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Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color
Don Barnett

Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color

with Deke McClelland

 


Based on the device-independent CIE specification from 1976, Lab color is frequently misrepresented as a techy, labor-intensive color space. In fact, Lab color performs certain types of color modifications more quickly and with better results than RGB. In Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color, Deke McClelland explores how to use Lab color "to make bad photographs great and great photographs even better." He demonstrates image manipulations that are best suited to Lab, and walks through a typical, non-destructive Lab correction. Deke also shows how to correct lighting, apply selective color modifications, and reverse the effects of color cast. Exercise files accompany the course.

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author
Deke McClelland
subject
Color, Photography
software
Photoshop CS3
level
Intermediate
duration
6h 25m
released
May 30, 2008

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Introduction
Your doorway to better color
00:00Hi! I'm Deke McClelland, best selling author of book and videos on computer graphics, digital imaging and electronic design.
00:08I'm here to introduce you to a command, just one command that most of you have never noticed, let alone chosen.
00:15This command is a doorway into an alternate version of Photoshop, one that has the power to make bad photographs great
00:22and great photographs even better and it goes by the inauspicious name Lab color.
00:28Now before I go any farther, I call it Lab color. Others swear by L-A-B. More on that later but no, agree or disagree,
00:37my decision to call it Lab is entirely deliberate and I believe the better way to roll.
00:42Lab color is not new. Pre-dating the founding of Adobe a company, Lab made its way into Photoshop more than a decade ago.
00:50So why aren't you using it? My guess- because you don't have to.
00:54The other color models, RGB and CMYK, those are half do spaces. Your image starts off in RGB, there is no getting around that
01:02and if it is bound for pre-press, you have to convert it to CMYK.
01:06By comparison Lab color is entirely optional. There is a not a reason on earth to choose it,
01:12well unless you want to save time and you want your images to look better.
01:16Lab offers the upsides of less artifacting, less banding, and more vivid colors.
01:21In just a few minutes you can take this image and turn it into this and here is the thing,
01:28Lab can be a little more intellectually demanding but you can fix an entire image with a single command, usually Levels or Curves,
01:36or you can target an image's luminance and color information independently.
01:40And once you come to terms with Lab, it is faster. That's right.
01:44Lab let you achieve better result in less time. You just got to know what you are doing, which is where I come in.
01:52In this brief introduction I'm going to show you when Lab is helpful and when it isn't.
01:56If you have a RAW digital camera file for example, there is no sense running the Lab, but if you have a JPEG
02:02or TIF image, Lab is perfect even in concert with Camera RAW.
02:06In subsequent chapters I will show you what Lab color is and what it can do.
02:10By the end of this series you will know how to work in Lab and your images will look much better for it.
02:16Enjoy.
Collapse this transcript
Lab and the untreated JPEG image
00:00Now I'm providing you with the exercises in this introduction, just by way of full disclosure so that you know
00:06where Lab is really strong and it's not as necessary.
00:10It is always strong.
00:11It is the best color mode there is inside the Photoshop.
00:14I don't think anybody disputes that.
00:15It is better than RGB and CMYK as you will see.
00:19The one thing it can't really compete with is Adobe Camera RAW, at least where images that are captured
00:24in your digital camera's RAW file format are concerned.
00:28What we have got going here inside of this folder and by the way, the name of the folder is 00_introduction
00:33and it is found inside the exercise_files folder.
00:35I'm looking at the content of this folder in the Bridge.
00:38And you have access to this folder if you are a premium member or you own the DVD.
00:43And notice I have got three pictures of the same model and here is what happened.
00:47I had the digital camera set up to capture a JPEG file and a RAW file at the exact same time
00:55and so that is basically what we are seeing here.
00:57We have three variations, two on the JPEG file and then one of the RAW files.
01:02So this very first one, it is called Woman-1 untreated.psd.
01:06This is the JPEG file as it was captured by the image as it was basically digested and developed by the image
01:14and then I have taken it into Photoshop, converted into Lab and added a few layers.
