Lessons

Lesson Info

Layers and Color

Ok, so here is our original image you've got a nasty little color cast going on here and again if your designer you are not going to be able to try to fix this in another way perhaps so you could create a color balance adjustment layer so color balance lives just blow hugh saturation from the same menu we've been using when you open a color balance adjustment later you get a siri's of three sliders okay? And they allow you to change the overall mixture of colors in your image. The only problem is that you have to know a little bit about color theory to figure out which slider to adjust to fix the color caste problem that you've got so basically these sliders air all letting you move the balance of color from one side of the color wheel to the other and if you've ever seen the color will okay, so it maps out how all the different colors that we can see with our eyes are created from combining other colors so magenta and green or reddish and green or pre opposite on the color wheel same ...

with a sigh in and red and yellow and really more purple e so if we've got a color cast here into me it looks like we've got a yellow color cast I can come down here to the yellow slider and if I click and drag it more toward blue that color cast will completely disappear by leaving the preserve luminosity check box on we're not altering the brightness levels of the image were only shifting the color from one side of the color will to the other side of the color wheel, and that's, how you can neutralize the color cast that you might not be able to eradicate in any other way. So here's our before and here's our after you do have a set of a pop, it many of the top here and you, comptel, photoshopped, haying, onley mess with shadows only mess with the mid tones or mess with the highlights depends on where the source of your color cast is coming from. If you're dealing with something shot under fluorescent lights, you might try jesting just the highlights and seeing if if you've got a yellow cast from florissant lines, maybe you could choose the highlights and then just move those colors more towards blew away from yellow or vice versa. But for the most part, I leave this set on mid tones, okay, so here's our before and there's our after so that's nice, so let's look at another shot let's say you work in a magazine company, or what have you and you get that this this shot from the photographer and it just looks yellow here's our original you can do the exact same thing maybe you don't want to mess with trying to correct it any other way just one eradicate the color caste so we can choose a color balance again. Come up here, look at our image find the color of the cast. If we were dealing with the blue cast, we might pull this slider more towards yellow or we could take the science lighter and pull it more towards rid. Ok, if your photo looks a green, you could grab this sire pull it a little bit towards magenta, but for us this one looks a little green, a little yellow to me, so we're going to go ahead and drag that yellow slider more towards blue to cool it off a little bit and then we might take our magenta slider here and drag it a little bit to the left adjustments made here a little bit goes a long way as well kind of liking curves so there's our before and there's our after which to me looks a whole heck of a lot better. So so far we've been looking at adjustment layers that apply themselves toe all the layers that are underneath them. Ok, so for example, if we decided that we wanted poster that layer away, if we decided that we wanted our foreground, our couple shot over here, which they were on a very boring background earlier, all temporarily disabled my layer mess. You can see the original background boring, and I'm controller, right? Clicking on my layer mass to toggle it often on but let's say that you need to change just the color lighting to the foreground, but not the background, and they're on two different layers. Well, if we create an adjustment layer here, let's, just use brightness and contrast and will actually use it to make a brightness and contrast change. So if we lighten the foreground, that adjustment layer is a also applying to the background. Okay, so you can see the background shift when I turned the visibility I often on cease the whole photo. So what do you do if you on ly want to make an adjustment to one layer, but not all the layers underneath? You have to clip that adjustment layer to you that layer underneath in the way you do it is you click this little bitty icon right here at the bottom of the properties panel and c s six or the adjustments panel in c s five or whatever panel it opens in previous versions. So this and if you if you forget what I can't, it is just point your cursor, add it in. Take your hand off your mouth, be still for a minute and the little tool tip will come up and say this adjustment effects all the layers underneath it if you don't want that behavior, give it a click and now pleasing back out and we toggle are visibility I off and on on that adjustment layer, we see that now we're only affecting the couple and not the background layers that's obviously too bright, but I wanted to make it significant enough to see so that's how you can make an adjustment layer only apply to one layer down instead of all the layers and that does trip up aa lot of folks here's another example, let's say this is an ad that you've created and to account for the slight darkening that you're going to get in any print process it's going to get darker always in the darker when you print something, you can't account for that by adjusting the brightness of just that photo to ensure that it doesn't go to dark once it it's printed and say newsprint or something horrid like that, so we'll go ahead and do that show I can create a brightness contrast just it layer and I'm gonna brighten that just a little bit, but my whole document has gone brighter even the