This is part of photoshopped mastery, which means I'm going to be trying to teach you not just what steps to follow, but how to truly understand what you're doing in photo shop. And so in this session, the next two days is going to be about adjustments and have divided into different sections where today we're going to concentrate on what I'll call tonal adjustments and by tonal adjustments, I simply mean anything that does not have to do with adjusting color, so that means adjusting the brightness, the contrast or any kind of thing you want is long as it doesn't have to do with fine tuning color. Tomorrow is we're going to talk about color, and so tomorrow we'll get into things like color correction where instead of just blindly following steps, you'll actually understand how it works, why it works and therefore why sometimes doesn't work and how to think about that. So you're not stuck just following some instructions that if they don't work, you don't know what to do so also by trul...

y understanding what you're doing, you're not limited to doing what I show you. You know, on my images instead you khun adapt the techniques for anything and you can come up with new techniques, said nobody's ever thought of before because your brain's different than everybody else, is the other thing we'll talk about today. Is adjustment layers and that's how we apply those adjustments in some of the special things we can do with adjustment layers toe limit, where the adjustment applies and how it affects your image in general. And so today is all about tonal adjustments and adjustment layers tomorrow is all about color adjustments, so as I'm describing things, I'm going to try to teach you the logic behind things not always successful with truly getting youto completely understand, because your brain sometimes works differently than mine. So if, after I'm done describing a particular technique, we open for questions, I'd love it. If you don't understand anything in particular, let me know it, and then I might feel describing a slightly different way to connect with your brain on try to really get it. So you understand what you're doing, so we're going to jump in and get started. These first section I'm going to talk about scanning leinart in line art is anything that is pure black and pure white, like your signature or black and white logo that has nothing fancy going on in it and there's some secrets to making it look good. When you scan that, then we'll progress on after that into grayscale. And how do we optimize grayscale images and let's say we're going to print a brochure or something? How do we make sure that it's set up appropriately for any kind of printing, then will progress onto, like converting your images to black and white? That kind of stuff that's the kind of beginning this morning, so let's jump in get started, so I'm going to just pop over to photo shop. I have just reset my preferences so I should be a default settings, so anything that I used in photo shop should be similar to what you get at home unless that is that you, you know, mess with your settings and a couple things that I do automatically without thinking just that I mentioned before we get started is I will frequently get photo shops interface toe largely go away so I could just show you my image and to do that they're a couple tricks that I use one is going to be hitting the tab key quite frequently tab is going to hide all the panels and photo shop, so all you see is your image and just so you know, I have mouse pose a turned off right now because I use photo shop I used keyboard shortcuts in general to do a lot of things that have nothing to do with photo shop, for instance zoom in on my screen I'll do something like this and if I have mouse pose a turned on you'll be distracted by seeing a keyboard shortcut showing up it has nothing to do with photo shop so every time I use a keyboard shortcut I'll mention it for both mac and windows also let you know when um I pressing and what am I letting go so you're not there's not a lot of mystery when it comes to that and in the handbook for this there'll be a guide the keyboard shortcuts I know right now is three pages long we might add to it that type of thing but just see her where I just found that with the number of times that I zoom in on my screen and do other things that it was a little distracting to have the key show up all the time so anyway I'm gonna press tab right now and that's going to hide my panels if I press tab again they'll come back so I do that all the time the other thing that I do quite frequently is all press the letter f f stands for full screen in my press f once twice I could get to where I just have my image and so if you ever seen the open a picture and it just goes to full screen like this where you can't see a thing all I've done is press letter f for full screen a few times and that's not command f for shift half it's just the letter f all by itself so I'm going to do a few little slide shows and photoshopped this is another reason I have most jose turned off is because I'm going to use my keyboard to switch which layer is visible and you don't need to know that because it's supposed to be like a slideshow is if I was in another program like power point. So so anyway let's get in here so we're talking about scanning leinart leinart is anything that would be solid black and a solid white background it could be a simple is your signature logo where it could be an old drawing it could be very detailed if he needed to be but let's take a look at what's involved so here's an example and this image was scanned on a scanner that had a mod called leinart mode so that it automatically when it was done delivered a pure black and pure white and result and let's take a look at it up close if I look at this section of the image and zoom up on it there's just not much detail there and if I look at a dark portion of the image I see it's kind of clogged up we're starting to turn almost solid black in many areas and that's not what I'd like so instead of scanning in leinart mode, I would scan and grey scale mode because in grayscale mode, really, really fine lines can show up his light shades of gray. Where is in leinart mode? These air has a choice of showing up for not showing up at all, and those fine lines will often just disappear. So now, if I zoom up on the same area that we looked at previously, you'll see that there's a lot more detail in it, but that might be good enough if we're going to going to display the image on screen. The only thing is, when I look at it, it looks a little soft, so we'll do something to get it so it it's just has more pop to it, but if I'm going to print this, the problem is to reproduce those shades of gray, especially if you happen, do it on a printing press like in a brochure, it ends up reproducing those shades of gray with little black dots, and it can look more like this and that's not ideal for leinart. Imagine that was your signature, and instead of looking like a solid black line looked like a bunch of little specks, so that's what's known as a half tone and that's a little less than ideal for leinart. We look at a dark portion to be the same thing we get more detail because we scan in gray scale, but if we leave it in grayscale mode, then we're going to end up with a half tone in there when we print it and it's not gonna look as good, but we're going to do is take that grayscale scan and enhance it, and when we're done enhancing it, we're going to end up with a result that's pure black and pure white, so when I zoom up on it even when printed, it'll look nice and crisp. The file size will be very small because it doesn't contain any shades of gray shades of gray make the file size go up, and if we compare that to just scanning in leinart moto by itself like your scanner would have available, we're gonna have a lot more detail both in the bright areas and in the dark areas compared to scanning in leinart mode. But before we get into the technique we're going to use to do that, we need to discuss one other issue and that is the key to avoiding the jay g's you've all seen somebody's signature before in a magazine or in a brochure or even online and it looks jaggi I mean it looks computer generated and there's one key to avoiding the jag ease and that is the setting called resolution and so, let's, take a look at that resolution. When you scan an image simply means how big are the pixels that make up your picture? And it means, how big are they when you print them? So if that number's too low it's a setting called pixels per inch, or a lot of people called dots per inch, it just means how many of these fit in an inch, these little pixels that make up the image. So if the number's really low, they're big, and if the number's really high, you're squishing more of them into an inch. And so I just need to make sure that those gets smaller, smaller, small enough, where it stays nice and smooth. So let's talk about that. If we're gonna be printing this on your desktop printer, then we want the resolution of our picture to match the resolution of the printer in that way, these little specks that make up our image, the pixels are the exact same size as the ones your printer uses when it prince and therefore we're going to get the highest quality out of that printer we possibly can get. So if you have an inkjet printer in its resolution is fourteen forty, you can look it up in the brochure or just to a search on the internet for your model. And look for the word resolution you confined it uh but that's the setting and want to use in order to get the highest quality if we're going to print out of printing press, there is no resolution of that output device it's like in some ways infinite you could, but what I find is the highest setting where you no longer notice any difference if you go higher is once you reached twelve hundred so if you're going to go to a printing press there's really no need to go above twelve hundred twelve hundred gives you a nice high quality twelve hundred sounds like it's extremely high for a photograph it would be but for line hard it's not it's just right for leinart no need to go higher than that when it comes to your desktop printer. If your desktop printer is higher than that, you could max out at twelve hundred, but if it's really close to that like fourteen forty versus twelve hundred, they're pretty similar. You might as well go for the exact resolution of your printer