01:18But right now we are not seeing the effects of any of those layers.
01:20This preview represents the unmodified version of the JPEG image.
01:25This next one, Woman-2 ACR JPG.psd, I forced the JPEG file to open inside of Camera RAW.
01:34What you can do from the Bridge, I can't do with this file because it is a PSD file,
01:38but if it were a JPEG file, I could go up to the File menu and I could choose this command right there,
01:42Open in Camera RAW in order to bring the JPEG file into Camera RAW.
01:47Then I made a few modifications, which you can see right here, these are the modifications
01:51and then the reason it is a PSD file is because I have made some further modifications inside Photoshop
01:57that we'll be turning on shortly.
01:59And then finally we have got Woman-3 RAW.dng and this file has been modified in Camera RAW, inside the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in.
02:07However, it began life not as a JPEG file but as a RAW digital image and I had converted it into the DNG file
02:15but otherwise it is the image that was created by the camera.
02:18And we will see once again how it will work with each one of these three in Lab.
02:23I'm going to go ahead and double-click on Woman-1 untreated.
02:29And you can see there she is, she is set up as a Smart Object, I will tell you more about those later
02:33in case you are not already familiar with them.
02:36But in this case, it just allows me to apply some non-destructive Smart Filters and the filter that I have gone ahead
02:43and apply to this, is this guy right here Gaussian Blur.
02:45So I'm going to click in front of the word Smart Filter there in order to turn on Gaussian Blur
02:51and this is a heaping helping of Gaussian Blur.
02:53I want to head and set the Gaussian blur filter to 25 pixels and this is going to allow us to blur the surface detail.
03:00Of course right now I'm blurring everything, all of the detail throughout the image is blurred.
03:05So lets go ahead and change that by double- clicking on this little slider icon right there
03:11and inside the Blending Option dialog box, I'm going to change the mode from Normal to Overlay.
03:18And you can see what a terrific job that does of covering up some of the surface blemishes. I will go ahead and click OK.
03:24It is basically what we are doing with Gaussian Blur combined with Overlay.
03:27We are creating a layer of digital makeup essentially.
03:31It is quite becoming in fact, but it is darkening up her hair as well as the details in her face.
03:37I really just want to hit the highlights so I'm going to turn on this Filter Mask right there,
03:41that I have created in advance, by Shift-clicking on it.
03:45That is what we call a Luminance Mask, I will tell you more about those later as well.
03:49And that allows us to just smooth over the surface detail inside the face without harming the hair at all.
03:56So this gives you a sense, at this zoom level right here, this is before we apply Gaussian Blur.
04:02Notice the hair is pretty much the same but notice the details going on inside of this woman's face and this is after,
04:10definitely smooth over the contours quite nicely, it smoothes over the pores
04:14and some of those wrinkles and stuff like that as well.
04:17All right, so lets go and zoom back out.
04:19Next I'm going to go ahead and enhance the a & b Channels.
04:23Notice that I'm working in the Lab mode right here.
04:25So what I'm about to show you would be impossible inside of RGB and again I'll tell you more about that later.
04:32But for know that this is a Levels adjustment layer that I'm about to turn on.
04:37I'm just going to click where its eyeball would be in order to turn on this layer.
04:41Notice it just brings out this enormous degree of saturation inside of the image.
04:47This does an amazing job too and we're bringing out this color saturation, you might argue well this is little bit
04:54over the top Deke, that's a lot of saturation you added. Yes.
04:58However, notice that was pretty much maximizing the Saturation values without clipping the colors.
05:04So we're not flattening out any contours inside the image.
05:07If we have done this far with Hue/Saturation and pumped up the Saturation value this much, it'd be a mess.
05:12This image would look horrible but in Lab you can get away with this kind of stuff.
05:16Yes it is a little bit too much but you can go that far if you want to.
05:22And finally I'm going to punch up the brightness of this image a little bit by adding this Curves layer right there.
05:27I'm just going to go ahead and turn it on, so we are brightening the highlights of the image just a bit.
