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Transform Your Images with Color Grading

Lesson 10 of 14

Applying Blend Modes to Adjustment Layers

Transform Your Images with Color Grading

Lesson 10 of 14

Lesson Info

Applying Blend Modes to Adjustment Layers

So I did show you what you can dio in light room, toe warm this up. But what can you do over here in photo shop? A couple things is a couple tools. I'm going to go through several of them. One of the things that you might not realize is you actually can get the controls that you had in raw back in photo shop. But you're no longer technically working with a raw you're working with whatever you committed to for the file information of that tiff. So let's say I wanted to warm this backup. I wanted to do that effect like I've done all the retouching. And now I want to add that at the end, you can do that right here. So I'm gonna duplicate my background. And where these controls are is here under filter camera, raw filter. So what it does is it brings up all of those controls that you had back in late room or in adobe camera raw. But remember, you don't have the raw file information, so if you're breaking things way up or darkening it down like you don't, you don't have that same informatio...

n anymore. So you got to get the exposure right when you commit and open it up and Photoshopped doing a warming back up. Wow, it doesn't like the warming up. Okay. All right. So if I could remember what these things were without them being labeled this one's highlight No, this one's exposure. This one's contrast highlights shadows, whites, blacks. Okay, I'm doing good clarity. See how well I know what I'll like art. Someone increase my clarity a little bit. I'm gonna pull out this one's vibrance. Okay, Pull up my vibrance. A little bit of an increase. My contrast. And so basically, this is what we did before in light room. But I can do it here in photo shop, but at the end, so I don't have to commit to it in case I change my mind. So I'll say about their Yeah. All right, so it's OK. That's so weird. All right, so, anyway, look, I could warm it back up if I wanted to. Using the controls and maybe already familiar with and light room. You just want more flexibility to change your mind later. So that is under filter camera. Raw filter. All right, now let's take a look at another one. Right? So another tool that I will sometimes use would be hue and saturation. So I'm gonna go to my little half moon cookie. I'm gonna grab hue saturation. There are several different things that I can do to play with this tool. So I'm gonna show you a few different things you might want to try. The 1st 1 is I play around with colorized. So when you cull arise, it makes all of the colors in the entire photo one. Q. So I hit the little colorized button and then I can say, Okay, let's make everything really, really reds or really Thiel's or really blues whatever you want. Okay, so let's say I picked the teal ish in this instance. Now if I just apply that, obviously it's too much, but I can back off the opacity. That's one thing you could do or you could do. Is your blending options again Your blend. If right, what we talked about so I could right click on your blend If and then I could say, Well, I don't want it on any of the highlights and so I can back it off the highlights again. Hold your Ault option key to split it and then feather that off. So there's another way you can control it. And so I've added the toning just to the shadows, and that was kind of getting to your question about Can I limit where it hits? And I can obviously limit more, but this is why I love it. My great background is now a teal background, and because this is an adjustment layer, so it's nondestructive. I could always go in here, and I can change what, Hugh that ISS so I could make it. Let's say I wanted to be a kind of warm colored background. Now I could have a warm colored background, or I can drag it over and make it a purplish back whatever you want. So that's why I like to shoot on gray. I can change it to whatever I want, pretty simply, and then I could select it and have it be less on her skin if I wanted to. I like it a little bit in the shadows, like I think it unifies the photo. The next thing that I could Dio was delete that so again, just you know, Hue saturation. I colorized it, Um And then when I colorized it, I went right, clicked and did my blend options. So blend this again. Gonna delete it Another thing I can do is I can colorize and plan it Play with my blend modes So I'm gonna click on my adjustment layers I'm gonna go to Hue Saturation And let's say I want this whole thing warm again I'm going to the colorizing all over again Colorized would have warmed this way, way, way up And then I want to play with my blend modes on blend modes again change How will layer interacts with the layer below it? So for this one, I'm gonna hit soft light. So what it does adds warm toe all of the shadows and the highlights, and I'm gonna back it off a little bit. So just watch shoes before here's the after it just it warms it with a papa contrast. I love trying random adjustment layers and then applying softly. It's about 50 50 whether it looks good or not, But why not try it? So I do that all the time. Similarly, this is kind of a color toning thing. But when I have got a photo that looks a little flat on and I purposely you know, I said, I purposely shoot things a little flatter sometimes so I can add that pop in post. One of my favorite things to Dio is grab 1/2 the half moon cookie, go to black and white and in black and white. I don't want the photo to be black and white. I want more pop that this is where I change the blend mode too soft, like so when I change the blend mode too soft, light it just like it adds, like a lot of contrast to it. I'm gonna back it off a little bit. Something to show you the before after like it just, like just pops it a little bit high. Let's get a little bit brighter. Shadows get a little bit darker. Um, anytime I've got a flat photo, I do this. It it just gives it a sweet papa contrast, and then you can use if it hit too much in the shadows. You could use your blend if toe back it off the shadows a little bit. If it or you could use a luminosity mass to block it off your shadows. If it's just a little bit to have because look, if I go full effect too much in the shadows, I could blend it off. So it's just not quite a strong, but I still love that pop. It's almost silvery. I usually do this in conjunction with uh remember how I said When you decrease saturation, you include decrease, contrast. It looks flat. I usually do this black and white layer on softly, and it gives us a pretty pop. So let me show you real quick if I take this photo and let's just say I Let's just say I pull out vibrance Look, I just flatten it down, pull down vibrance a lot. You see how it starts? You start to look kind of grayish. So this is when I come in and I add my black and white layer. I change the blend mode to softly as a little bit more pop, but it's a little bit too strong, so I block block it off, Okay, gets that pop, and then I would go in to say, my selective color, which we've talked about. I would go into my blacks, and I doubt a little bit of that scion go into the highlights. Maybe add a little bit of that yellow or whatever. And so I'm kind of combining all these things together. This way you have endless options to choose from. So disappointed, that is, was a black and white layer on a blend mode of soft like It gives you a little bit of papa contrast, and you can control it with your blend ifs or luminosity masks. Okay, hue saturation. Okay, questions on that one you mentioned earlier that there's a point after which you're working with a tiff and you've lost the raw. It's sexist till the wrong not been Photoshopped. It is no longer raw file unless you opened as a smart object. But if you opened it is a smart object, then you can actually edit the pixels. And could you just repeat the implications, please? Sure. Okay, so basically idea is this. If I were trying to, like, bring up detail in the shadows or there's a overexposed highlight and was trying to bring that highlight back in, you have to do it when you got your raw file like adobe camera raw or in light room. Because once I open it back up here in photo shop, I don't have access to that information anymore. I committed to what I selected should be the dynamic range of that photo. Like what? Information? The highlights in the shadows. The reason it matters is because if you do your color toning in light room and then you open it up here and you re touch everything, then you change your mind if you've kind of thrown out a lot of information. So I like to do the actual color toning later on in the process so I can change my mind because I do often. But the problem is, is if you go through your whole process and later on go Oh man, I need more shadow detail. You committed to it so you don't have that as much. So that's it. So I just try to get the exposure, which is why I often when you bring it into when you bring it into Photoshopped, my files look flatter. I bring up a lot of detail in the shadows. I bring in the detail in the highlights because I can always crush them like I can always increase the contrast and mess around with them in photo shop. But I can't get them back if I didn't have them to begin with. This is also why a lot of people, if anyone ever switches to medium format, if that's your step up, What they're doing is they're trying to get more information in the shadows and highlights and gives you more range just for our DSL. Ours. We have less. We have less information to work with. So it's what we sometimes have to manipulator files a little bit more.

