Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing with Blending Modes

so there are all sorts of things Weaken Dio with these features. I want to let you know that there are a few issues you might run into, one of which is if I go in here and do any kind of an adjustment. It's not unique to curves. I just use curves a lot, so you'll notice me using that. It's my default. But if I darkened something, you're gonna find that often times it becomes more colorful. If I turn off this adjustment layer, watch this area. Where's noses? And if this was before and this is after it to me looks more vivid. And so sometimes I'm attempting to simply dark, and something in the fact that it becomes more vivid gets in the way. So you should be aware that whenever you use an adjustment layer and you're attempting to Onley, adjust brightness. Sometimes that'll happen, especially when darkening. The way you can prevent it is with the adjustment layer active. Go to the top your layers panel to this little menu. This is known as the blending mode menu in the blending mode menu ...

is something we have entire lesson on its part of the photo shop complete guide. And if I come down here, one of the choices in there is called luminosity. Luminosity is just another word for brightness. And so this means make this adjustment layer on lee affect the brightness and therefore don't affect the color. So if you watch that same area, I pointed out before, I'm gonna type Commands eat, undo, and I see that the nose becomes more colorful. Then I'll re apply it. And so you can see the difference of using luminosity mode versus not so. Any time you darken an image, if you notice it, become more colorful and you don't like it head straight to luminosity mode. Just make sure that the adjustment layer that was causing it is active and change it. But sometimes you like it. When I came on this image and I added contrast to this bird, it became more colorful, and I liked it, so I didn't need to change it to luminosity mode. Had I, then it wouldn't have become more colorful. Then there's a couple other things you should know about. I'm gonna come in and open a different picture and let's just start adjusting if I look at this area here. To me, it looks almost like there's a dark halo around the skylight that's there, and I'd like to brighten it up, so it's more similar to this. So I'm gonna go in and, of course, use my favorite adjustment of curves. Then I'm gonna move my mouse over to this area right here and click to measure how bright it is an added dimmer switch for it. I would like that area to end up Being approximately as bright is the area my mouse is on right now. Well, I'm not gonna click there. I'm just gonna look in curves. And if I looking curves, I see a circle that's showing me exactly how much light is in the area where my mouse is. That's what the circle is. So now I'm gonna move the dot that I added earlier, up to that height, you can move a dot whichever one is currently active. It's active if it's solid using the arrow keys on your keyboard. So I'm gonna just move that not straight up until it's about the height of that circle. The only problem is that circle moved up as I move the Datta. And that's because if you look at where the circle is that part of the curve moved up. So all I'm gonna do is once I've gotten that to approximately the height I'm thinking of, I'm going to take my mask and inverted with command. I control I am Windows and then paint this in. I need a soft edged brush because I needed to fade out. And I'm gonna now just pain in here and now the area around the skylight looks a lot more like the area over there because I put approximately the same model light and turn that off and on. And you can see it should also know that curves is useful for more than just adjusting brightness. We're gonna have a whole separate lesson on how to adjust color with curves. But here, I'm going to create a brand new curve. Before I do that, I'm gonna isolated area. Do you see the area on the right side over here? This doesn't look as yellow is. It does here in the middle or on the left, and I'd like that to look more yellow. I'm gonna isolate the area first by typing queue for quick mask painting where I want to change the image and red means what you're not gonna change. So I typed command. I control I am Windows to get it in the opposite spot so red means don't change. Well, then, that's what I want. Turn off quick mask with Q. And now let's adjust that with curves in curves. There's a pop up menu at the top. When it's set toe RGB, it means Onley adjust brightness, and if that means only adjust brightness. I'm not gonna be able to get that area to look more yellow if you click there there. There are three choices red, green and blue, and if you choose those you will be able to shift color. You'll learn a lot more about thes three. If you end up watching the lesson that is about color adjustment, that's part of the complete guide. But in that lesson, you'll learn that yellow is the opposite of blue, and so if I use less blue in here, you'll see that area becoming more yellow. Once I do, though, it looks a little too green, so I could go over here and choose green click there and bring that down to so you will be able to adjust color as well. Using curbs in. Once you get the combination of adjusting brightness, contrast and color using curves, you're gonna have dramatically more control over your images. The main thing you need to get used to is the fact that adjustment layers are the best way to apply things because they're not permanent, You could always throw him away Later. We can also use a blending mode, which is the menu found at the top of your screen to limit it so it can affect the color. And we can paint on those masks to control exactly where it affects the image. And where doesn't. Sometimes you want to use the same mask more than once, and that's the last little two bit I'll give you. I had just made the area on the right side more yellow. Now I would like to do something to brighten it or pull out detail, and I'd like to do it with a separate curve, so I'll do a new curves adjustment layer. I'm gonna move my mouse over there and let's just say I wanted to brighten this so I brighten it. But when I do, you notice the entire image changing well. I would now like this adjustment to be limited in the same way that the adjustment below it is limited. You see that this adjustment has a mask in it. This one, it's mask, is white. Well, there's a way to make this mass kind of get stacked on top of that one. And if you do, this mask will apply to it, too. How do you do that at the bottom of your adjustment layer settings for curves. Do you see this little down pointing arrow? If I use that, watch what happens in my layers panel to the layer I'm working on. It just had an arrow pointing down. That means that it's using the mask that is found down here, and I can even paint on this one to further limit it. But if you ever need to have two adjustments that affect the same area, then you could make that adjustment and click the icon that is found right here. That means use the same mask that's on the layer below. Sometimes they do that because I want to use curves in one spot in a different adjustment in that same spot, like a human saturation adjustment or something else. But now that adjustment is only affecting that area on the over on the right, because it's using the same mask. So we've been talking about tonal adjustments and adjustment layers, those air adjustments that only affect brightness and contrast in not color.

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