text I don't want that, so you need to clip that layer to the layer underneath it and you're just going to click that little looks like a folder. It was like a square with a little leftward down we're pointing arrow see how the text in the background my logo now are the colors that I meant for them to be so there's our before and are after so that's still tip for you? Ok, so let's close this document, I think I did the same thing on the mermaid shot here, so we've got a couple of adjustment layers up here I changed the brightness of our foreground, and then I add a little bit of a color tint, which you were actually gonna do later so that's her original color and I called her off a little bit with a photo filter adjustment layer, which we're going to be using pretty soon here. So in this case, I've got to adjustment layers that air clipped to a single layer and you can have as many of those as you want clip to a single layer there's no limit on that now, let's look at doinsome really fun stuff let's look at changing color, okay? We're going to start off with the easy stuff we're going to start off with intensifying our color so here's, our original and here's what we can create with one single adjustment layer vibrant adjustment layer now vibrance came over I believe in c s five and it felt like it was just snatched right up from camera raul I wish we would get a clarity adjustment layer put that would be nice so we're going to choose vibrance from our list of adjustment layers and immediately when I make my pain a little bit smaller you get these two sliders one is called virus one is called saturation both of these sliders will intensify saturate the colors in your image vibrance won't mess with skin tones and I've got an image with skin tones and I'm ashamed here in a second so that's one hundred percent vibrance looks pretty good so let's to syria that out and I'll show you the difference between that and saturation much more intense hey vibrance tends to leave lighter tones alone those that fall in and around the range of flesh tones tends to leave those alone so you'll get a much harsher effect with saturation of saturation is a global I'm going to take every color I find in this image and intensify it vibrance doesn't do that so for the most part I add color pop with vibrance I tend to stay away from just the regular old saturation ok and what happens if uh one adjustment layer of vibrance set to one hundred doesn't give you the pop you need just duplicate that layer? Why is it that sometimes my shortcuts don't seem to work, so if your keyboard shortcuts don't see in or sometimes you can always grab the layer physically by its layer thumbnail drag it down atop the new layer icon at the bottom of your layers panel and that will duplicate the layer so here's one vibrance adjustment layer here's to maybe that's a little too much so we could click on the second one and drop its opacity down maybe we like that better, so remember you can always duplicate those adjustment layers and it's really handy if you've done any masking, then as your duplicating that adjustment later you don't have to keep redoing the mask. Ok? So now let's look at that same adjustment on a photo was skin okay, so go ahead and delete these layers and we'll start out with a levels adjustment take a spin through my channel see if they're different enoughto warn adjusting them individually and in this case they're not so it's not going to help me to adjust them individually, so I'm going to go ahead and grab that shadow slider, drag it to the right toward the foot of my mountains, increased contrast just a little bit by dragging the midtown side or to the right now let's make the colors pop a little bit so we're going create a vibrant suggest mint layer and just to show you what uh, saturation will do to skin we've got alien hot pink going on here I'll go ahead and um liberate my panel here so you guys can see the photo that's nasty, huh? That's really bad that's why you don't want to use saturation on anything with skin in it but look at what vibrance will do even if we drag it all the way to the right see how it didn't completely trash the skin I see you want to stick with vibrance if I were doing this image for real I wouldn't drag it all the way up to the right but I might stop about there hey now for a quick before and after there's before and there's after just gives the color a little bit more intensity now if anybody ever sees me on the beach with the computer in my lab please call for help because if you're on the beach he did not need a computer on your lap she needs an intervention okay, so close that now let's take a look at this image right here here's our original and I don't know about y'all but those flippers are fluorescent neon so we need to tone those babies down a little bit just like you can add vibrance to increase color intensity you can also back off of color intensity if it's a little too much so let's do that let's go ahead and use a huge saturation adjustment layer case we haven't used one of those yet, and we get this handy properties panel or adjustments panel that has all these wonderful things in it. Ok, so let's, just take a look at this panel for just a second. We've got a slew of presets appear that you can use teo for some color effects, but I've got a little bit of a better way, a lot better way actually to do color effects later on, you can use this many right here that's set to master teo, adjust the hugest fancy way of saying color, he means pure color, you can change the color and saturation level of that color specifically on different channels. This is another great way to get rid of a color caste let's say you had a photo, you could not eradicate the color casting the other way. If it's the yellow cast you can come in here and choose yellows from this pop it minion it's kind of an unlabeled poppet money, but you can think of it is color channels, change the menu, toe yellows and then just drop the