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Bonus Content

Lesson 9 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Color & Tone

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

9. Bonus Content

Lesson Info

Bonus Content

Well, we're back it creative live here. I'm on my day off. This studio is empty, there's not a human in this room, in fact, is getting ready for the next session, so there's actually baby ah paraphernalia in here and I just thought I would come in, since I don't fly out until late tonight and cover some of the things we didn't have time to cover over the last two days and just give you some bonus content. So what we're going to talk about is I'm going to talk about how to make your color correction a little bit more precise than what we've talked about this far. I'm going to talk about how to think about the numbers that you see in the info panel if you want to be able to glance at the info panel and just be able to tell what color it is just by looking at the numbers, instead having to actually see the color, and we'll talk about if you convert from rgb mode to see him, why I came out there, some settings involved, I just want to show you where they are, and if you want to know a litt...

le bit about them, how to think about it, so I'm just going to jump in and get started first thing I want to get into. He is one of the adjustments we used the other day was brightness and contrast and it's an adjustment that I don't use all that often because curves conduced so muchmore, but I do use it on occasion, and I wanted to show you one special instance when I find it to be overly useful on this image that I'm working with. I just want to add texture to it, so I'm gonna show you a very quick technique for creating texture, and then I'll show you how the brightness and contrast adjustment comes into play, so I'm gonna create a brand new layer by clicking on the new layer icon, the bottom of my layers panel, and I'm going to fill that new layer with any color I want, usually just white. A little shortcut is that you can fill with your foreground color by typing option delete on a mac that would be walt backspace in windows going type that right now, and I just want to put something in this layer, and there are a few filters and photoshopped that can create something out of nothing. The two filters I use most frequently for that is one that is called ad noise, and another that is called clouds. Both of them will give you semi random information that we can use as the basis for creating texture. So I'm going to start with ad noise here and I'm gonna create kind of a woven texture so I'm just going to put a bunch of noise in my image and usually this monochromatic check box has turned off the default setting would have it off where you get multicolored noise but I'm going to turn it on and then click okay and here it's hard to see what I have I'd have to zoom up to one hundred percent view to really see what's in there and now I just want to distort this noise and I could use just about any filter I'd like to distort it but I want to create a woven texture in a woven texture should have two directions you know like a horizontal part of the weave and then a vertical to do that I'll go to the blur menu and in here I'll find motion blur in all motion blur it vertically you know just bring it up until I can no longer tell it's noise instead it looks more like threads click okay and I'm gonna write back to the exact same filter a second time, which was motion blur and I'm just going to apply it at ninety degrees different from what I've done already so the angle was sent to ninety the first time I'll set it to zero this time so that it tries to blur in the opposite direction or the ninety degrees offices from that cook okay, the end result just looks like a blurry mass, but all I need to do is go to the image menu and there's a choice called auto contrast by using that it's going to make sure the brightest part of the image goes toe white darkest part goes to black and I should get my texture. So right now we have a texture of maybe burlap or something like that. The final step that I usually do in creating a texture is too apply the embossed filter and what's special about the embossed filter. Now we get a little bit of our we've is it produces a tremendous amount of fifty percent gray that's, the main gray that's in here and when I have that fifty percent grey at the top of my layers panel we have are blending mod menu and there's a set of blending modes a whole section, the section right in here where fifty percent gray simply goes away. So if I use that I could get this texture, apply it to my image and see the image through it. Well, that doesn't have to do with our adjustments so much, but having this kind of an image, any image where the last thing you did was applied the embossed filter where you have a tremendous amount of fifty percent gray brings in a special problem I want to maintain that fifty percent grey if I ever adjust this texture and if I come in here and use traditional adjustments like levels, moving, any one of the sliders and levels will make it so the main gray that's in here is no longer fifty percent, regardless of which slaughter you move it's going to mess it up if I want to keep maintain that fifty percent grey if I do it with curves, I would have to click in the center of my curve for fifty percent gray is represented, and then I could adjust the rest of the image, but I'd have to be