Lessons

Lesson Info

Fixing Extreme Problems

Let's get into other ideas. Here's just kind of a random idea that I want to share with you, because something I use quite frequently for all sorts of different applications, that is, on occasion, I'll run into color issues within a picture in the picture I'm opening right now is an HDR image were so I shot out of a serious of images, combined them together, and I used camerata processing the same process I showed you previously. And it's a relatively extreme brightness range because we have the blue sky up above and we're underground here, and it's quite dark down here in right where the sun that's coming down this opening falls onto the wall. There's an extreme transition between mega bright in pretty dark, and if we look closer at that, I can see almost like a little mini rainbow of colors. If you guys can see that well or not, but I can see the yellow ish in there. I can see a purplish and some other things on occasion. You run into little bitty color problems like that. Sometimes ...

it's something where it's a lens flare in the lens flares green, and it would be fine as far as it being a slightly brighter area, but the green part makes it distracting. So here's a little tip. I'm not sure how it's going to solve this image. I've never adjusted this image for this, but he came to mind when I saw it. If I create a brand new empty layer and in that empty layer, I come over here and grab my paintbrush tool, get a small brush. I can pick one of the surrounding colors. There's a little trick, and that is any time you're in the paint brush tool, you can hold on the option key all time. Windows can click anywhere, and you'll grab that color to paint with all it's doing is setting your foreground color. Then I could come in here and paint on that layer, and I'm just going to blatantly putting paint on top of my picture. But that paint is contained in its own layer. What I would like to do is have that paint determined the color of what's underneath it, but not changed the brightness of what's there. So what that means is I'm gonna change the blending mode that's up here to one of two choices. The first choice I could use is Hugh. Hugh would change the basic color, but not the saturation of the color mean it can't make the image more colorful or less colorful. It's just going to shift the color. So we had blue. It's gonna make it cream color or something. So choose Hue and let's see what that's done to the image. I'll paint a little bit more in there so I could make sure I got it across that range. But if I hide this layer before and after, I can see a slight change. Do you see a little bit less than pinky stuff in there when he turned on and off? If you doesn't do it, then I might change the saturation. Saturation will change both the basic color and how colorful it is to make it just as colorful is what I painted with. So when it changed its saturation, they're not saturation. Sorry color. Get into the right choice there. Now we're gonna get a bigger change to the image because it's also changing saturation. Do you see how you no longer see that rainbow of colors that was in there. So sometimes they end up with really weird little color issues for unknown reasons in certain areas of my picture. And so sometimes I'll come in, I'll create a brand new empty layer. I'll set the blending mode of the layer to color, and then I'll grab my paintbrush and with my paintbrush, hold down the option key Alton windows to temporarily access my eyedropper tool. And I'll say, Let me grab this color down here and then I'll paint it across an area where I saw some color issues, and it will make it so. It's closer to the color I painted with, but it's not gonna change the brightness. And so I can do that in a bunch of different areas. Either sample the colors in here. If you want to change it to that, remember, it's not gonna change brightness, though, or sample the color outside if you'd prefer to shift towards that. But did you guys were you able to see it down here where we used to have a little more range color? That's something that can annoy you if you don't know how to do it, and that could just as easily be a lens flare that's a certain color. You wanted to be the color of the surrounding. You could always dark in the lens, flare with curves as I showed you on the image of the vintage trailer and then come in with a layer set the color mode. Sample one of the colors from around it and just paint over it in the color would shift so that if he needed it to be something other than what it waas, you can easily do that. See if I can find, I'll show you another use for that. If you have anything that's already in color like a car, you can create a brand new layer, and what I would use for a car is I would set it to color. Then you could click on your foreground color and pick your favorite color, whatever it may be. And if you change this menu to hew, hew will change. Only the basic color of whatever you paint over will not change. The brightness will not change how colorful and let's see what happens. They get a bigger brush here and just start painting right on top of this. Now it looks like it might just be getting blue paint. But look at what happens when I go to that highlight that is on the corner of the car, and I come over this way. They go over this way. It's not just putting blue paint on it. It's shifting the color of the car to the color and painting with without changing the brightness so I could come in here. And if I want a blue truck. All I have is a layer with its blending modes set to Hugh and I'm painting on it. Get any color you want. You can even use the Grady in tool. Get a rainbow colored car if you want. I mean, it's not limited to one color. If I were to set this to saturate are not saturation color. Sometimes it's not gonna look right because it's going to make the car just as colorful as the color I painted