saturation of that particular color a little bit. Sometimes when you're dealing with photos that are given to you for whatever purpose, you may find that your people have a lot of red tones in their skin and perhaps the level zahra curves adjustment maybe didn't eradicate it completely, but you can come in here to hugh saturation adjustment layer choose the reds and slightly dropped the saturation of the reds and that will get rid of that reddish skin look and again, if you if the redder skin isn't all the way across the photo, then you can use the included layer mass to hide the slight de saturation of just the reds from the parts of the picture that don't need that change, but we're gonna go back up tio master here, this lighter right here stands for he'll let you change the color if we don't have a selection in our image and we start dragging that hugh slider around, we're changing all the colors and our image wherever they appear, and you know, that might be a nice artistic lick, but we'll set that back. Okay? If you want to change the color of just one area and your image, you could create a selection first, maybe of these flippers, and then use that bar to change the color. If you want to drop the intensity of the color a little bit, you can drag the saturation slider to the left. I tried all the way the left and you've got a very lame low contrast black and white, and then the lightness slider does exactly what you might suspect darkens or lightens the photo now, if we if our goal in this image is to lower the intensity of the color of those flippers, like I said, we could come over here to the quick selection tool because that's a a selection told based on color, and we could try our darndest to make a good selection of those yellow flippers, okay? And we might even come appeared to the select menu and say, please, father shop select yellows and the rest of my image area here select similar, and we could try to get a good selection of those flippers when then we could come in here and create a huge saturation adjustment layer. And now when I dragged the huge slider around it's on lee, the flippers that are changing, but in my mind, that's the hard way to do it. Okay, so what we're going to do is bypass that all together, so we've created a huge saturation, just mint layer, but we haven't really made any changes in it yet. Did you notice this little tool right here? That's, another on image adjustment tool. Why I try to create a selection of the thing you want to change in color. If you could just grab that tool, come over to your image, you can use it in two different ways. If you want to de saturate or lower the intensity of that particular color wherever it appears in the image, then you can just click on that color you're going to drag, lift, tow lower saturation drag right to increase saturation case if I wanted to back off of the neon value of those flippers, I might lower that saturation to around ten or so and I'll skip that guy over there so here's our before and here's our after ok, so we use that on image adjustment tool if you want to change the color or the huge rather of that color wherever it appears your image without making a selection you're going to press and hold down the command key or the control key on a pc. So with this back up to the top here so we've got our eye on him adjustment tool active little hand with the arrows we're gonna mouse over to the offending color pressing whole command on a mac or control on a pc and by doing so then you're changing the hugh slider and not the saturation so violent orange flippers I'm done and I haven't even had to make a selection, but the trick to changing the huge using that targeted adjustment tool is to press in whole command on the mac or control on a pc so that's useful yes so there's our before and there's are after and do you realize that you can drag these panels around anywhere you want? You are not stuck to them being docked and constantly appearing atop your image there is another way too target a specific color for changes within this panel here and it involves using these eye droppers to select a range of colors and then you can use this incredibly cryptic bar the grave are right here to isolate the changes that you're making to the sliders to a specific range of colors once you have used the eyedropper to tell photo shop what range of colors you want I can use thes sliders tio narrow that range so that I'm on ly changing that certain hue but dad gam is there anything that would be harder to use them that so don't use that use this targeted adjustment tolins dead but do you make sure tio command click seeing the tool tip but even gives you the key stroke click and drag an image to modify saturation command clicker control played to modify the color so to me it's way easier to do it that way so let's take a look that on another image ok so here's our original we did a levels adjustment try to bring the color back in line and then with the huge saturation adjustment layer in various election we've changed those flippers to orange so let's go handle eight that will do it again now I know the question is going to come out it is really best not to change color into drastic of a manner ok so if I use my target adjustment tool come over here to my flippers press and hold command or control I can easily change these flippers to orange and it will look perfectly realistic when I go off into the other room like way far away from the original color than things stop looking realistic in a hurry ok I come over here to blue that is not working okay so try to restrict your color changes to be fairly subtle you know yoda orange not a problem to a little bit of red not a problem all the way to purple or something incredibly dark and very far away from the original color is not going away real peso but yellow orange absolutely and without a selection you can't change color using this method of something that doesn't contain color so forget about