careful to never move that middle dot this is where brightness and contrast becomes overly useful if I choose image adjustments, brightness and contrast with brightness and contrast, I can bring up my contrast slider and if you look at it fifty percent gray stays at fifty percent grey it's the areas that are brighter in the areas that are darker, that are being adjusted but fifty percent gray stays consistent so that's useful any time you've implied the embossed filter and you're using one of those blending modes that makes fifty percent greg go away so it's important that you keep fifty percent great being where it wass with this, you'll find you've a limited amount that you can adjust, you can't add all that much contrast so there is a another feature in here there's a check box called use legacy if I turned that on this dialog box acts like really old versions of photo shop back when this adjustment was not good on normal photographs but it was really good on textures so now if I bring up contrast I should be able to go much further not that I want to go as far as it can but it makes it so it's more powerful and I can get us much of that texture out as I'd like so most of the time when I'm adjusting this I'm not looking at just the texture instead I've had the bloody mode changed in my layers panel to choice like overlay are hard line and then I want to emphasize or tone down that texture so I come over here to image adjustments brightness and contrast turn on used legacy and now I can add contrast to the texture or oftentimes reduce it to get it just the way I like so I wanted described when would you use use legacy because we skipped over that during class and just wind is this align with other features and photo shop so that would have to do with adding texture to your image any time used the embossed filter and you are applying it in one of the bloody modes that are in the same general grouping as hard light mode now let's move on next thing I'd like to talk about is color correction we have done color correction the other day but in doing so we didn't have that much time to talk about it and so I wanted to show you how to refine that and results that you end up with when we were in the curves dialog box in curves we had little eyedropper tools when you move your mouse on top of the image with one of these eyedropper tools and you click with default settings photoshopped looks at a single pixel at the exact area where you click the problem is if your image is noisy grainy you might click on a little speck of noise which doesn't really represent the overall area you're clicking on so if you look at the top of your screen when you have those eyedropper tools active there's a setting and the upper left the default setting is point sample which means look at a single pixel if I click there you can tell it to look at an area instead in average of color that's in that area so three by three average is much better than point sample because then if there's any little speck of dust or noise it should be averaged into its surroundings if you work on higher resolution images you might want to use by by five average so it takes a larger area five pixels lied five pixels tall and average is it and that can end up making this a little bit better when you click so that it averages in any kind of random variation in the pixels. The other thing you can do with these I droppers is when you go to them and either levels or curves you khun double click on any of the eye droppers. Let's say a double click on the white one and that's going to bring up well, usually dialog box there goes, but it didn't double click fast enough, I guess, but if you double click on an eyedropper, it'll bring up the color picker, and you can tell it exactly how bright to make the area that you're clicking on. So the way I think about it is when I'm looking for the brightest part of my picture there's one thing that I ignore and that is what's known as a speculum highlight it's speculum highlight is something that reflects light, just like a mirror, like the windshield of a car, or the bright highlights in water or chrome bumper anywhere where the light source will be reflected directly or light sources themselves. If it's something that would be so bright, it would hurt your eyes to look into it like the noonday sun, I would ignore those areas, and I would go for the first thing that should truly have detail because those really bright light sources and the reflections look best if they have no detail and so I look for the brightest thing that possibly should have a little detail in it. The problem is when I click with the white eye dropper it will force the area I click on toe white and that means I'll lose the detail in it so what I can do is double click on the white eyedropper coming here if I click on the setting that's next to the letter b in hsb that's the brightness I could use the up and down a rookie's here too dark in that up just a little bit to make it so the area that I click on with white eyedropper does not go to solid white instead it goes to a slight shade of grey, meaning that they're still detail in it if you're going to reproduce your image on a printing press, I would glance over at the scene why cain numbers usually the lightest shade that you can reproduce on a lot of printing presses is about three percent so what I would do is click here in the number that's next to the letter b which stands for brightness used the down arrow key and I'm just looking