Class Description

Often you'd be quite surprised what a magazine or editorial portrait looks like before Adobe® Photoshop®. No, it's not about changing the skin or body-- it's about the tones and colors. In this class, we will begin by creating some timeless imagery using simple sets and lighting setups. Then, we will crank our creativity up a few notches by exploring color grading in Adobe Photoshop. You'll learn several approaches and tools to create drastically different emotional responses to your portraits using selective color, split toning, plug-ins and more! There are many ways you can transform the look of your images for a drastically different feel. Join Lindsay Adler as she shoots a series of standard but beautiful portraits and then transforms them using Adobe Photoshop.

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop CC 2017

Lessons

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Reviews

Sean

Fantastic course. Lindsay Adler is a such a photography Rock Star. She can do it all, shooting in and out of study, lighting, posing, teaching and very amazing, Photoshop guru. Thanks for getting Lindsay, in the beginning I never knew that she was so skilled in all these aspects. As you progress in your photography, you learn lighting, skin tones and white balance, then skin retouching, then you learn color grading and analogous colors, complimentary colors, color triads, etc. Color Grading is so key to that final polished and "expensive" look. Lindsay did a terrific job teaching this course. I watched it 3 to 4 times to really pick up how to use these tools. Lindsay is a phenomenal teacher and photographer. Thanks for getting her Creativelive.

Elizabeth Haen

This is a great class to learn many options for color grading images. Lindsay gives comprehensive options for use in both LIghtroom and Photoshop. She has a style of teaching that is easy to follow and does an excellent job of summarizing each technique after introducing it to help the process sink in fully before she moves on. I love how she goes over everything she does thoroughly in a way that clearly explains each step without assuming everyone knows what she is doing. There is never a time when I thought "wait, what did she just do there?!:". Just really great information that is well taught.

David Babcock

Awesome class - Lindsay is a wonderful teacher. It might be nice to have a list of the equipment used, I had to go back a couple of times to find all of what Lindsay was using. Excellent and well done!!

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Transform Your Images with Color Grading

Applying Blend Modes to Adjustment Layers

Class Description

Lessons

Sean

Elizabeth Haen

David Babcock