using this to change super dark brown super dark purple super black it's not gonna work okay so an item has to have color in it for you to change its color in this manner and things that are very very dark just don't have enough color for you to be able to do it in this kind of away and again try toe keep the color change so at least the same general range of colors and not completely offices if you do need to change the color of something light to something else opposite then you could lay down that paint on another layer for example I could come in here and create an image layer I could set my foreground colored ship to the color that I wanted to paint these flippers make it a little bit brighter aereo and I could come over here with the regular old breast tool and I could lay down orange paint I'm not going to be careful with where input in it because you guys get the point and then you could change the blend mode of that painted layer to something like color or you usually works depending upon how dark it is overlay can also work so you can change color in that way as well lay down the paint on another layer and then experiment with the blend moves to try to bring the color of the object in line to what you want but that stuff can be hard to do okay so let's take a look at that on this image right here now this one has a lot of fur involved or feathers okay so creating a selection and then using a huge saturation to try to change that birds color let's say we need to make him yellow okay so we've made a selection and we can come up here make a huge saturation adjustment layer try to change the hue and we've got areas outside of our selection that aren't being changed, and we've got edges of the feathers appear that aren't being changed either so again, much simpler to create the huge saturation adjustment layer can use that targeted adjustment tool to mouse over to the thing you want to change the color of and then commander control click and when I do it that way it works out a lot better so we could take her our bird into the light orange realm if we wanted so there's our before and there's our after you'll notice the beak color is changing this because there are some of those tones found in that big but to me the beak having a little bit of a tense to it like that, I bet you is a reflection of those feathers kind of coming off of the bird's head. So in my opinion, it doesn't bother me too much that the big change to a bit of a yellow tent where it was read because I think it's a reflection, but if it's not click to activate that layer mass, grab your brush tool, set it to paint with black and you can hide the color change from just that area, but I bet you that some of that beat color is coming from the reflection of the feathers you showed us how to just take the eyedropper and pick say from one outfit to another to select color is that did you show us that or is that something that's you would do on a layer you can hope in this one back it turn off earlier I made you could use the eye droppers is that what we're talking about in a huge saturation just mint layer so incident is in that on image adjustment tool you could come over here too the channel's poppet many at the top of the toward the top of the key saturation properties panel so I could choose yellows from that pop it in you and when I did that did you notice that these eye droppers down here became active? Ok, so those eye droppers will now let me further find in a specific range of yellows that I want in effect okay, so I could come over here did you see that little gray bar kind of skewed so the rain bos telling you what color range that you're currently dealing with? Okay, so if I'd like to change the hue of that it works pretty well because those flippers air super yellow and there's not a lot of variation in that yellow is pretty much the same here, but she could continue to use these ad droppers tio add more tents of yellow or shades of yellow in that little range slider down there would continue to contract or expand according two if you're using the plus eyedropper which is adding more color to that range of color that's going to be affected by the next thing you do with the sliders if you get a color in there that you don't want to change then you can click the little eyedropper with the minus sign and he could subtract that color from the range of colors that are changing see how as I'm clicking with that eye dropper my little grey range indicator is changing so I'm narrowing the range of colors that would be affected should I choose toe mess withy sliders yes, I'm just curious if you wanted to try this with a video clip would it potentially function that way absolutely all of your adjustment layers work on videos isn't that awesome? He actually imagine the color effects and changes and things that you could do color correction to your video clips levels adjustment layer brightness contrast everything and what we're going to move into here in just a minute are black and white effects so you could do that easily the video as well have a question yes I'm stacy cap photography would like to know what if someone has a yellow shirt and you want to change that but he don't want to change the yellow two of next to them do you make a mask or do you just mascot the area so it hasn't affected or what do you d'oh yes, that would mask you would use the included layer mass that comes along with it to hide that color change from the areas that don't need it because you can try to narrow the range as much as you possibly can by choosing a range of colors from this poppet menu and using these eye droppers and you could even click and drag the range indicators yourself so what this little range indicator is telling you is that okay if you make a change to these sliders up here it is absolutely going to apply one hundred percent to this part in the middle right here see how there's a slider here in a slider here in a slider here and a slider here so