and you'll get the highest quality of that if it's for onscreen use. We can talk about that after I'm shown you enhancing the image you don't need to go anywhere near that high, but we'll talk about it so let's look at the process we go through to get nice detail would leinart scanning so first off here's, the image scanned using a scanner that had a choice called bit map mode, which is also leinart mode on you can see the lack of detail here's the exact same image scanned is gray scale you see how much more detail there is, but somehow we need to take that grayscale image and we need to get to still it down to pure black and pure white because that's, what line art is supposed to be and usually the way that's done is to go to the image menu choose mode you see we starting in grayscale mode you goto a choice called bit map in bit map mode all you can have us pure black and you're white that's what the modes for so if your photographer you've probably never used it before, but if you're a graphic designer someone else you might have, so if I get a bit map mode, this comes up. It tells me the resolution of my picture to begin with and just wants to know if I'd like to change it before I throw away those shades of gray down below it says, well, how are we going to convert this image to solid black and solid white if it has shades of gray right now the default setting not going to be a good one if I were to click okay with that setting and then zoom upon my picture you see how it looks like just a terrible amount of specks in there doesn't look like nice solid lines because what it's doing is it's trying to simulate the shades of gray that air there I don't want it to simulate the shades of gray I wanted to give me a pure black pure white so if I were to change the mode there's a different choice in there and it's called fifty percent threshold you see all the other choices that are in here try to simulate shades of gray try to keep it having that look but it's only fifty percent threshold that gives you solid black and solid white without any weird fuzziness going on so I'm just going to try that but if you look at it we're losing too much detailed you see where it used to be bright in this image there's nothing there if I choose undo there used to be a lot of detail so what we're going to do is when I went up there and change the mode a bit map it had that choice of fifty percent threshold well, all that does is it says anything in the picture that is darker than fifty percent gray is going to go black anything brighter than fifty percent grand going to go white so fifty percent grey is the threshold between going to black and going to white well that's not necessarily most ideal so let's see if we can get a higher quality result than that here's what we're gonna do the first thing I'm going to do to this image is I'm going to try to enhance the detail and I'm going to do that by sharpening the image so I'll go to the filter menu I'll go down to sharpen and I'm going to choose one sharp mask usually the amount setting used for a picture going up to about one hundred is getting relatively high but for this kind of an image it's not a normal photograph I'm actually gonna bring it up really high five hundred that's the highest I can go to on a normal photograph that would look ridiculous but online art it's going to make it to the detail starts to pop out I'm gonna take the radius setting and I'm going pop it up a little bit just a one point two and let's see what that's doing to our picture I'll zoom up to hundred percent view and I'm just going to turn the preview check box off so you see what it looks like before looks kind of blurry and after where it's much more well defined that's going to help us maintain the detail it was in there but the other thing I'm going to do is there's a setting called threshold and what threshold does is it says how different two two shades have to be before it's considered detail that should be sharpened with its set to zero the slightest difference is going to be exaggerated so if you look at where the white sheet of paper used to be out here I don't think I see it I'll zoom up even closer I can see it in there getting exaggerated if I turn preview ofthe you see before you could barely see what was there after all that stuff is being exaggerated well if I take threshold and I increase it it means that two areas would have to be at least this many shades of gray different before it's considered detail in sharpening kicks in so if I get this up high enough the difference between this detail and the white paper will will be within the threshold which means it won't be sharpened let's just watch what happens I usually have it said to at least two but if I can see the paper being exaggerated I'll continue to bring it up higher it's not comin for me to go higher than about seven between two and seven but if you want to see the difference who bring it back down to zero and watch the area where the paper is and you see a lot more detail showing up there sometimes you can bring it up a size ten if you need to but just know you're going to sacrifice they need really light detail within the image itself. All right, I'm gonna click okay? The main thing is I used a setting of amount of five hundred a radius of one point two it's just setting this I've found to be useful with liner and then you mess with threshold until the papers not being exaggerated too much so I choose undo before after before after you see it's much more well defined the detail now I want to get this image so it's pure black and pure white I could do that by converting it to bit map mode but then it's going to be stuck in fifty percent gray for the threshold remember that where anything darker than fifty percent craig goes black anything lighter goes white instead of being stuck with that, I'm going to go to the bottom of our layers panel I'm gonna click on this little half black and half white circle that's how you create an adjustment layer in there's a choice called threshold when I choose that I get this little area showing up and there's just one slider it starts in the centre and that would be the quill into fifty percent threshold if I move this towards the left look at the image moving towards the right look at the image and so now I confined tune this setting and I really wish adobe would put a grady int in here where black would be on the left and white would be on the right with all the shades of grey in between in there, because then this would tell you more less what it does. Let me open a simpler image seating, figure it out. I'm gonna come in here and use threshold on this image, which has had shades of grey in it by move it one direction versus moving in the opposite direction, and if I just get rid of this adjustment layer, look at what the image started with, so all it was doing with the choice called threshold it was saying at what point do things turn white? And at what point do things turn black? And if you just were to look across this, I could make it so it's at this point where anything brighter than this shade right here gets forced the white and anything darker goes to black, or I could make it so its over here where anything brighter than this turns white and anything darker turns black it's just at what point is that threshold? You don't have to completely understand that the only thing to know is I really wish they would simply show o'grady int the kind of grady at you see, when you're in levels when urine levels do you see this little grady it right here, this thing all they'd have to do is copy that darn thing and put it in the threshold dialog box if it was in there and you had the one slider sitting there, anything to the right of the slider turns white, anything to the left of the slider turns black and it would be pretty blatant, you know, what's going on, but that's not how photoshopped works, unfortunately, with photo shop they I assume you already know how things work, and so when I'm in threshold, I just went down to the adjustment layer icon again shows threshold we just have this slider and all I'm going to dio is moving around and look at my picture. Ideally, I would zoom up in view my image at one hundred percent view, otherwise you can't really see all the detail, so I'm just doing command plus command plus consume up this is a hundred percent view and I'll just try to decide how thick do I want those lines to be all right now since I used an adjustment layer, what that means is it hasn't permanently changed the information that's underneath. Yet if I look at my layers panel, I could turn off the eyeball for that particular layer it will hide the adjustment revealing what's underneath, which should be our sharpened grayscale image I could click in my layers panel on layer that's underneath to say I'd like to change that layer and what's on top, the threshold will still apply to it, but now I can make changes here. The main changes you might decide to make is to come to your tool panel and in your tool panel there's this tool right here if I click on it there's actually, two main tools you'd use the dodge tool in the burn tool dodge is gonna lighten burn is going to darken. Unfortunately, they used terms out of a photographic darkroom, which was the last time you were in dark room. It could be called the brighton in the darkened tool, but you know, this could be a a sun and a moon icon or something, but I don't think these icons air helpfully more for most people getting started with photo shop. So anyway, if I am in this tool, I can come in, and if I'm in the dodge tool dodge tool is going to end up lightening things I could now click and drag in the dark portion of the image, and if I d'oh, which I'm doing right now, I could lighten it up. So if there's any area where you need a little bit extra detail coming out of your shadows, you grab this tool in paint and try to get it in there if you choose the opposite tool, which would be the burn tool, you're going darkened things that's useful wherever things are really thin if you have really thin lines, you can come in here and paint don't you see that I'll choose undo? Do you see a slight difference so you could find tune what you have? You're probably not going to need to do this if all you're doing is scanning your signature in, but if you're scanning in a complex logo lots of detail in it or a drawing it's really nice to be able to do it it's completely optional do that step, though