at the numbers where it says see him like a knowing that if any numbers show up that are below three they might disappear by the time this goes onto a printing press, so I'm going to continue to hit the down arrow key until whatever numbers air their hit at least three right there. Now what I'm doing is I'm making sure when I click with white eyedropper that the area I click on is going to have detail and it's enough detail to still be there once this gets onto a printing press, if you're not pointing to a printing press, you could go for a lighter shade than this, but this is fine as well for other purposes in desktop printers and all that would be just fine. So what I've done is I double clicked on the white eye dropper to get to this color picker. I clicked on the number next to the letter b an hsb used the down arrow key until whatever numbers were showing up in san why kay went to at least three, and that way from now on, I can save these as my defaults. Yes, and now every time I use that eye dropper, I'm going to make sure there's detail in the area that I click on. You might think you need a double click on the black eye dropper to get a color picker and limit the amount of ink that's there, because if he used too much in kind of printing press, it doesn't drive fast enough and you just got too much ink absorbing into the paper but photoshopped does something they're automatically so if you look on the black choice and you look the scene why cain numbers do not say a hundred instead they're automatically being limited we'll talk in a little bit about where that happens and how that's determined so there's no need to change the black eye dropper also no need to change the gray eyedropper because all we wanted to do is balance the colors and it already does that so it's on ly the white eye dropper that I might need to think about so that's enough about color correction now let's look at one issue we can run into when trying to match colors into different areas the other day we talked about taking an image and making it so a tan line would go away. Well sometimes what I'm doing is trying to take a color from one image enforce it into another for instance let's say I really like this tan skin tone here and I wanted to use it in this photo all he would need to do to accomplish that is to get the info panel open move my mouse on top of the tone that I like and write down the numbers that appear in the info panel you know the rgb numbers and then just as we did the other day I could make an adjustment in photo shop where I have photoshopped measure the color that's in my image and I type in for output the numbers that I want to match which would be the numbers I get off of this skin if you do that between two separate documents there's something you need to think about and that is those numbers are dependent on something that's known as the color space that your image is in if you go to the bottom of your document there's usually some numbers listed down there and if you click on the triangle that's right next to it one of the choices that you have is called document profile and you'll see something in there that's either going to say s rgb adobe rgb or pro photo and you need to make sure that that setting matches between the two documents if that setting doesn't match between the two documents than the numbers that you're using are not a precise description of that color unless that setting matches so let's go to the other document I have no idea what it has set ah they are different that's just by chance this one says s rgb the other one says pro photo so if you're ever going to use rgb numbers you're going to take them out of one document in use them in another we need to make sure that that setting called document profile matches between the two documents so here's what I would do to make sure that's the case I would go to the document you're trying to change I would glance down at the bottom if I have this such a show me document profile I'd see what it's set to s rgb then I would go to the document that I want to take my numbers out of I'd go to the edit menu and I would choose a choice called convert to profile in convert to profile will see many settings but we only have to look at one in convert to profile right here where it says destination space we want to click here in choose whatever the other document was set too so I'm going to choose a choice called s rgb then I'll click okay in now if I look at the bottom of that document it's setting that's down here is the same as the setting for the other picture and therefore those two pictures are thinking about color in the same way and therefore the rgb numbers will be consistent between the two documents and it will work perfectly fine. What that setting really means is when you talk about rgb numbers in your info panel that setting defines what color of red what color of green in what color of blue your image is actually made out of the one called pro photo would make use very vividly colored red greens and blues the one called s rgb would use mellower red greens and blues, so the numbers, when you say I want one hundred percent red, we'll represent a different color, depending on what that is, as long as we get them, so the two are set to the exact same thing, then we can share the numbers between documents. We didn't run into that when we had art class, because we always chose the colors that we wanted to use from within the same document that we're trying to adjust, and so