the changing make with the sliders appear going to affect one hundred percent to this range of colors which is the brightest parts of the yellow it's going to apply a little bit to the colors that air in this range between that left most slider into that one does that make sense case what's applying a little bit here and a little bit here but one hundred percent here so to change the range toe widen or narrow you can use either these droppers or you can click and drag these sliders yourself that let me tell you using this stuff isn't exercise in madness I'm not kidding my punish yourself I would use the targeted justin tool instead so we said, nobody uses that because they don't know that you can hold down the commander control key to choose a range of colors that way, and then issues the mass to hide if it goes into other areas. I did not know that I did have I think I asked chris walt question and properly, I'm going to go when I asked about the eyedropper tool, so to clarify, he asked suppose I want to match a model's lipstick to her bandanna? How would I do it? So matching say those two flippers were one color and you just wanted to pick up? Well, gosh, that would be tough. I would probably be tempted to lay down that paint on another layer and I would sample the color, maybe get the hex number of that particular color, the pantone number of that particular color that you need to match and I would lay that down, lay down that paint in the absolute color on another layer and experiment with blend moods till you get the right one that allows enough of it to show three that yet you get the texture from the lips are the thing that you're trying to recover her underneath, so with this particular adjustment, you can't dial in specific hughes there's just no way to do it, but if you're laying down paint on another layer you absolutely can. You can you can call specific colors from the color picker if you happen to know the colors hex number you to do it that way, or you can open up the color libraries and choose which color library let's say pantone on def, you know you need to make that lipstick, you know, pantone nineteen twenty five then you can set that to your color and then paint on another layer and it went great just because I've I've got a huge saturation adjustment lee or actor there so that you could do that is still a hard thing to do. Thank you. Now, let's, take a look at another kind of adjustment layer this one is called selective color now selective feller they are gloriously useful if you need to make a single color in your image brighter or darker, um, they're real helpful if you need to make whites wider blacks blacker, you can also use them to shift one color to another, but it's a challenging technique because it requires knowledge of color theory to know how what color you need to add to an existing colored has shifted to somewhere else. So let's, take a look at what I've done here I'll turn off the layers that I've made, I've got a huge saturation layer appear and I simply just de saturated the blues just a little bit so they weren't so bright but here I have a selective color adjustment layer so we'll turn that off so we can see our original image quite a bit different huh so what we're gonna do is create a selective color adjustment layer and selective color lives all the way at the bottom of that adjustment layer menu so we're going to give it a click and let's say our goal and all zoom in and move over a little bit so we can see our happy diver now you know the theory or the theme rather of these deep dives has been water and diving and all that kind of stuff this is how I like to dive right here I'd like to get in the gear and get in a floatie and then have a cocktail that's my idea of time so let us say that that we love this image bit that lime green is just a little too much we need to back off of that just a little bit so we can reduce our greens a little bit and add a little bit more blue so what you can do here is kind of the same thing we did with the huge saturation adjustment later you can choose the colors that you want to effect in your image rather than making a selection of them which arguably we it would be tough to do because the greens are everywhere in the image from that reflection of that floating, so it would be darn tough to make a selection of that. So what we can do is target those colors here in using the colors, pop it many of the selective color adjustment. So now all you need to dio is figure out which one of these sliders you need to move to reduce the green. Okay, so we could do all kinds of things. We could add a bit more blue to the greens. We could add a bit more magenta. Okay, so if you're dragging to the right, you're adding that color to the target colors that you said, if you're dragging the slider to the left, you're reducing that particular sliders color from the colors that you've targeted in your image. That's why this suggest mint is a little bit, it requires a lot of experimentation unless, you know, color theory, because then, you know, oh, well, to do that well, of course I would, you know, shift my yellows this much or, you know, add black and all that kind of stuff. So I wish this one was called color mixer instead of selective color, but it does allow you to remix your colors a little bit, so if we wanted to adjust the blues as well with you come down here to the science, maybe add a little bit more magenta. Or take the magenta away so you can see how the colors are changing as I'm dragging the sliders so a little bit more persnickety to use. But that adjustment did back off with the green on this part of the floaty, quite a bit without me having to make some kind of crazy selection. And then, if I wanted to further d saturate the color, just a touch than I could add. Hugh saturation adjustment layer and just drop the saturation a little bit. So those colors aren't quite so bright. So there's, our original and there's. The adjusted version.