when you're completely done you think this looks good to reduce my file size down and to simplify the image, I would change the mode from gray scale two bit map remember bit map only means solid black and solid white our image already has just solid black and solid white, but going to this mode is going to make the file size go down dramatically. This will come up when you do it, just leave it at fifty percent threshold in click okay? And now we have our image. It should be solid black and solid white, and it should have a heck of a lot more detail than what you would have had if you'd just scanned it using your scanners mode that's called leinart so I know it's a, you know, got more steps than some people need. If it's just your simple, like a thick sharpie marker kind of signature, he probably could just scan it online art mode and it be good enough, but if you find anybody writes their signature with a really fine pen and that's, what you need to scan in it's going to get clogged up wherever the lines of the signature kind of cross each other and get thicker, and if you do this technique it's gonna look much better now I should mention for on screen use. If all you're going to do is use it on the internet or something like that, you don't need to go to bit map mode, and he also don't need to do the threshold adjustment layer. So you go through the same technique where you scan and grey scale, and when you're done, you would sharpen it just like we did. But then, instead of applying threshold to make it pure black and pure white fur on screen used these shades of gray actually help. So for on screen used this is what it looks like right after sharpening it, what I would do is go to the bottom of my layers panel, click on the same half black and half white circle, and instead I would choose levels in levels will talk more about it in a few minutes but the black slider forces areas to black so I would bring this in intel the lines within your image or starting a look black instead of ah light shade of gray and then the upper right slider forces areas toe white and I would bring that in until the areas surrounding everything is looking white instead of like it has details you could then use the middle slider to control how thick the lines are but this is on ly for onscreen use because this is going to maintain shades of grey in the picture which wouldn't look good when printed but for onscreen use we use levels and you bring in the upper left slider to force areas to black the upper right slider to force areas toe white and then the middle slider to control the thickness of the lines and when you're done you can just save the image for onscreen use so that's the process I used for scanning liner not everybody stood every day, but when you do it's good to be able to get a high quality and result you guys got any questions in the studio audience don't be shy don't be shy it's ok if you don't like ever getting quite a bit but to make sense overall main thing is that grayscale scanning with sharpening is going to give you a dramatically better result so let's move on because scanning grace care scanning leinart is not the most exciting thing in the world but now let's move on and talk about black and white pictures in photo shop you're going to hear the terms black and white in grey scale used in general interchangeably but it means images that are contain any color I'm going to start with this simple image that is just what's known as a step wedge and it contains white and one side black on the opposite side and then shades of grey in between and these shades are equally spaced as faras how different they are in brightness and when adjusting a black and white picture nominees levels in levels is overly useful for that kind of a thing just going to get this small enough where I can see it at the same time as levels levels doesn't cover it up and then whenever I apply my adjustments I do it through an adjustment layer they're two different ways you could apply your adjustment want us to go to the image menu and choose adjustments from here that applies here adjustment directly to the image where it's permanent meaning that if you save and close your image open it up a month later there's no way to get back the original there's no way to figure out what adjustment has been applied in the past, that kind of thing and so I find these to be less useful, then creating adjustment later. We'll talk about adjustment layers in depth today, but I just want to share the two general methods for creating them. One is to go to the layer menu and you'll find a choice called new adjustment layer give you a list of all the adjustments you could apply to this image you'll find there's a large category great out because this images in gray scale mode, which means adjustments that require color I just can't be applied if I want a different method. I confined the same list of adjustments by going to the bottom of the layers panel and at the bottom of the panel, I'm going to find a half black and half white circle it's right here. If I click on it, I will find the same list with a couple extra options at the very top, but that's the same list in choosing from here will also create an adjustment layer. When I do that, my adjustment will appear in the layers panel right above my image, and the original image will remain untouched underneath, and it says, if I'm standing at the top of the layers panel looking down and in order to see that original image, I'm looking through this adjustment just like you might look through sunglasses to see something outside well, there's my sunglasses, it's, whatever my levels adjustment is so let's take a look at the basic controls in here and then we'll see how we could apply them to a black and white picture first the slider in the upper right will force areas to solid white as I bring it in you'll find that more and more of this image becomes solid white but it doesn't just force areas to solid white it also make sure that the areas that are not becoming solid white blend in nicely with the areas that are solid white so it brightens up the rest of the image along with it to make it look appropriate but to really understand what he's doing, you need to look at levels and look at where that slider is compared to this little bar that's down here and simply look directly below that slider and see what shade is below it all this slider does is it takes the shade that is directly below it in any shade that is brighter than that enforces it dwight so if I pull it way over here it's going to make anything this bright in my picture or brighter turned white blood way over here anything this shade or brighter turns white so that's all it does now let's look at the slider on the left side that one if you look at it is a black slider that's because it forces areas to black is I pull that in watching the image and you'll simply notice that more and more areas are becoming black. But not only does it make more more areas black, it changes the rest of the picture to make sure it blends in with that new black. And if you want to know how it works again, look at that slider compared to this little bar, all it's doing is taking whatever is directly below that slider. This shade right here, enforcing it to black along with all the shades that are darker than that that's what it does. So if I move it over here, it would be this shade right here and anything darker than that that becomes black. The middle slider is an overall brightness control. So if I move it to the right, I can darken. Move it toe laughed. Aiken, brighton what's. Nice about it. Isthe regardless of how far I move it. Watch what happens toa white and black. Move it as far as I can. This way, we still have white. We still have black moving as faras. I can this way. We still have white. We still have black. A lot of other adjustments and photoshopped would brighten our dark in the entire picture so that black would no longer be black when you brighton. But when you darken if it does the whole picture white would no longer be white but what's nice about this is black and white stay the same and it frightens her darkens everything in between if you really want to know how it works all it's doing is it takes the shade of grey that's directly below this the shade right here and says that one's going to become fifty percent grey if I move it over here it means what used to be this shade right here is now going to become fifty percent gray moved over here whatever is directly below that is going to become fifty percent gray so in other words, if this is becoming fifty percent gray it's going to be darkening it to get there whereas if I'm over here if that becomes fifty percent grades going to brighten it to get there but that's how it thinks you don't have to completely understand those to use them just know the middle sliders and general brightness control then we have two more sliders down below let's look at the slider on the right side watch what happens to the picture and see if you can figure out what the slaughter does since the slider if you look at it close is full of white where is the one on the opposite side is full of black you might want to pay attention to what happens to white in your picture with this slaughter does isn't hurt it takes what used to be white in your picture in changes it to whatever the slider points at. So if you used to have white in your picture and you move it here right in the center it means what used to be white will now be fifty percent gray the opposite one is full of black so watch what happens to black in my picture what it does is it takes whatever used to be black in your picture and changes it to whatever shade this thing points out why the heck would you ever want to do that? Well there's a couple good reasons for it the first is when you print on a printing press there are some issues if you think about paper paper is absorbing otherwise it wouldn't hold the ink that you put on if you ever try to print on your inkjet printer and a piece of plastic it never dries it just runs all over the place if you touch it instead you need paper that's absorbent to suck in the end can hold it right in the cheaper the paper is the more it's like toilet paper or like a paper towel and what happens when you put a cup of coffee that's got some liquid on the bottom on a paper towel you set it down and asked that coffee absorbs into the paper tall it spreads out is it could sucked into