05:32But we still have this rounded volumetric detail; it is still looks really great.
05:36So just to give you a sense of what we've done, this is the original image that I opened, this is the original JPEG file
05:44and this is the file as its been corrected inside of Lab.
05:49So this amazing difference accomplished inside of the Lab mode and that is where you really going to see the wonders of Lab is
05:57when you just open a JPEG image, open a TIF image and start at it.
06:01Let see how things change a little bit if we were to open the JPEG in Adobe Camera RAW first
06:07and then perform some modifications in Lab and I will show you how that works in the next exercise.
Collapse this transcript
Lab and Camera Raw with a JPEG file
00:00In the previous exercise we witnessed the tremendous difference that you can achieve when correcting a JPEG file,
00:08what I'm calling an untreated JPEG file in the Lab color space.
00:12So in other words nothing has been done to it, except for our modifications in Lab.
00:18Now we are going to move on to that same JPEG file, first treated in Adobe Camera RAW, so we made some initial modifications
00:26in Camera RAW and then brought into Lab and you will see that makes a difference, whether good or bad,
00:32every one of this scenario is going to be a little different than the others.
00:36So here I'm in the Bridge again, inside the 00_introduction subfolder, inside the exercise_files folder,
00:42there is this image called Woman-2 ACR JPEG, meaning that the JPEG file has been processed in the Adobe Camera RAW.
00:49And you do that, by the way, if it was a JPEG file- it is a PSD file so that I can just walk you
00:54through the process without getting bogged down by the details.
00:58But it was a JPEG file you'd go up to the File menu and choose Open in Camera RAW in order to open it in the Camera RAW plug-in.
01:05But since this file's already built, we are going to take a slightly different approach.
01:09I'm going to first open that image inside of Photoshop and there it is.
01:14And notice that we have got a Smart Object it says ACR.JPG because it is a Camera RAW Smart Object.
01:21So if I double click on this thumbnail right here, we are going to open the image inside of the Camera RAW plug-in.
01:30And that opens the file here inside of the Camera RAW interface as you can see.
01:34I'm going to go ahead and zoom in to the image.
01:38And notice that we have applied a few modifications.
01:40I have adjusted the Temperature which is to say that I have warmed the image up by elevating this value here
01:47which adds yellow, so you can see if I take the value even higher we are going to warm the image up even that much more.
01:53A value of 12 though worked out pretty nicely.
01:55Then we have this opposing axis of Tint that allows you to either offset the colors with a little bit of magenta or green.
02:03Now what it is interesting about Temperature and Tint is they are analogous, not quite identical but very close to identical
02:09to the axis, so the A & B axis in a Lab Color mode.
02:14So Tint is very much the same as A and Temperature is very much the same as B as we will see later.
02:22It also reduce the Exposure a little bit. I reduced the Brightness. I changed the Vibrance so I brought out some
02:28of the low level saturation in the image, just in order to take a first step at some correction.
02:36So I'm just going to go ahead and cancel out of there.
02:38I just want you to see that I did make some changes and that it is going to affect the final image.
02:43All right, otherwise we are pretty much making the same modifications, if not exactly the same numbers.
02:50I'm going to start by turning on this Smart Filter here for the Gaussian Blur. I have Gaussian Blurred
02:55her this time 20 pixels instead of 25, so not quite so much.
02:59And then I haven't yet set it to the right Blending mode so lets go and do that by double clicking that little slider icon there
03:06and I'm going to change the mode to Overlay.
03:10And that is going to once again give us a nice coating of digital makeup, click OK.
03:16We need to limit our digital makeup to just the light areas.
03:20So I added a Luminance Mask and I'm going to Shift- Click on this mask icon in order to turn it on.
03:26Oh nice. So once again if I zoom in on the image here, you can see that this is what it looks like without that layer
03:33of Gaussian Blur and this is what it looks like with the Gaussian Blur.
03:36Notice the hair, once again, not much affected because I protected the hair with this Luminance Mask.