therefore the numbers were perfectly fine. I just want to make sure that you know how to use them between documents. Now I want to show you a trick for sharpening your image. We're not going to get that deep into sharpening because we've already talked about sharpening in a previous class, but I want to show you just a little trick that will allow you to use higher sharpening settings without it looking bad. Whenever I sharpen an image, I zoom up to one hundred percent view. Otherwise the sharpening is so subtle you're not going to notice it if you're zoomed out to viewing the images a hole. And so here I have the image of like to sharpen and before I sharpen my image is what I usually do is convert them into a smart object. In this works, even if you have multiple layers in your image, the only thing is you have to select all the layers first, so if you have a multi layer document, goto the select menu and there'd be a choice called all layers. This image only contains a background layer doesn't have any extra layers so that's great out, but if I had a more complex image that's what I'd choose secondly, goto the filter menu and choose convert for smart filters when I do that, if you watching my layers panel, you'll find that the thumbnail for the layer I'm working on will change and it will get an extra icon on top of it. That little icon is the only indication that you have a smart object the reason I turned my image into a smart object before sharpening it is by doing so I can make it to the settings for sharpening are not permanent instead there's something I can come back to it anytime and I can modify the settings so therefore if I make a prince and I find it's too sharp, I could just go back and reduce the sharpening, whereas if I apply the sharpening directly to the image and I save and close it there's no way to undo that sharpening but if you do with a smart object is just a setting attached to the layer and I can easily change it later, so now I'm going to go to the filter menu to sharpen and if you look within this menu on ly the choices that have three periods after it, I will ask you for settings the other settings without the periods are generic settings there like presets instance, I want control over my sharpening I'm gonna limit myself to the bottom two I use a gn sharp mask when I have pictures of people where their faces are prominent within the scene because there's a feature in there called threshold, which will allow me to keep the skin smooth and not exaggerate little wrinkles in other things that would make people look older. If I don't have people in my picture, then I choose smart sharpened since this image doesn't have any people all you smart sharpen in here I'm going right now use a higher setting than usual just to make it obvious whatthe sharpening is doing to the image try to make it easy to see. In fact I'll bump up my radius just a little bit to make it even easier to see. Now if you look at the sharpening you look really close your image you will find that there is a bright halo around the edges of dark objects that's because the way sharpening works is it finds the edge of an object in which ever edge is brighter, it brightens whichever edge is darker, it darkens if I choose undo it's really easy to see the bright halo that it's added it's really difficult to notice the dark halo that it adds on the opposite side of that object the opposite edge. So I want to show you a way of reducing the bright halos so that you can get away with stronger sharpening settings because it's the dark halos that we wanted overemphasize and so let's see what we can do. What I'm going to do is apply the smart, sharpened filter twice. All I'll do is go back to the filter menu to sharpen again and smart sharpen I'll use the exact same settings and I'll just click okay if you look at my layers panel now, you see too smart sharpened filters applied to this layer. Well, if you look to the right of each one, you'll find a symbol I wanted double click on that symbol when I do this comes up and I can tell it what blending mode to use. I'm going to set one of those two to darken mode and that's going to control on ly the dark halos that it adds to the image and I'm going to keep those at one hundred percent strength, then I'm going to double click on that little symbol again for the second sharpening, which is here and I'm going to set it toe lighten mode so that this particular application of the filter on ly control's words lightened the picture. I'm going to change the opacity from one hundred down to fifty, and that way, the bright halos that show up within this image will be at half strength, so they won't be is noticeable by doing that, sharpening the image twice, making one of the sharpens being dark and mode at one hundred percent capacity and the second one enlightened mode. At fifty percent capacity. You can get away with stronger sharpening your your picture because it's, usually the bright halos that become distracting, but by doing it this way, those bright halos will be at half strength, so you can go to hire sharpening settings before the bright halos become distracted. Here. I've over sharpen the image to give you a better ah feeling for what it is, but we choose undo enough times where he might be able to see the difference. Here is a single application of sharpening, and you can see the bright halo here is two applications is sharpening, where the highlights or the the bright halos are at half strength before after by