the paper right? And so what happens is if you have an image like this one and you printed on a printing press me show you what happens to take me a moment to do this it gets reproduced using a pattern it's called a half tone just a bunch of specs but if you have this and let's say that's made out of coffee that's the shape of the cup of coffee you have on the bottoms the texture of the bottom of your cup and you set it down on a piece of paper towel you would not end up with this pattern. Instead, the coffee would soak into the paper tall and as it did, it would spread out. And what would happen to this is it would clog up where all the black stuff would spread out and it would fill in those little gaps that makes sense and that's. What happens when you print on a printing press? Now in the bright part of the image, something similar happens. But it happens for a different reason on a printing press you don't print directly onto the sheet of paper instead, if you would actually go and look on a printing press, you have a set up more like this there's a bunch of different rollers. This thing here would be your sheet of paper up here is there a roller that has ink on it that is touching your printing plate that's the thing that you you could say you output from your computer to print out a printing press it sitting right here this puts in cloning before it goes on to the sheet of paper the ink from the printing plate gets transferred over to something called a blanket and then it goes from the blanket to the sheet of paper well, that means that your image is being transferred to more than one surface before it ends up on your sheet of paper and imagine you had absolutely tiny specks where you have one percent gray the chances of those tiny specks staying there after gets transferred to more than one surface starts going down in those little bitty specs that used to be one percent grey they just disappear they just kind of stay back on one of these rollers and we just don't adhere to the sheet of paper you don't have to remember this stuff or even know about it all you got to know is there's a reason why we might not wanna have solid black or solid white our picture so let's say we could figure out how the brightest shade the printing press could reproduce without the detailed disappearing in the darkest shade that the print press could reproduce without a turning solid black wouldn't it be nice to take our picture and take this little slider here in pointed at that shade to make sure the brightest shade of our picture is the brightest shade that could be reproduced and we could pull this in so instead of having black we would have the darkest shade that could be reproduced would that make sense? Well, that's what you can do with these slaughters now we're going to print out an inkjet printer we're printing directly onto the sheet of paper and so we're not gonna lose those not so much and also your printer driver the thing running your printer is going to make some adjustments for you so that's not critical that you do this but if you ever print to a printing press then you got to think about so if you just send the same kind of image is used on urine chair printer to a printing press they might not look as good. So how do we figure out what the heck settings to use? Well, you could ask your printing company what brightness range can they print that can be known as the minimum dot in maximum dot reproducible on press all that means is what's the smallest speck that can print and what's the biggest they can print you can ask them that find out the numbers or you can use generic numbers, which I'll give you the generic numbers that I'm going to give you our for bringing in the left side, I would put in thirteen for the dark side I would put in to forty seven sounds mysterious, doesn't it thirteen and two forty seven how exact can you be? Well, that's equal into three percent gray in the bright party your picture and ninety five percent grey in the dark part and I could show you howto figure out the numbers so if they give you a percentage you know how to translate because what happens is these numbers khun range from zero to fifty five because having one hundred shades of gray that's a nice way to describe things like fifty percent gray eighty percent grey but it's not precise enough to give you high quality. We use two hundred fifty six shades to make your image even smoother than you get with one hundred and so photo shop uses that numbering system and there's just one number for each of these sliders to describe where they are but let's, figure out how the heck can we figure out what the numbers mean? I have a quick question I'm unfamiliar with rich frandsen, but javy photo ass is there any way to increase the number of shades of gray and photoshopped from two fifty six to something like rich france and pseudo gray algorithm, which deflect displays a far more extensive number of grey scales in black and white images I'm not familiar with the exact thing they're referring to, but there is a way to get more shades and your picture with kind of default settings you get two hundred fifty six and technically that's known as eight bit if you ever look at the top your picture, it usually tells you the file name up here what size your viewing it at and then some other stuff, but at the very end you see it's a slash eight or if you go up here to the image menu and choose mode, you can see if you're in a bit, but eight bit means two hundred fifty six shades if you want maur, if your scanner offers that or if your digital camera offers it or however you requiring that image if you find a setting that sells that how many bits it is increased that number each time you increase that number, you double the number of shades, so if I go from eight bit to nine bit, that means I go from two hundred fifty six twice that five twelve go up one more and I go to a thousand twenty for each time you bump that up by one, you double the number of shades, so on a lot of scanners and on some digital cameras you can get a higher setting for that, and that means you have even more shades I think we should call your next class instead of fifty shades of grey to know know what way the new bestseller people are like wow, that looks pretty mellow then think all right, so anyway, in here if somebody tells you that hey, the brightest I want your picture is I don't know let's just say four percent and the darkest I need is ninety eight I'm just picking numbers off the top of my head for in ninety eight we got to figure out how the heck can we figure out what that means? Here we use two hundred fifty six shades so let's figure it out it's not that hard, but I know people don't like numbers that's why your visual person? I am too I don't like numbers either, but the numbers aren't that hard if you have if the highest number you go to his two fifty five days you have two hundred fifty six shades total what's ten percent of two hundred fifty six twenty five point six right. So therefore what's one percent of that just move the decimal each time two point five six that makes sense to point five six is one percent okay, so I could take whatever number somebody gives me and multiply it by two point five six the only problem with that is it would be the exact opposite of what you need because this talks about light and they're talking about ink and they're just the exact opposite so here's how you actually translate numbers take the opposite of the number you want, so if they say they need ten percent what's the opposite of ten percent would be ninety percent wouldn't take the opposite of what they want, so here I have foreign ninety eight I'm just going to figure out what's the opposite of those so the opposite of ninety eight would be to what's the opposite of four ninety six so those are the opposite numbers I take those and multiply by two point five six and that tells me the exact numbers to put in here here's a calculator you know I hate numbers, but all you could do is write it down in personnel this say opposite of percentage times two point five six equals what you using levels the mass not that hard and if you think through it it's somewhat makes sense, but you don't want it to make sense. Who wants to deal with thinking about that? Just use the formula but any way you could dial it in down there all right now let's use that information to adjust some pictures and we're not gonna limit ourselves to just levels we'll use other things too, but we're going to at least end upin levels if we want to end on a printing press because before we send it off to be printed on a printing press, we want to make sure to adjust those bottom two sliders to make sure we don't have solid black we don't have solid white instead we have the range are printing press can reproduce and you got the generic numbers weren't they thirteen in two forty seven but if you ask printing company, I want to get the highest quality what's the brightest and darkest I can print it's actually know nas minimum highlight dot in maximum shadow dot if you want to talk to printers knowledge you know their language you don't want to, but if they go I don't know then just say, hey, will you talk to the techie guys? What's your minimum shadow down maxim highlight dot actually seeing the way around next time shattered at minimum highlights, but you could ask them and get back numbers otherwise using your neck settings so let's adjust this image it looks pretty bad to begin with. I'm just going to go down here to the bottom by layers panel created adjustment layer I'm gonna choose levels and the first thing I see there's a bar chart see that thing in there all that bar chart does is it tells you which brightness levels are present in your picture in which ones are not so if you look at the bar chart notice that there's no bars whatsoever over here. All that means is go straight down to this thing. See that guy? If there's a gap in your bar chart there's nothing in the bar chart. That means none of this is in your picture. Nowhere to be found anywhere in your picture. Do you see over here where there's no bars in the bar chart whatsoever? Hey, it means you have none of this over here you look always straight down to see it, then the bar chart itself. The shape doesn't really matter that much. It just tells you the range you have in brightness. But if you want to know what the shape means, one of the bars will always go to the top. Always that's. Whatever