that stuff, I thought it might be helpful since we're really starting at the beginning here. I thought it might be helpful if we first talked briefly about color in general and color balance within photo shop. Because before we go spewing things and making everything kind of wack color wife, it might be helpful to actually understand how color works a little bit. So we're going to start taking a look at this. These are what anybody does anybody know camera setting stuff? I guess you need your mic, right? Why Balance stuff. So when we're talking about color in our photos And if I were to ask you, where does the color come from? I mean, obviously the camera. Oh, you take a picture. Right? But how did the camera and know how t...

o interpret the color correctly? Because the minute you start getting into photography and studying light lighting and all of that. You realize that light has different colors and it can really affect your photos. So we're gonna talk about white balance, and these are the icons that you see on your camera when you are manipulating your white balance settings. So the W B is the white balance. Somewhere. I will show you on the camera where you can look for this. And then these are the various options and some cameras have more. Some cameras have less, but this is kind of the general collection of white balance setting. So we have a W B. Which stands for auto white balance. Below that, we have a son for daylight Balance the clouds, air cloudy, right? Um, the little It was kind of like a rocket ship shooting laser beams out of the side that shade the state of a building in the picture. There we have flash, and then we have a tungsten or incandescent light bulb, even though way have the fancy led than all that. Now they're still color temperature set for kind of the old school incandescent. So if you ever go to your big box store and you're shopping for light bulbs. They come in all different colors now, right? But this is referring to the yellow er warmer light. Then we have the traditional fluorescent lighting. A lot of cameras have multiple options there, so you might have multiple fluorescent settings. That little funny icon is for a custom white balance. Some cameras allow you to set a custom white balance, and then the case stands for Kelvin. When we talk about color in light and color, temperature is actually measured in degrees, but not Fahrenheit or not filthiest. It's measured on a scale called Kelvin, and so some cameras will actually allow you to dial in a specific degree setting for your color. So what happens when you are working with This? Is your telling your camera what kind of lighting environment you're in so that the camera can basically calibrate the image according to the environment and try to render accurate colors? That's the idea. So here is it's kind of not showing up. Married? Well, I guess in the image here. But this is the same singing photographed six times. This is my son's room photograph six different times, so it's not the same picture manipulated. It's actually six different shots, and I just change the white balance setting before I took each picture. So the 1st 1 was shot on auto. And then we have the sunny down below and the clouds in the shade and the tungsten in the fluorescent. Um, and you can see hopefully it's coming through. You can see the difference in the color. Sometimes it's subtle. If I had shot this, I think outside and just daylight. It would have been way more dramatic, the difference between the settings. So on your camera, depending on the model that you have, you might have a little white balance button, and usually then you would press that. And then you can squirrel with one of your control wheels or use your buttons. Teoh arrow over until you choose the setting that you want, and then you take the photo. So this is something that you set before you take the photo. This assumes you're shooting J pegs. Um, it's not an after the fact thing. It's a before it basically tells the camera how to process the day peg to get good color in whatever environment you're in. So that's how that works And by the way, you don't have to use, you know, the cloudy one. Only if it's a cloudy day in your it might be that you're in the state, and the Sade setting is not working so well. Maybe the cloudy one works better because there's some other factors that are contributing to the situation. So it's there just guidelines. What the presets are are basically different temperature stops along that Kelvin scale. That's all they are. They're just little stops, but they're depicted with pictures because it's easier to remember the sun for daylight instead of 5500 Kelvin. Right? So we don't have to remember all the numbers. So the way that you do this is at least how I like to do it. If I would take a test shot and I usually leave the camera and auto white balance and less I need to change unless there's a problem, then I'll change it. But it's the one auto function that actually decently works on camera. Okay, so I would usually just be an auto, and I'd take a test shot. If the color looks wack, then I would go review the image and go in and change my white balance. And that's when I'm like, all right, you know, I'm under a tree and it's really blue light. So let me try the shade setting. And then I would take another shot, and then you just repeat until you get a decent color. It's not always going to make your color perfect and amazing, but it can dramatically help. And it's always best to get as close as you can in camera instead of using Photoshopped as a crutch. It's more fun to you that as a creative tool, right? Okay, then, once we get into Photoshopped, let's talk a little bit about how color works. Um, we're going to talk about a couple of ways of working with color. We're gonna talk about color balance, and we're gonna talk about hue saturation to start with. So I just kind of like to talk about here. Just so you understand visually what's happening. So we're gonna be looking at the color balance dialog window, and it looks a lot like this. So there's three Flight Er's and each slider has two colors at one color at either end, and that's because they are actually opposites in Photoshopped, World of Color. So scion and red are opposite magenta in green and, of course, yellow and blue. So what that means is that we're working with an image that has the color balance problem, meaning, Let's say that it looks really read. For whatever reason, maybe we couldn't get the white balance well in camera, and or maybe we're correcting some other image that someone else took, and now we have to clean it up for some reason. So maybe the images really red. There is no way to just suck out that read. What we would actually dio is add scion, and that would reduce the red. So it's all about balance. So those little carrots that we see under each slider there like a fulcrum. So I like to think of these fighters like teeter totters, and it's really about balance if we have too much red. If we're heavy on the red side, we correct that by moving the little fulcrum, the center of our teeter totter towards Scion, and that will balance Back out came same with magenta and green, yellow and blue, so that's a little about color balance. Just so you understand in your mind that they're opposites time and I like to also depict them this way because this is how it really works there. They're opposites, but they're not. In reality, they're not separate like they're shown here. They're really intertwined like this. So you have the opposite. So we still have Scion in red, are still opposite and yellow and blue magenta green. But they actually all intersect in the middle. And that's how your photo if produced. Basically, that makes sense. This is a really complicated things, so we're just really I like to just simplify it, so that's where we're going. Another way of talking about color is the hue saturation dialogue, and that's one of my favorite places in photo shop. And I don't know that it gets that much love actually anymore. I don't know why, but it also it to you. I think it's great and will be manipulating color in here, too, and I just like to show it here quickly because it can be a little confusing. Otherwise so the way that this dialogue works is when we think of color in a color wheel right, 360 degrees of color in a nice circle. We're going to take the existing color and image, and we're gonna skew it. So we're gonna take it and just kind of spin it around the color wheel, and that's going to be you'll see the color. But it's not in a wheel like that in the dialogue is laid out flat like this, so it can be confusing to people. Because when you look at it plot like this, you see red on both sides, and then you're like, Why is it right over here? And it's also right over here because it's shown is a line. But it's really a circle, and it's just like this. So if you imagine scissors snipping at the top of it, and then you imagine taking the circle and flattening it out, then you get this. So that's what we'll be looking at in photo shop. Hopefully, that makes some sense already. All right,

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

How To Install Actions in Photoshop
Nine Color Toning Actions

Ratings and Reviews

Sara C. Madsen
 

Nice little class. Very basic. Perfect for beginners.

a Creativelive Student
 

Very, very basic. Strictly for beginners.

user-9f5c01
 

Khara is very personable and engaging. But I do think people should know this is NOT a color CORRECTION workshop. This is a basic course in that it provides a very brief overview of the pshop functions that can contribute to color manipulation. She does go most into gradient maps.

Student Work

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