with. And the problem with that is usually dark. Areas of your picture contain less color in same with really bright areas of your picture contains less color, and we center the color. You get the same amount everywhere, and it usually looks really artificial, but he was what you can use if you'd like to change the basic color. So all he did is create a brand new layer, changing the menu to Q. In paint you want change color. Somebody's eyes do the same thing as long as their eyes already have color. Hugh will not put color into an area that doesn't have it already. And so if I do that again, we actually choose. Undo here. Watch what happens when I paint across the headlights, the headlights. If you look at him, too, they contain any color, if anything, just a hint of blue. Maybe, but in general, none also the area here in the area where the bumper is. So when I paint there, I'm painting right now doesn't look like anything is happening. But once I get down below that to where there was some color, you'll see it happen so it cannot make something more colorful or less colorful than what it waas. So any areas that are chrome or white or gray aren't gonna change unless your image has a color cast. It needs to be coming. Correct. All right, let's look at a few other things we can accomplish. Sometimes I want to create a stylistic looking an image. I don't want to look like a normal photo. And this one you see here are out of touch That out. This one, um, is one where I wanted to have a stylish look look. And so what I'd like to dio is get the colors to look a bit different than usual. So I'm gonna come in here and do a black and white adjustment layer, which is gonna pull all the color out of my image. Then I want that black and white toe Onley affect the dark part of the picture. There's nothing in here that allows me to do that as faras in the adjustment itself. But I can easily make it only affect the dark part of the image. What I end up doing is I go to the bottom of my layers panel. I click on the letters F X and I choose blending options. Remember these sliders? Didn't we use them to make the dark parts of clouds go away? And I think we used him for a couple other things. Well, in this case, when the layer that's active is an adjustment layer. The ones called this layer thinks of whatever the end result of that adjustment is whatever your picture looks like a za result of your adjustment, whereas underlying layer thinks about what's underneath it, which would usually be the original picture. In this particular case, it's not critical which one of these two I work with, because the result of this adjustment is similar to the original. When it comes to brightness, I'm going to bring up the slider. Actually, the other slider to let we'll see what happens. This side. I'm gonna bring it up and you notice how bright part of the images getting color to come back in. What it's doing? Is this a saint? Hide the bright part of whatever this is adjustment did so that I can see the original. It's underneath, so I'm gonna bring it up until I start getting color in their face. But then the transition between where there's color and where there isn't is abrupt, and I want to smooth one. So I hold on the option key Ultima windows and I split the slider in half and further part of get these softer, more gradual transition and usually the more natural it would look. So I'm going to click, OK, and then I'll choose. Undo, and I'll show you the difference. That's black and white everywhere. This was black and white only in the shadows, and here is the full color image. So you see what's happening in the shadows. Ignore the blue down here that I had to put that on there so you couldn't read what's there. Um, but you see how dark things are going towards black and white, and that can help, especially when you have people in it, because people's faces air, usually a lot brighter than a lot of their surroundings. And by doing this you can make it so the faces stand out because a lot of the other things were going black and white. But I want to do more than that, so I'm going to open a texture. This texture is just a picture of a concrete wall. That's it. So I'll use the move tool click within this, and I'll drag to the other tab where mother document ISS, and then dragged back down in Adobe will give you so many warnings about so many technical things that most of them don't matter whatsoever. That most the time you click that and say Yes, I wanted to proceed because most the times the options that is presenting with you. If you were to click the OK button, it just means retain the appearance of my picture, meaning that's exactly what you want. So ignore that little low warning I got. What that warning was saying was you dragged something from an eight bit image into a 16 bit image. It doesn't matter now that I have this on its own layer. I've dragged it over there. I'm gonna change the blending mode of it by clicking appear. And with these blending modes, there's an entire grouping of modes right in here that are relatively good for applying texture to an image. The key to using those modes where the texture is that the texture should not be overly bright or overly dark. It should be a medium brightness, because what all of the modes do in this general area is anything in that layer that it will be 50% gray halfway between black and white is going to disappear so you can see your picture. Anything that is darker than 50% gray will dark in your picture. Anything is brighter than 50%. Gray will brighten your picture, so the key is to start with a texture that is medium brightness. And so I'm gonna set the Stover light and let's see what happens. If I turn this layer off a little eyeball, you'll see before I put the texture in and after. And if you're texture is ends up brightening or darkening your images dramatically. You can always adjust the brightness of the texture, just