shade is the most prevalent, the most common takes up the most space. However you want to say it in your picture, one shades got to do that so it's the one that goes to the top. So if you go straight down from that this shade right here is the most prevalent in this entire picture takes up the most space then compared to that one, the other shades take up less space so the lines aren't as tall and so in general, when you look at a history graham, you could glance at it and just say where's tall whatever is directly below that takes up a lot of space wherever it short whatever's below that takes up less space but quite a bit exits a lot shorter. But beyond that you don't have to know that much about the history ram it will become much more useful only start using other adjustments like curves. So if I get a history and like this one, the main thing to think about is the history ram does not extend all the way across. Well, it would be nice to have the full brightness range that we can use in most images and here's how you go about getting it. If your bar chart does not extend all the way across, grab the slider on the left, pull it over until it touches the bar chart. You have just made the darkest part of your picture turn black because all this slider does is take the shade that's directly below. It turns it to black along with anything that's darker than so if the darkest shading your tire picture was right there there's nothing darker. Pulling this over until it touches the bar chart takes the darkest part of your picture makes it black, then if this little speck right there is the brightest part of my picture because if there was anything brighter, it would have to have some line over here on the bar chart that's the shade right here to force it to white I grew pull this over until it just kisses that like that now consume out look at the picture in there's an eyeball icon at the bottom down here if I turn it off will see what it looked like before I adjusted the picture before and after it's got a little bit more contrast looks a little bit better but I think it could use a lot more then if you met remember the middle slider it's an overall brightness control so if I want it dark in the picture bright in the picture I could do it here but the main thing I would do when I'm in levels is I would pull in those end sliders if the bar chart doesn't go all the way across now the problem is look at where those little sliders are pointing on the bar chart look at how short the bar schardt is their short means doesn't take up much space when it's this short short as it could possibly get it could be a speck somewhere it could be a piece of dust or noise or something completely unimportant to the picture there's a way to actually see what part of the image is being forced to black and see what part of the emissions being forced to white let's see if we can figure it out well we need to get to a hidden feature in here in for most hidden features and photo shop there's one standard keyhole down to get to the hidden feature and this will be through most features and photo shop, and that is on a macintosh. You'll hold on the option key in windows, it's ault so I'm holding that key down right now, and I'm going to continue holding it down while I adjust those end two sliders that we've already played with. So remember, I have option held on right now I'm going to click on the black triangle and you see my image changed now, it's visibly showing me exactly what part of the image is turning black on ly the parts you can see in there that are black. If this wasn't touching the bar chart, I'd seen nothing so I could bring this over and decide how large of an area would I want to turn black, and I usually want it to be big enough to be a blob, which means not just a speck, if at all possible, but not so much that it's a huge area. So I'm going to try to bring this in until I see a blob, not a speck, so right there would be a speck, I don't even know if you can see it, but in the very centre of my screen there like two specs. I doubt on the video feed that can even see it because the compression it applies to the video but there's like two pixels in the middle of my pictures showing up if I bring in a little further little further those air stuff just starting to turn into blobs where it looks like a collection of pixels instead of just one random one so that might be far enough I'm going to keep going though hey there I'm getting nice little blobs near the lower left of the frame if I continue to bring it in too far I'm going to start seeing big areas big areas would be large areas with no detail whatsoever usually I want the first blob to show up I go to the opposite slaughter the white one I'm still holding down the option key when I click on it it gives me a different view in this time it's showing me the areas that are turning white if I pull it in a large distance you can see large areas becoming white pulling a little distance and with that I pull it in until I see something showing up and then what I end up doing is I let go of my mouth so I can see the original picture and I just look at where those specs are and if those specs are something that would be so bright in the scene that they'd hurt my eyes to look at then it's fine to have a white that means if it's the noonday sun forever it's the noonday sun reflecting off of somebody's windshield we're off of a chrome bumper that's usually where it's so bright it doesn't make sense that detail so I'm just looking at those alecko my mouse that's a reflection on the windshield in one spot looking see that reflection on a logo that is on the hood in another and a little glint of sun catching something over in here I think that's fine I can continue to bring it in a little bit as long as that remains on those really bright reflections then I'm okay I don't want it to migrate to other stuff those air what's called speculum highlights you have two kinds of highlights speculate or diffused in speculator means it reflects light like a mirror is usually something that wouldn't have detail in it where the sun's reflecting off of something shiny so those things find have it turned white in fact if you don't have it turn white it could look odd a diffused highlight is where you'd actually have detail all right so now let's look at what else we can do to this image we're limited here in levels we mainly have this middle control which can brighten her darken but this image needs a lot more than just brighten and darkening so on occasion what'll end up needing to dio is supplement levels I'll go down to the adjustment layer icon, and for now, since we haven't talked about anything more sophisticated, I might use brightness and contrast in here, I'm going to have a general brightness control as well, but I also have my contrast control, which I can't quite do in levels in the same way that this does so I think this image could benefit from a lot more contrast, and it might find tune my brightness a little, but the main thing is if I plan on printing out a printing price, whenever I'm completely done with the picture with everything going to dio, then I would go backto levels in in levels I would bring in the bottom two sliders I'd bring in this one until it says thirteen or even just select the number at the bottom and type thirteen and the other one I was set to two forty seven if you haven't gotten more precise numbers from a pretty company and therefore going to make sure I have limited the brightness range so it's gonna look better on a print press so let's, look at before then in this case, after we could still do a lot more once we get to learn about other tools, any questions in the studio here? Yeah, when you were in the levels, dialogue on looking at the bar chart of the history graham in the lower left hand car kind about the middle of that window on the left side there's the caution kind of caution try yeah yeah what is that? What it is is in order to be ableto update the system ram quickly in order to be able to have it show up instantaneously it looks at more of a low resolution version of your picture and it means that it's not one hundred percent accurate if you click that little exclamation point zoom up just so you guys can see it it's supposed to look like a history ram with warning symbol on top it's going to calculate the history graham from the full high resolution picture which might take in this case of millisecond but if it was a high res picture it could take two or three seconds and then this will change to be more accurate so it means that when that shows up the history graham is close to accurate but not one hundred percent. And so if it's critical that the hist aground be exactly right you click on that icon yes what do the three ink droppers above that the three in trappers were going to use? They have to do with color and they're used to do color correction on a black and white image though they can be used so if you'd like to know what they do let's go back and open the line art image because that could be used there I'm going to go into levels and if I grab the black eye dropper on a great scale picture and I moved my mouse into my picture I can click right here and all photo shop is going to do is look at what shade of gray is under my mouse and it's gonna pull this slider over until it points at that shade of gray what that means is I'm going to tell it within my picture which shade should become black if I grabbed the white eye dropper let's see if I go up here do you see in the paper on if you can see it or not but there's some shades showing up there if I click right here it's going to find that shade of gray what is going to do is find it right down here and it's going to pull this slider over until it points right at it to force it to white so I'll just move my mouse right here click and now I forced that white so it's a way of visibly picking which should be black or what should be white without having just pull him in so it's kind of nice especially if you have something like a logo and you find it's looking grayish grab the black eye dropper click right on it the middle eye dropper is not available when you have a great skill picture it has to a color, but we use those same three I droppers when we end up adjusting a color picture now they'll be a couple other questions one will be what about this menu and what I would say about that is if you have a color picture that colorful enough then