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Using the Eye Dropper to get Proper Color

So we're gonna show you a couple other things here on how we can actually go in and change the colors of things as well. One of the things that somebody mentioned online Can you just go in and pick up the color sliders? And it's like Sure, of course I can. I can go when they can enter the values in here to make it that much easier. I want to show you how we do it all manually. So say we have our chili pepper and this needs to be an orange chili pepper instead of a red one. So if I go and jump over to my orange right here seems to be quite popular on I take my eyedropper tool and I sample that color. I've got my orange and I could go to my chili pepper here, create a new layer and draw that selection on there. Fill it right there. I've already gone in, and I had spent some time doing a selection around by Chili Pepper because it's kind of got soft edges here. So I spent about 10 minutes going in and I had saved that is a channel, and I could just command. Click on that save channel to l...

oad that in there so that I could target that specific area. So with this area targeted, I'm going to start off like I normally do and choose a hue and saturation adjustment layer. And I'm going to adjust that over to the orange area and seems totally crazy. And what's weird is, and people ask me this, they're like, OK, so you started off here, and this is what it looked like. And so you would think by sliding it over to the orange area of the hue that you would get orange, right? Well, that's not how it works. Okay, so these two bands at the bottom are actually telling the story. Okay, this is a nice little pictorial look of the entire color spectrum, but what's actually going on here is this right here. And when I slide this back and forth here, I think Oh, I slide it over to the orange, it's gonna turn orange. No, down here is what I'm paying attention to. And you see what I slide? Those Those little rainbow bars change. So when everything is said it zero here like this, those two bars lineup. My original color is that bar on top. The one that I'm changing it to is the bar on the bottom. So my chili peppers red. So if I pay attention to read in here and I slide this back and forth, what I'm doing is I'm lining up the bottom bar to be whatever color I wanted to represent on the bottom. So as I do that I get kind of into the orange area right here. My original red area now matches my orange area here. This is just nice to look at, but people wonder what's actually going on here, and you're just lining up your original with the color that you want. I know learn something new every day. So there is my human saturation. Make sure that even though it's mask out, I still want to put my color swatch on top there just to make sure that I don't mess that up. So my colors watch when we call up my info panel again, and I'm going to read that orange. We should know that orange pretty well by now to 28 1 31 and that's what I want it to be. And so now I'm gonna go in them to read my chili pepper. So I'm gonna click on me Chili Pepper here. And this is interesting, because now we've got highlights and shadows here. Where do I pick the color? Well, I'm going to go for a nice neutral here, which may or may not be the right choice, but I'm gonna go someplace in here, OK? A little bit of a highlight and we'll see where that ISS So that's going to be a to 20. That's gonna be 1 38 and that's going to be a 61. Were pretty close. Okay. To what? We have got a question here in the audience. You wouldn't use the eye dropper for a larger average like you did previously. Eso that instead of picking a pixel in potentially getting a wrong off color, why wouldn't you use the average there? So with this, um, I used the average to go ahead and sample the color to drop the color in there with this. When I hover over this, you'll see as I go through here and I'm picking up these these numbers, it's actually picking up the values, and I'm just kind of using a general number with these values. If I were to go in and I were to dio set this to my point sample. You see, as I go over here, it's actually picking up pixel by pixel. So when I go in and I set this by the 11 by 11 average, it's actually taking what I've set in my eyedropper tool. So because I've set my eyedropper tootling tool to this, it doesn't matter which tool I use. It is picking up that average. So yeah, so I actually am doing that. It's just something that you don't draw the correlation. I mean, you could use your eyedropper tool and sample the color here. It really doesn't matter what tool you use, but it's always based on your sample size of your eyedropper tool, which doesn't make any sense. You're like, seriously, I could use my selection tool to measure the color. It's just a cursor, and wherever that cursor is, it's still governed by your average that you've set with your eyedropper tool. So that's what Yeah, that's what you get. Probably didn't explain that, but good question, but yes, it ISS so it doesn't just affect the eyedropper tool in that regard. So if I use my move tool, it's still giving me that 11 by 11 average. Yeah, so there it iss. So now I'm gonna zoom out here when that orange is pretty darned close, you know? And if I put that orange over there, it's a little bit more intense, but that's a solid color orange. So here it is, new adjustment layer, and we're gonna do curves here and there is my curves. I got my info panel going to go in with my