03:43Alright lets zoom out a couple of clicks here and lets add
03:47the A/B Levels layer so I'm just effecting the A & B channels with this Levels adjustment layer.
03:54Now my settings are different this time and if you are curious, I mean you have access to this file, you can compare and contrast
04:00on your own but these are different settings to accommodate the modified file because I had already changed the Vibrance.
04:08For example and the Temperature and the Tint inside Adobe Camera RAW, so I had to accommodate those modifications
04:14with this particular Levels adjustment layer.
04:17And then finally I went ahead and adjusted the lightness of the image using a Curves modification right here.
04:23So it just ever so slightly brighten the highlights.
04:27Now let's compare these two images to each other, so these are the fully corrected versions of the images.
04:33Again I'm really bumping up those Saturation values.
04:37You might not care to go that far but I really wanted these images to have an almost graphic impact.
04:43So this is the untreated JPEG version of the image and this is the ACR, the Adobe Camera RAW treated version of the image.
04:52And you can see that they're slightly different.
04:54Now which is better? I don't really know. I mean that's a subjective decision.
04:59I would say I liked this version better, the one that went through Adobe Camera RAW, because it has a little less
05:06of the crimson colors going on in the face. It's little warmer, little more toward the yellow than this image is right here.
05:14So we have a few more pinks inside of the untreated JPEG image.
05:20Now that is something we can adjust, we can spend sometime getting both images very close to the same.
05:26But we made things a little easier by processing the image in Adobe Camera RAW first.
05:31So that is an option and that is not an option that we are going to explore in this series.
05:36We are just going to go straight ahead with Lab adjustments. Adobe Camera RAW is for a totally different series.
05:41But I just want you to know that is a possibility.
05:44In the next exercise, I will show you how to really go ahead and correct a RAW digital camera image
05:53in Camera RAW because that is where you want to work.
05:55You either want to work in Camera RAW or in Lightroom, then bring it into Lab and then just make some slight modifications.
06:03Stick with me.
Collapse this transcript
Lab and Camera Raw with a raw photograph
00:00All right gang, it is time for the final scenario.
00:03What you do if you have captured an image in your camera's native RAW file format? Which is what you want to be doing by the way.
00:09If your camera supports a RAW file format definitely use it because it is going to do you the most good.
00:15Well this is where the Lab mode does least amount of good. It is still good, it is still a great mode but you are going to want
00:22to apply the majority of your color modifications inside Camera RAW or inside Lightroom.
00:27And then optionally just tweak the image inside of Lab.
00:31So lets take a look at how that works. I have got the Bridge trained
00:34on the 00_introduction folder right here inside the exercise_files folder.
00:39And I have selected this image right here, Woman-3 RAW.dng.
00:42And when I double click on her, this time we are not going to open the image inside Photoshop,
00:47we are going to open it inside of Camera RAW.
00:49We are not going to develop the image because it has already been developed.
00:53I have gone ahead and applied the changes that I think need to be applied to the image.
00:57So here they are. You can look them over if you want to. This is a balanced Histogram we have got, there is a very little in a way
01:04of clipping going on, a little highlight clipping, a little shadow clipping.
01:07But if I was to Alt or Option drag this Exposure value right here, which shows me the clipping inside of the image window there,
01:15inside of the Preview, we are going to see very few clipped colors going on.
01:19Mostly we are seeing black, which means those colors, the black colors are not getting clipped, which is a good thing of course.
01:24I have gone ahead and elevated my blacks.
01:26I have upped the Brightness a little bit.
01:29I have upped the Contrast.
01:30I have sent the Vibrance value quite high as you can see.
01:33So now we are going to open the image in Photoshop as a Smart Object.
01:37So I want you to press the Shift key and notice I have got the image set to open in Adobe RGB in the 8 bit per channel mode
01:44which is sufficient when you are working in Lab.
01:46So I'm going to go ahead and press the Shift key and that changes the Open Image button to the Open Object button,
01:52so the Shift-Click on that button in order to open it up as a Smart Object here inside Photoshop.