that will be in there in pretty much leaving it at the default means on leah just brightness and choosing one of these means mess with color will do that stuff tomorrow. Well, thank you for answering that you're reading the internets mind yes question that we're going to ask you and this thing is simply a preset if you was a setting, you apply all the time. For instance, if you hate thinking about those bottom two sliders to prepare for printing, you could move the bottom two sliders ended thirteen in two forty seven and then you could come up here to preset and we could save it as a pre set I think you'll have to go to maybe the side menu yeah, the side menu on the panel right up here you could say save levels pre set and I could call this prep for printing just save it in the default location it brings you to so that now I could always go to this menu and just choose prep for printing and therefore if he had different settings for newspaper because they shittier people and different settings for high quality brochure you could save them in there so you don't have to have a post it note with the numbers on you don't think about him but that little poppet menu is preset to save the preset you go up here to the upper right save levels preset that's a really ah ha moment for me t be able teo modify your black and whites to those levels sighed and realized well now just know that those bottom ones are mainly for printing press if it's an inkjet printer your printer driver largely will handle it but if you find that your shadows are always clogged up a solid black you could compensate right there with that lower left slaughter okay the icons of the bottom you see no will cover those mohr when we get into adjustment layers later on but otherwise that's most of the controls anything out of them the interwebs yeah of course there's always some good questions there sam cox from loveland, colorado is asking if there ever a reason for having more than one levels adjustment layer well sure you could have more than one you will find when we talk about adjustment layers that you could paint on a mask toe limit where defects your picture so sometimes for instance on this image I might decide the sky needs to be much more dramatic than it is right now I could use any kind of selection tool in this case I'm using a quick selection tool to paint across the sky to select it now just imagine I was more careful and doing so so it actually had a useful selection right now this selection is a bit on the crude side but imagine you just spent some time making it then I could go down here and do a separate levels adjustment that on ly effects the sky because whenever you have a selection any adjustment you apply only affects that area and I could then say levels and I could say let's make the dark part of the sky even darker let's darken up this way maybe make the highlights brighter in the sky something like that and get it to look well in there it's got fewer shades of grey usually the sky casino won't look posterized right now I can see stair stepping in there well usually it stays looking smooth there's either something going on with the compression or some other monitor setting that we're using here usually it'll end up looking smooth but I could do that so it only affects the sky but we'll talk more about that kind of stuff when we talk about adjustment layers in sometimes I like to have two levels adjustments one to optimize the image in general just make it look good and then a second one to prepare it for printing so that if I decide I'm not going to print this image instead of gonna put on my web site I could turn off the eyeball icon for the one that prepares it for printing so we no longer has that adjustment save it out for the internet turned the eyeball back on and now I know it's ready for printing thank you sure I'm going to do another image here this image I shot in iceland and issa was one of my favorite places to visit I'm going to be there twice this year I've already been there once in the winter time uh but we'll goto levels and first thing I do is just look at my bar chart the main thing I do when I'm adjusting is is the bar chart go all the way across with a black and white picture most images and less damage is supposed to look like it's pure fog fog is gray it doesn't have really dark areas really bright areas it's just all gray unless you're shooting pictures in fog or smoke usually you wanted to have the full brightness range because whatever it is you're displaying it on your computer screen or the printed page is more limited in brightness range than life you know what you see with your eyes so usually want the full brightness range in most pictures so that means we want this bar chart to go all the way across unless you've prepped it for printing, you prepped it for printing, they'll be a little bit of gap on each side when you're done so anyway, first thing I do is pull this over until it touches and then remember you could hold down the option key alton windows, which I'm holding down right now to get that different view to see what am I forcing the black and I usually like it to be a blob instead of a speck and by blob I don't mean a big one I just mean not an individual pixel so many things I don't want a big area I want little blob and that's little blobs there then it looks like the brightest part of my image contains some takes up a little bit of space you see the line that's there it's not one pixel tall it's a little bit tall, so tell me white takes up a little bit of space possibly I could hold on option to see though yeah, white takes up that much space if I bring it over and then I have my overall brightness with my middle slider but I'm really limited if I just use levels levels is great to just get the ends where you want it and do an overall brightness, but here by the time I darken this so I like the sky the building looks terrible by the time I brightness, so I like the building sky looks terrible, so I'm not going to do my brightness with this slider right now. Instead, I'm going to create another adjustment layer. The kind I'm going to use is brightness and contrast, because the addition of contrast is going to help me here, I could lower my contrast or increase it depending on what I need and also adjust my brightness so let's see if I could darken this up and just mess with contrast, to see if I can get it where I like it a little bit more somewhere around there. Now we're going to later on today, talk about curves with curves were going to be able to do so much more on also when we talk about adjustment layers so much more, but we've got to start somewhere, so if I turn off these two layers, that's going to show me my original there's, the original here's, my end result in if I was going to send this to a printing press, I would do another levels adjusted when I'm completely done doing any changes to my picture bowling those bottom two sliders, all right, but then when I confirm my image, the black and white or I'm done with black and white, oftentimes I don't want just black and white could be kind of boring instead I wanted to have some personality I might want to look a little bit warmer, a little bit cool so let's look att two different methods for doing that. The first method is designed for when you go to a printing press. In order to get to this method, you go to the image menu and choose mode and you change over to something called duo tone do atone you'll find will be grayed out in many cases and that's because if your image is not in gray scale mode to begin with, then do a tone is great out, so if you started with color picture let's, say and you're an rgb mode that's what usually color pictures are may go there just for a moment you'll see that dude tone's great out and all that means is to go to do atone go to grey scale first I think it's weird that they do that, I wish they would just make it go to grey scale and then do it own automatically, but if you ever find it great out got a grayscale first and then do it now we do a tone there's a lot of fancy stuff you could do in here I'm not going to get into the overly fancy parts because we haven't talked about curves yet and that you require knowledge about currents to do it but for now we can use presets and if I click here you're going to find a long list of pre sets a really long list now with each one of these you'll find usually therefore choices for each preset so here's one that's going to make the majority jj here's one that's going to make it aqua here's a brown one burgundy purple green all sorts of colors well if I choose one of these the choice that's number one in here is going to be the most colorful and then as I go through these is I get to a higher number it's gonna be less and less colorful but know that the ones that have weird numbers on them are designed for printing with special colors of ink notas pantone colors what it would be if I have a black and white photo and I don't want to print it on a printing press with just black ink but I don't want to spend so much that I get full color printing full color printing this science magenta yellow and black four colors that's a lot of ink to buy a lot of printing plates to have made I could just pay for two colors of ink black ink usually and then something else and so in here the bl would be black and then this number is a number I could look up you can get a pantone swatch book, little printed reference, like when you go into a paint store, you don't get your paint chip books on, you could see that number one forty four is orange, and you could see what color that is. Number one, fifty nine is a darker orange and so on, but that's, what these are designed for if you're going to print on a printing press with science, magenta, yellow and black, then go in here and you should find some that say, see m y k and you could use those, and they're set up for using the colors of ink they usually print without a printing press. When you do a full color job, well, you're going through those ben someone a few people are asking about the difference between a printing press and a regular printer. Could you kind of go into that a little bit? Well, any time I mentioned printing press, I mean something very specific a commercial huge, very expensive printing press that you do not own somebody else owns it because it cost millions of dollars. When I talk about a desktop printer, the difference is with the desktop