RGB right here, and I'm going to go back in and I'm going to use my scrubby tool and I'm gonna find out exactly where I go right here. Now, somebody online said, Well, why can't you just go in and enter in your input and output values like, Well, you can. But what fun would that be? You know, just press a button and it happens. Um, I don't use these. You certainly can. I mean, I'm starting off a to 20. It needs to be to 28. I click with a middle scrubby tool and I click here and you move so these register and just by moving a little bit, I've already gotten those values in. But I could go in here and I could enter in those values. And it just so happened that I clicked and moved it enough that the values were dead on. But you can. So if I go into the green here, I'm going to go in and enter that. And here's what I want to dio. I don't want to go in and enter my output values in until I have clicked on that location. Okay, so with my scrubby tool, I don't want to just go in and enter the values in I could, but I'm gonna click on that same location so that I know that that's going to be on my adjustment. And then I could go in here and I could specifically go in and enter by value after, But I always want to set that location so that my input is going to register right there. I mean, I could very easily go in and say Okay, with blue here, you know my output is my inputs gonna be 61 outputs gonna be 31 you know, out of habit. It's just me. I like to go in and physically click on there. Once I click that I could go in and what you click and you land a point, it's gonna register your input in your output in there so I could go ahead and type in 31 as we have it. OK? And there is my orange now I'm done with that. If I take my orange colors washing, I drag it over there. We've got that and it's like, OK, you know, this is pretty close and as I see, I mean, that registers in certain areas in here. But it's hard to say because, OK, you know, do I want to make this darker, Though I want to make this lighter overall, Well, I can, because once I have my entire curves set up here and I've got these actual colors in here, I can take my entire curves panel or my tire curves adjustment and I can go in and I can actually go in and adjust on my composite right here on my composite is actually the black line right there, and I could take my scrubby tool and I could go in and I could adjust overall so that I adjust darker. Overall, I adjust lighter overall, and what this is doing is this is taking all of my channels that have already done and adjusting everything overall. So taking on my adjustments and making them blighter or making the darker overall instead of going in and adjusting the red lighter or darker the and up and down so I could go in and I could make that a lighter orange. I could make that a darker orange as well. And of course I would want to make sure that I get my mask adjusting the chocolate right now to So I could adjust that lighter or darker overall and adjust that so that it's more pleasing to the eye because we've got really strong highlights and shadows. I needed to pick a point in there where that orange actually works. And if I were to take this and put this over here and this orange were to disappear in certain areas than I would say, OK, you know where those actually show up that would work. One little trick. I didn't load my mask or my selection before I did my curves. And I want to make sure because it's this layer is adjusting the chocolate as well as you can see quick and easy way. You can copy your mask from one to another. Just hold down your option key option. Click and drag, and it's going to allow you to copy your mask and put it right on there instead of having to select make a mask. Everything didn't copy anything in Photoshopped. It just makes it that much easier. So sometimes I'll forget to load a mask when I start off there. And this, I think we need to lighten. Overall. Teoh make that look more like my little orange right there. And with that, you know, it looks pretty believable. Is it riel? Of course not. You know, you get these catalogs that you can get fruit for the U for Christmas and everything or the apples really green, Or were they read? You know, you look in a catalog and it's like, Oh, that's the same apple that's green on that page and read on that page. Who knew how that works? Yeah, cool stuff. Got a question here. Yeah, I was wondering the images that you're working on look really nice and, ah, adjusted already and kind of Photoshopped. But if you were starting on that image of the chocolate and the pepper from scratch and you still had to do, you're dodging and burning, inhaling. Ah, we're in the process. Would you do your color matching? Is it always at the end, or can you do it first? Sometimes color matching? I always do at the end. So my method of working on something like this is I would go in and I would do all of my retouching first. So clean up absolutely everything and get it dialed in to exactly where everything is going to be. Then I would go in and I would go in and do my color matching. And then I would do all of my color correction after that, um so always get rid of everything that you're going to get and dial everything in exactly the way it's going to be that way. When you masked certain things out, you're not changing the actual image. So I do clean up first, then all my masking and then color adjusting and then go in to my color matching at the very end. That way, everything is right there where it's supposed to be.