toning down those bright halos, the sharpening is less obvious. This isn't the most ideal image, but I just need to work on some image to show you and I used higher sharpening settings tonight would usually use just to make it easy to see, but I wanted to share with you that tip. Then, if you decide you need to make changes to your image later on, you can go in your layers panel, and if you make a print, decide it's too sharp, you could double click on the word smart, sharpen in, lower your settings, and you can lower it separately for the highlights and the shadows of that sharpening. Also, if you need to make changes to your picture, just double click on the thumbnail for your picture, and if you do, the original uncharted picture will show up in a separate document, and you could go in there and re touch or do anything you need to to that document, you're going to see it in an uncharted state, and I could come over here and maybe try to get rid of this building at the bottom and what's. Nice is, if you save and close this, you're not saving, enclosing it into on our onto your hard drive. Instead, you're gonna end up saving and closing it into its original document where's, a smart object and the sharpening will simply update to reflect the changes you've made, so I go to the file menu to save and then I'll close that document, and now this one that sharpened updated it's kind of weird to think about though choosing save and not having a go on your hard drive. Instead, you're saving it back into the original smart object that you got it out of so that's a little tip for sharpening, sharpened twice with dark and motor one hundred percent lightened mode at fifty percent. Now let's, look at what happens when you convert to seeing why came out if I open any picture doesn't really matter which one if I go to image mode, c m y k, I would on lee do that if I was going to go to a printing press, not just a small printer I'm sending to my image out to where I get ten copies I mean what you're spending for two thousand copies or ten thousand or one hundred thousand, where it's a real printing press, a commercial press, then you want to end up in seeing why came out? Well, when you convert to see why came out, it just seems to magically do it. But there's a lot of settings behind the scenes and it's important to know where they are in case you need to change them if I go to the edit menu and I come down there's, a choice called color settings in color settings. There's a lot of little menus, but we only need to pay attention to one of them on that menu is the one labeled si m y k if I click on that pop up menu, here is where I choose what type of printing this image will be used for should be prepped for and it's dramatically different in the setup, depending on the kind of printing if you print on a newspaper, you're pretty in a very inexpensive paper that absorbs a lot of ink, so you need to limit the amount of anklets used as you go to more expensive paper coated papers and presses that are higher quality, you end up being able to print smaller dots and put mohr ink on the paper because the paper doesn't absorb is much it's, not like a paper towel where it really absorbs and spreads out. Instead, the interest kind of sits in there and doesn't spread out very much so you need to choose a proper setting here and it's really, depending on the kind of printing you do it's best if you talk to your printing company because they know what kind of paper you're printing with and what kind of press that's going on and they could tell you what settings to use here, or they can supply you with a custom profile. If you ask them for a color profile for their press, if they can provide one, you can choose it from this menu if they don't provide it. Some old school shops will instead tell you some settings to type in, and I want to show you where those settings could be typed in, and just a little bit about what they mean. If you ask you're pretty company for how you should convert to see why came out and they give you a bunch of settings, go to the top of this menu and that's where you going to find a choice called custom seemed like a causes this dialog box to appear and let's take a look at firstly of ink colors. If I click here, we have a bunch of different choices because they use different set of science, magenta, yellow and black inks that very a little bit between the u s between asian countries and in europe. And so here you can tell it what to use most publications in the u s as far as I know you swamp I think that means standards for web offset printing, but you need to dial in what type of ink they use, depending on what country you're printing in, then we have a choice called got game. In with doc and you're trying to describe how much is the ink going absorb into the sheet of paper and spread out just like when you pour a little bit of coffee and a paper towel it doesn't just sit where he poured it it spreads out of his absorbs in what they do is they take a little square of fifty percent gray and they printed off on the edge of the sheet where the crop marks our registration marks are and they can measure how much darker that fifty percent grave becomes if that fifty percent gray becomes seventy percent gray when it actually gets printed on the kind of paper you're going to use, the difference between what you started with what he ended up with so fifty versus seventy would be how much dot game you had and you could type that number in right here