printer, usually you want your image is to be in a mode that's called rgb, and we might talk more about that tomorrow only talk about color when you end up going to a printing press, you need to be in one of two modes either well one ofthree moz either seeing why came out do a tone mode where imode you'll almost never used called multi channel but those three but whenever I say printing press, I'm talking about the big, expensive kind where you print tens of thousands of copies not the kind of sits on your desk just with the printing press ones that's something I was wondering as well, so if I'm going sending to a lab that would not be a printing press, it would just be football when I was pretty impressed I mean the kind of printing press that takes up a room where there's press men running all over it where you buy your paper in pallets and you you know it comes out it's only find on preparing pictures for a book or a magazine or something like that looker magazine if it's a a long print run meaning that not if you're sending out to m pixar blurb or one of those one off kind of place is pretty much if the quantity that you're ordering is less than a thousand it's probably not a printing press if the quantity or ordering is above two thousand, it probably is in between it's kind of hard to say sometimes they send one way or the other but so if you're ordering ten thousand brochures it's a printing press it's going to be if you're ordering fifty it's not because they're gonna waste fifty sheets just getting the printing press ready they're going probably waste hundreds of sheets getting it ready and so printing press you'll know it because you have to contact a printing company which is used to doing very high end brochures and other things or newspapers and things so it has to have the quantity or ordering night didn't blow a thousand I doubt it's a printing press so anyway you can go through here and apply this if you want to tent your picture but if this in general is designed for a printing press doesn't mean that you're stuck using a printing press though if you like one of the settings that air in there all you need to do when you're done is due this change it to the mod called rgb when you're done it'll look the same and now it could be used for anything now it's not special for a printing press it could be used on the internet it confusing your desktop printer can be used for anything but it's no longer set up specifically for a special kind of printing so we can use a feature designed for a printing press to just add color you alternative if you wantto add color is first off anything you do it's not going to be ableto happen when you're in gray scale mode because grayscale simply can't have color, right? So I'm gonna go over here and changed to a mode that can have color the most common one is rgb mode. When I'm in rgb mode, I can go to the bottom of my layers panel and click on that adjustment layer icon, and I'm going to find a choice in there called grady in't map grady in't map almost nobody uses that one probably never touched it before when you did did weird stuff to your picture, but radiant map. What it does is it takes the shades of gray that make up your image and it will replace it with whatever ends up showing up in this bar right here. You can change what's in that bar by clicking on this little arrow on the side and you'll get presets, but whatever end up shows up over here will replace black whatever's over here will replace white and so on in between, but the problem with that is usually you end up changing the contrast to your image dramatically. So what used to be black won't be black anymore. Watch who wow that's kind of interesting it wasn't expecting that, but you could get these weird results now there's a way to get it so it can only change color, though if it wasn't available to change the brightness and it just simply was incapable of it it would be much more useful so if you want to do that all you need to do is go to your layers panel in your layers panel there's a little menu of top it's usually set to normal and it determines how does this layer we're working on interact with what's underneath it I'm gonna change that menu it's called the blooding mod menu in the choice I'm going to use his one near the bottom it's called color what that means is that this adjustment layer will only be able to affect the color of my image in therefore it will not be able to affect the brightness if it can affect the brightness any areas that are near black will still be near black they're just going to shift in color in the area near white will still be near white it'll just be a different color but the brightness will remain consistent so if I set this to color now these little presets become much more useful because my brightness doesn't get all messed up in adobe added some pre sets for us that are very useful for tintin images I happened already have them loaded here and I'll go through them I'll just click on one of them and I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard to cycle through and there'll be more subtle tinting in here, but these choices are not loaded by default. You need to do something to get these extra ones loaded in and these air from the newer version of photo shop, I believe it's photoshopped cs six when they added them, I am to load them in what you're going to need to dio is the following, so I'm in this thing called radiant map. I go to where I see this little preview radiant, and I click on the little arrow on the right that's how you get to the process, here's my presets with default settings, you're not going to find these special ones to get him loaded. Do you see the little gear? Click on that gear and in here you're going to find some pre sets, one of which is called photographic owning photographic tony that's. What brings in those special ones? So I've gone into the little arrow that's next to the grady and preview, then clicked on the gear and shows photographic tony, when you do that, it'll usually ask you a question if you just click okay, it will replace all the presets were that were already in there with these, but if you click on upend, it'll just adam to the bottom of what's already there instead of replacing what's, their mind already loaded, some get clicked, cancel now sometimes when you do this, it's just the effect that it applies will be too strong if the effect it applies is too strong, you can go to the top of your layers panel you're working on the adjustment layer right here and right there means how strong shouldn't apply one hundred percent of normal or if you click right on the word opacity, you could lower it, and that means don't apply one hundred percent strength instead if you bring it down on ly apply maybe in this case, if I want it to be subtle, it may be half strength, so you can tone it down a cz much as you'd like. But I got to that by going to the bottom my layers panel clicking on the half black and half white circle and choosing grady in't map and to make it apply the way I wanted, I needed to go to the menu at the top of my layers panel and set it to color if I didn't, then my highlights will end up changing and my shadows will end up changing in brightness and fewer of those presets will be useful. Uh, unless you've done that, then one other thing and that is what if we have a color picture and we don't want the color there's a bunch of different ways of getting rid of the color in a picture I want to just show you the most user friendly and therefore useful version of it, and all it is is if you have a color picture, go to the bottom of your layers panel to that adjustment layer icon and there's a choice called black and white, black and white is designed to take a color picture and to remove all the color doesn't mean it's going to do an amazing job to begin with. So ah, it doesn't mean it's going to do an awesome job to begin with if you come in here though there's an auto bun it will analyze your picture and see if it could do better click on auto a little bit better, but all we have here is a bunch of slaughters for various colors that might be within your picture and if I grab any one of those sliders and moving towards the right in this case, things that used to be red will get brighter but moved to the left things that used to be red will get darker and I could adjust each one of these sliders. The problem is by glancing at the picture, I can't tell what used to be read and what used to be different colors so there is an icon on here looks like a hand if I click on that I could move my mouth's on top of my picture and when I click photo shop we'll figure out what color did that used to be right where I'm clicking so it just looks at the original image in that area I click and right now it just highlighted the yellows you see the number for yellows got highlighted in so I could drag to the right in anything that used to be that color we'll get brighter tried to the left and we'll get darker so yellows to be useful to make brighter I think, but not quite as bright as the white ones were whatever color this used to be I think should go darker so I click there and I can tell it's the red because red got highlighted bring that down and then I'm gonna click on the stuff that's in between the flowers I think that would be the greenery my guess now it's looks like yellow ari or I can manually come in here and say I take the greens, make him darker or lighter if you want to see what the image used to look like just turn off the eyeball either at the bottom of this adjustment or in the layers panel right next to the adjustment layer those two eyeballs do the exact same thing there's before he was after it's not gonna look great until you find two in these slaughters to end up with a good conversion if you find you like that conversion you can go to the side menu in the upper right of this panel right up here in chu's save black and white preset save it in the default location it brings you to then you're going to find that in the future right within this little menu called presets it has some preset ones in here you can try those out this beginning points but why not save your own same about five or six of them and you'll find that they'll be probably a better starting point than just hitting the auto button s o that is another way we can do this it can apply color in here is well there's a little check box you know if you can see it's called tint if you turn that on its