brighten or darken it until it's a medium brightness, and then it won't affect it as much. Now, after applying the texture to the image, though, I would rather have the faces look normal. So what I would end up doing is adding a mask to that. So click the layer mask icon. Then I'll grab my paintbrush and I'll just paint right where the faces are to say, remove the texture from here. And so by doing that, I could get a picture. It looks a little bit more interesting if the texture happens to be too much, then just click on the opacity at the top of your screen and lower it. You'll lessen the effect, so if you click there and bring it down slowly bring it up to control how much you have. So let's see the difference between the original photo and this one that has black and white shadows and a slight texture makes sense. So there are some techniques that I apply to a lot of images to get. Ah, certain look to them. And these are some of what the actions are that came with the course. If you purchase the course, you would be able to open your actions by going to the window menu and choosing actions. And in there you would find a bunch of actions. They all in general start with the word Ben or bends, and they would show up within the actions panel. You go to the window menu to find the actions panel. In there, you'll find some under bends Creative. Here's one called Anti Color. If I click on it, then at the bottom of my actions panel, there's a play, but it looks like a triangle pointing towards the right. I click that and it will play the action and it gives me a particular look and sets it up. So it's easy for me to lessen the effect. Zoom out on this thing. The way I can lessen the effect is lower the a pass ity of the result resulting folder. So let's bring it down here and see what I can do with this particular effect. This could make it look as if the colors are a little more subdued in your image. It can feel a little bit more like an old photos. Look to it, and I apply that a lot to images, often times a lower the opacity like I don't have done here. And then I'll paint with black wherever I want your ID ago because then the color will go back to the original, where that waas and it could help direct the viewer's eye there. Here's another one called soft contrast, which gives it a kind of a soft glowy feeling, usually to way too much when you first apply it on the lower the opacity. I'll hit play, and I'm supposed to bring up this slider here in median until I can't see any fine detail way down. I would see the fine detail. Bring this up a bit, and I lose to find stuff in that. It gives me a different look. If I turn off the eyeball for that folder, you'll see before and after and again. Usually I have to lower the opacity on it, lessening, just putting a little hint of it. So if you end up getting the course, you'll have a bunch of actions that do these various effects. I just thought I'd play. A few of them justly have some sense of what's in there. We've been having a lot of questions about them. If you ever have a photo that looks as if it could be sunrise or sunset, as Faras contrast goes, you have maybe silhouetted people were silhouetted trees and then a sky. You could come in here and say, I want orange fake sunset in. This would give you the right tinting to make it look that way. This one doesn't quite look like it because we don't have silhouetted objects. I didn't want orange. I come in here and get red. I didn't want red. I could get a past 01 It all depends on what type of images. Start with you. Just start off with an image that had silhouetted four grounds and then a sky and you could get it So it looks that way. Sometimes I do things where I reflect images. So here's got reflect a hit play and it just made a reflection to the left. Then I can reflect it up, and we should end up with that thing reflected up. I'd have to have emerged those layers to get both sides that kind of stuff. So you would just, you know that some of what you'll find within those if you want to see how one of these works, let me just show you how I would have created it manually if I want to do something like anti color or soft contrast, oftentimes would end up doing is all end up duplicating this layer twice. I could do that, but typing command J and I'll hide the top layer. For now, I'll lead it. Need it in a moment in the middle layer. I'll end up changing the blending boat on the image to soft light. That's gonna add a lot of contrast to my image. Dark things will get darker, bright things will get brighter, and then I'll blur that. To get a soft feeling, I'll blurt until I can't see fine detail. When I do that, though, you'll find that you lack shadow detail. You see the shadow detail underneath. It's going away so I can go down to the letter FX and go to blending options. We've been there before, and I say hide the dark parts of this layer so it doesn't affect what's under it. And then I could hold the option key to split it apart and get a soft transition so that now I can regain that shadow detail that was lost. But it gives a slight soft feeling to it. Problem is, the colors become too colorful sometimes, so I have a copy of the original on top. If I turn that on, I can tell it to use the colors from the original. So this is a blurred copy in soft light mode, which is adding contrast and changing the colors a bit. Then on top of it is a normal copy of the original image in color mode. If I want a lesson, the effect of that I take those two layers, and I put him in a folder. Remember, you have to hold shift to get things to go into a folder, and now I can lower the a passage of both of meant once. So here's before. Here's after a slightly different treatment, and I can dialling exactly how much of it I want. That's the kind of thing that those actions do for you. So all you have to do is hit the play button and the lower the opacity to get where you want to go.