for docking that's a number that most printer should know but they will need to know what kind of paper you're printing on then we have some other choices in here we have separation type gcr or ucr well, I don't know if you remember but we talked about color correction and we talked about color in general I mentioned that equal amounts of red, green and blue makes gray and what that means is if you ever look at the numbers and the info panel whatever the lowest number is you could remove all of that color and an equal amount of the other two in those three since they're equal or balanced him out, you're taking out could be replaced with black ink because equal amounts of red, green and blue makes gray black ink makes gray, so when it looks at your image and says, you're trying to convert to see and why came out, it could look at the numbers in the info panel and say how much of this particular color contains an equal amount of red, green and blue? It takes just that amount, says let's, take it out and let's replace that with black ink to save some money and that's what gcr and ucr controls. What these letters stand for is gray component replacement in under color removal, and if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I've had to deal with these most the time I get profiles from my pretty cos gcr is going to remove that stuff in, replace it with black throughout your entire picture, where is the choice called? Ucr is going to do it on lee, where you have neutral gray, meaning only where there's no color ucr could be useful if you have let's say, screen shots for a book and it's a screenshot of this exact dialogue box. Well, I might want to make it so that this gray area within the interface gets mainly reproduced with black ink, so I could go over there until it to use ucr otherwise, for most photographs, I think gcr is gonna look better. Then you could ask what kind of black generation they would like, which is pretty much how much is it going to take out the colors that would usually print with and replace it with black hank? How aggressively will do that you'll find the lighter this is, the more rich your shadows will look, because you have more in kingdom you have science, a gentle yellow, and just a little bit of black. As you bring this to heavy, you're going to tell it to on ly use black ink in your shadows in no science, a gentle and yellow since that's lesson, it won't look quite as rich medium is the default, which is fine for most images, then it needs to limit the amount of ink that's used when you're on the printing press, so that not too much absorbs in the sheet, and so that the paper or the ink dries fast enough. So when it comes out of the printing press and the next sheet comes out above, it comes down on touches, but the ink is dry enough on the first sheets so that the ink doesn't transfer to the next sheet that comes out in, comes down and touches it, and it does that here with two settings first there's black, inclement in black, inclement is going to limit how much black you can use. Can I go all the way up to a hundred percent or not? I want to limit that in total inclement, which is if you add together the amount of science magenta, yellow and black ink what's the total aiken get, because if I have four colors event can I used one hundred percent of all four that would be four hundred percent in coverage. That would be way too much ink to have that in dry properly and the ducks and drive fast enough, the ink will transfer to some of the rollers on the printer, and when it comes out, the end of the next sheet comes out and comes down and touches it. The ink will be so wet that it'll transfer to the sheet above, so the total inclement here could be set. And the default, I believe, is three hundred and that's okay for some types of printing. But if you end up putting out a newspaper, you're probably gonna end up having to bring it down to more like two forty. Some printing companies will want youto limit it even with like normal publications like magazines and such where they'll find three hundred b a little bit high more like two eighty is a bit more common as you print on mork oded papers more high quality printing you can push this up if you're going to go with really high quality paper you might well bring it up two three twenty I doubt you would bring it beyond about three forty but it's best to talk to your printing company because they know better about the type of paper you're working on and how much ink that paper can handle then here is a choice called uch amount on dh if you ever come up here until it with black generation that you wanted to pull out quite a bit of black you see a stands for under color addition and this will push a little bit of ink a little bit of science magenta and yellow back into your shadows to make them look a bit richer and so if you ever end up in here with medium or heavy for your setting you might want to bring up just a little bit to give you a little bit more richness in your shadows but this is used whenever you convert to seem why came out it's important that it's set up before you go to the image menu choose mode in convert over to seem like a it's not something that most designers are photographers or overly into but it's something that is going to ensure that your printing on the printing press looks appropriate so you could do is take a screenshot of this dialog box, email it to your printer and say, what should I put in here for my particular kind of printing