going toe add color back to your picture and when tent is turned on, you can click on the little square that's next to it. It will bring you color picker where you could pick any color you want, but I don't prefer that method for tinti my photos because it applies that color consistently across the full color range whereas if you use the one called grady in't map gonna show you a few minutes ago it will allow you to put a different color in the highlights a different color in the shadows different color in the middle and I think it might look a little better the main thing I tell you herewith tent is when this comes up if you go closer to the left closer to the left closer the left you'll get mellower colors so it looks like way too much just go towards the left over here and that's where the mellower colors are so if you want it to be subtle but that's optional if you want tinted in there now there are other methods for converting to black and white the main other methods one is called human saturation in inhuman saturation there's a menu at the top where you could choose the color and then you could move the brightness control it's pretty much the same as the black and white adjustment we just used. The other type of adjustment you could do is one called the channel mixer, but I find I prefer the black and white adjustment cause it's much easier to figure out. How do I make red things get dark? Don't make yellow things get bright well with channel mixer is not quite as is friendly so this is theodore just meant that I prefer after applying a black and white adjustment, you're welcome to use any tools at your disposal to further enhance it that means you could use brightness and contrast you could use curves you can use it anything don't think of it is always being your absolute end result use anything at your disposal then as a final step, if I want a smaller file size when I'm done, if I did not add any color to the image at all, then I could convert to gray scale grayscale images take up one third of the amount of space in your hard drive as rgb images, so if you didn't need to have a tinted, I'd go to grayscale before I save it, my file size will go down all right, so that is the general info wanted to cover in the first session today, we started off with leinart scanning for pure black and pure white stuff, one on two gray scale where we did some grayscale, mainly learning how to figure out how do we force the brightest and darkest areas toe white on black? How do we prepare it for printing if we're going to print out a printing press tinted black and white where we ended up adding color and then finally taking a color image taking the colorado, we're going to do a heck of a lot more than that throughout the day, but we got to start somewhere and I thought that might not be a bad place to start, so why don't we pop into questions? And, uh then we'll take a break awesome first or you guys good in the studio? Do you have any questions? Okay my turn then so better photo says would bend still do the thirteen to forty seven thing if he weren't planning to go to a printing press and does it hurt when inkjet printing I wouldn't necessarily usually do it? Usually your printer driver for your inkjet printer is gonna handle most of that, but if I find I just noticed my shadows are clogged up there way too dark if I don't know how to change my printer driver settings, then I could manually do it using levels instead if I find mike for some reason my highlights end up too bright I could do it, but I wouldn't suggest it generically to everybody I would say on ly if you're having printing issues and you don't need you don't know how to solve those printing issues using your printer driver, which is where it should be solved, so you just want to do something you could do it let's say your go to somebody's office you're stuck with their printer, their computer and you like dang, this thing is just isn't working well, sure, I'll pop in a levels and I'll say, hey let's, brighten up the shadows a little bit because they're clogging up and use it as a kind of a stopgap measure but not something we talk everybody doing one quick question rest five one foreign nina scott and ask is there a difference between color or with the colors and all the numbers between a mac and a pc? Uh, nina said, I heard that if you put the middle turn toe one twenty five when going from active pc makes it the same as I correct, I'm not certain as faras that number of one twenty five the difference between one twenty five and one twenty eight, which which would be the actually one twenty it wouldn't be the default one point would be what happens is with a grayscale picture there's a setting attached to your image that is known as the if you're in grayscale mode that is, there is a setting attached to your picture that is trying to tell it what kind of operating system you're on and you can access that setting by going to the edit menu going to the bottom and there's a choice in here called a sign profile or convert to profile in right here ignore all the settings in here in general and just look right here in here you're gonna have a choice right here gamma one point eight gamma to point to and that's the difference between mac and windows is that setting I have been disconnected with that setting for quite some time, so I don't remember the exact which one's mackin which one's windows kind of thing but if you run into that a lot I would try these two different settings right here to see if they improve what you're doing and I think they're going to do what that person is talking about behind the scenes in more of the proper way instead of ah somewhat cheating way you could say so I did that by going to the edit menu, choosing convert to profile and then just clicking on one menu called profile ignore all the choices that are in here I know there's a lot and just try these two settings right here you can tell what your image is currently set two at the top so if you find your image is not being displayed properly on the other platform, then change it from whatever it is here at the top to the other setting out of the two ones that have the word gamma attached. Thank you. So did we have one more question in the city? I just brought up a question when you were learning this really deeply for printing press. Did you actually go to printing press sources to really get deeper into all these adjustments within photo shop or or this photo shop actually address it at this level with their tutorials or I haven't seen stuff in the tutorials, but I don't look at the two crows that often because usually they're more basic level than what I need and so I just don't commonly, look at him. The main thing for me is I started out when I first started doing printing and printing press, working at my college newspaper and that's when we did things traditionally and in the photographic darkroom we take this thing called a dense it tom attar and we would click on the darkest part of our picture and it would measure how bright it is and we do something special called in extra flash exposure. We put dots in it, there's all sorts of things we do to compensate it. So once the digital tools became available, I just tried to figure out how can we reproduced the same end result using these tools and levels happened to be the one that has a feature I needed. So when I was doing it back when I first started doing it was back when there was no books on photo shop, there was no online at all, you know, kind of thing. And so you pretty much had to figure out on your own or from somebody just word of mouth or from praying press background. Yeah, but the printing press people pretty much didn't want to touch the digital stuff. What happened is when digital came about, the printing companies used to get a lot more business than they do now because they used to scan your image is for you and then they would give you a position only image that you're going to pace in your way, your layout, and then they would end up replacing it goes too pretty, and they would completely handle that stuff. Once digital came into being, then it became more like you're responsible for your files. We don't want to help you because that's, what we used to charge you for and now you're doing it yourself, saving all that money. So go ahead, do that, you know? And they wanted it more or less the police is my interpretation that if you mess it up, you might hire me again to do that stuff for you. There was a lot of stuff right to figure out on my own or learn just from other people at work kind of thing are there places you can direct students? Now that would like to get into this that I'm sure there are. I couldn't think of the exact resource is because I don't look them up, but I'm sure now there's some good books about that would have to do with prepping your mentions for printing. You could do a search for the word pre press means preparing for printing, and I used to have a book out called photoshopped studio techniques, but I haven't updated it for the last few versions of photo shop. But it would have some of that information in that. But I'm sure you could find some good books on it. I'm just not sure the best titles right now.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Practice Files

Reference Guide

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Ben Willmore

As a photographer, Ben Willmore has shot in all 50 states and explored over 80 countries. He has been pushing Photoshop and Lightroom Classic to their limits since the beginning.

SEE INSTRUCTOR'S CLASSES

topics covered in this class

Adobe Photoshop Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

Shannon

As always, Ben surpassed my expectations. His easy style of sharing his experience is fun and inspiring. He is completely prepared and that makes his workshops flow smoothly. I feel like he's thoroughly comfortable with Photoshop. Thank you, creativeLIVE and Ben for bringing yet another terrific workshop to the masses.

a Creativelive Student

Wow, just watched the bonus content, loved it all, particularly the color theory basics! Thanks Ben for the extra effort and thanks CL!

a Creativelive Student

this sounds like help from heaven. I dearly wish i will be able to catch up with everything Ben has to teach!

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

9:00 am - Tonal Adjustments

9:00 am - Tonal Adjustments

Lesson Info

1. 9:00 am - Tonal Adjustments

Lessons