that I'm going to do with you? And then you can set it up for what they want and make sure it's going to give you a good result. But you want to do that before you ever go over here to see my came out once you've converted to seem like a those settings air already been used in your image, and they've radically changed the way their picture is constructed in order to apply different settings you'd have in general, convert backto rgb and then right back to seem like a you can re applied, but it would be less than ideal. It would be best to start with your rgb image, change those settings and then convert to seem like a let's look at some other ideas. I'd like to show you a bit about how you can think about the numbers that make up your image, so if you look in the info palette and you see a set of numbers instead of them feeling like just something you ignore or something you blindly accept as just describing a color you might be able to look at them in have a much better sense for what color they're describing without even looking at your picture that we have somebody has a set of numbers written down on a sheet of paper you could glance at him and say, oh that's a green color that's pretty saturated or you could you know, just have a general idea first let's look at the h s b numbers so here's a color wheel contains all the covers you could have in photo shop except for the dark ones I didn't put this going to black on the edge I could have but anyway this is the whole spectrum of colors let's simplify that and just talk about the most saturated colors to begin with and then let's take that and look at it when it comes to degrees here we have a color wheel and so it's a circle let's just say the top is considered zero degrees because when you look at the hsb numbers, the number for hugh which describes the basic color you're working with is a degree and so zero degrees is red then imagine you travelled around the color wheel going counterclockwise if you went counterclockwise and you got over here compared to where you started that would be ninety degrees you're in a ninety degree angle from where you started well, if you ever see a number this is ninety for hugh you're talking about a greenish yellow color if you see a number that's more like one eighty, you have a scion color if you see a number around to seventy more have a bluish purple and again you get up to zero and you're at red you could just fill in all the numbers in between and get as precise as he'd want if you were to simply memorize or right down what all of these numbers represent, you could just say on a sheet of paper leah post it note that zero equals red forty five equals yellow ninety equals greenish one thirty five equals this and so on if you write that down on a sheet of paper and eventually committed to memory, then whenever you see hsb numbers and you look at the number for hugh, you'll know that if the numbers between zero in forty five it's a reddish yellow color the closer it is to forty five the more of a yellow color this the closer it is to zero the more of a red color and you could do the same thing with everything else but just remembering eat colors in the numbers that associate with them could make it so you glance at any color when they come to hsb numbers and you'd have a general idea of what the basic color is, then you look at the saturation setting to see how colorful that is, and you look at the brightness setting to see how bright or dark it is in the three put together would make it so you might be able to visualize that color just by looking at the numbers, but you'd have to write down these angles and what they represent. If you commit that to memory, then you can glance at those colors just by the numbers and the info panel and know what it's talking about. Doing that with the rgb numbers is a little bit more complicated, but let's, take a look, so here we have all the colors we could create in photo shop and let's, just simplify that by looking at just the base colors in ignoring how bright or dark they are, then let's, take that color wheel and simplify it further into just a little rim because it's really the same colors, going all the way to the middle and let's, take that color wheel and simplify it by straightening it out. All we're going to do is slice it right here and then straighten it out, so if you look, we have red on the left side. We also have read on the right side so you could bend this into a circle and you'd end up with the image on the left let's try to further simplify that well, if we take all those shades let's just get fewer colors out of it and we could get even fewer colors out of that, so we're going to see how these particular colors down here could be defined in once we figure out those will move our way backwards to try to figure out how to make everything else so here's our base set of colors we're talking about red, green and blue and so the little squares for literally red, green and break blue are pretty easy to figure out because the square for red should have one hundred percent read in none of the other colors in it. The one for blue should contain one hundred percent blue and none of the other colors and the one for green obviously would be one hundred percent green in none of the other colors I mentioned before that the opposite of red, green and blue is science, magenta and yellow, and so we could easily define how much science magenta and yellow would be used for these because it lines up with what we're using one hundred per cent magenta here one hundred percent science there, one hundred percent yellow there but to figure out the equivalent in rgb mode we have to look in the info panel and remember that the opposites are directly across from each other. So if I want to think about how much science magenta and yellow is in any particular area I just take the opposite of the red, green and blue so in here, if I look if we usually need a hundred percent red red is the opposite of science. We have one hundred percent of this. That means we can have none of its opposite if we have no green with that really means is we're using one hundred per cent magenta toe absorb that green since they're the exact opposites, these numbers where we had red, green and blue will be exactly the opposite for science, magenta and yellow so we could do the same thing here or where it was easy to determine how much ink to use. We could just take the opposite of these to fill in how you would make it in rgb mode. Take the opposite of this to find out how would you make it an rgb mode and so on until we got all of those. But then we have the colors in between. And so how the heck did we make those? Well look at the rgb numbers for red use one hundred percent red to make it look at the rgb numbers for the color over here and just look at what makes them different what is different between these two? Well both of them have one hundred percent red in it and both of them have zero percent green. The only difference is this one the left has zero blew one of the right has one hundred. So what would be halfway in between that well, wouldn't it be fifty percent? And if I do that with any of these where I just look at what's this color what's that color in what would be halfway between those numbers I could type in exactly what's needed to create those other colors it's just a mix of red, green and blue instead of using them at one hundred percent and then of course I could simply take the opposite of all those to figure out the scene like a numbers take each one just type in the opposite and we could do the exact same thing to create all the other colors there in between. But in general we have one hundred percent read one hundred percent blue and one hundred percent green. And here if we have magenta it's if you want to know the rgb numbers just take the opposite of what you'd usually use and see m y k and you could figure out what all of these are what's in between is simply a variation that's halfway in between the other colors so the rgb numbers would take a little bit to get used to but you can after working with them for quite some time be able to glance at those colors to figure out what's going on now to get brighter and darker and rgb mode unlike in hsb where all you have to do is change the brightness setting let's look at what we have to do to get brighter and darker shades so if this is our most vivid blue that would be one hundred percent blue being used in rgb in order to make it brighter just look at the numbers that we have what's the on ly thing we could do well, we can't take blue any higher but we could take red and blue higher and if I bring that up I'll just increase the other two colors to get a brighter shade of it you could look at this in remember that equal amounts of red, green and blue makes gray don't even use the word gray just think changes the brightness so fifty fifty and fifty is what's making this a certain brightness level and then the extra in the blue is what's giving it its color to make this darker look at the numbers that we have what's the only thing we could do to make a darker we can't bring red or green in the lower but we could take blue and bring it down and so this is how photoshopped makes brighter shades in darker shades so you could reproduce all the colors you've seen the rainbow using science magenta yellow or using red, green and blue and the numbers and the info palate will reflect how let's put together the more you think about it and just get used to those numbers, the more useful they become even if you don't know how to think about him completely, you can'tjust blatantly use them like we did in class where you write down the numbers in the info palette in an essence you're running down that color, then you could use curves in any other document and just sample in area within your picture to say that's, what you want to change and type in the numbers you want a match for output, you can shift something any color you like just keep in mind that the color space of both documents would have to match in order to get those numbers to really mean the same thing. So those are the general concept that I didn't have chance to cover in class or things that I think just wouldn't have helped during class because they would have gotten your brain too full to be able to absorb any of the other things that we've talked about, but I wanted to sneak in here on my day off I fly out today and I thought, I just record some bonus content for those of you that have purchased the class. I want to thank you guys for purchasing the class. And remember, I'll have mohr sessions in the photo shop. Mastery serious to come, so be sure you look for my name on creative live and see the list of my upcoming classes. Otherwise, thanks for coming.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Practice Files
Reference Guide

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!

Student Work

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