01:58Now it might take a moment, there it is. That looks good and I will go ahead and zoom in on the image.
02:03So this time we are going to be performing all the modifications. There's not many that many as it turns out.
02:07Let's just go ahead and call this ACR SO, which is in Adobe Camera RAW Smart Object.
02:14Now let's hit it with a Gaussian Blur, so actually before I do that though, we want to set up the Luminance Mask.
02:19So let's go to the Channels palette.
02:21And the red channel is going to be the best channel for our Luminance Mask because that is
02:25where this portrait shot is going to be its brightest.
02:28So I'm going to Ctrl-click or Command-click on that red channel in order to load it as a selection.
02:34Then go back to RGB, go back to the Layers palette.
02:37I want you to go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur and choose Gaussian Blur, if you are working along with me.
02:44And let's go ahead and hit this with a Blur value of 20 pixels and then click OK.
02:49So high Blur value of course but then we are going to turn around, right?
02:52We are going to turn around and double click on this little slider icon here, we have seen this a few times now
02:58and we are going to change the mode to Overlay.
03:00And I'm going to go ahead and leave the Opacity set to 100% and click OK.
03:05Now I'm going to protect the image a little better, that is I actually want to reveal the Gaussian Blur more
03:11in the highlight and protect the shadows a little bit more.
03:14So I need to adjust this filter mask. Go ahead and Alt-click here in the PC or Option-click on the Mac
03:20on this filter mask in order to view it by itself.
03:23And then I'm going to go up to the Image menu, I'm going to choose Adjustments and I'm going
03:27to choose Levels and I'm going to change the values like so.
03:30I'm going to take this Black value up to 50, so that we are really protecting the dark values like the eyes and the hair
03:38and then I'm going to take this White point value down to 175 so that we are really opening up these areas inside the face.
03:46And then I'm going to click OK to accept that modification and next I'm going to up to the Filter menu
03:51and just choose this first command Gaussian Blur.
03:53It will reapply Gaussian Blur this time to the mask with that same Radius value of 20 pixels.
03:59Isn't that beautiful? I think that is a really cool looking shot almost as a mermaid quality.
04:05But it is just a mask, people, so Alt-click or Option- click in order to return to the RGB version of the image.
04:12Now let's go ahead and zoom in, in order to take in what we have done.
04:15This is without Gaussian Blur, this is with it.
04:19And you can see already this image is just looking great.
04:23I mean why do we need Lab, really?
04:25Let's compare it to the other images. This is the one that was untreated before I brought it in,
04:30everything that we did was thanks to the Lab color space.
04:33This is the one that is a little bit of a combo of some Adobe Camera RAW modifications and Lab
04:39and this is the one that is relying entirely on Camera RAW.
04:42And so far we have not even switched over to Lab, we are still working inside RGB.
04:46Well let's change that, lets do make a few Lab modifications.
04:50Now again this kind of stuff is optional when you are working
04:52with RAW digital camera images, you might or might not want to go to Lab.
04:56I'm going to do it, I'm going to go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose Lab Color.
05:01And I'm going to be warned, hey, do you want to rasterize your Smart Objects? I don't.
05:06I want to go ahead and keep this interaction of Smart Object and Smart Filter.
05:10So I'm going to say don't rasterize it.
05:11Watch what happens because we are going to see a slight change happen on screen.
05:16After I get settled with the progress, so try to ignore that.
05:19Just watch the image down here to see how it changes.
05:22And notice that the Gaussian Blur got spread out a little bit more and actually I think has more becoming appearance.
05:30So this is before and this is after.
05:34So we are downplaying the highlights a little bit, we are downplaying some of the volumetric differences
05:40that is the chiaroscuro, the interplay between highlights and shadows.
05:44But I think the Lab version actually looks a little better.
05:47Now let's say that we want to go ahead and still bump up those Saturation values
05:51because really our comparison isn't fair so far.
05:54We have some very high Saturation values going in the other two JPEG images as you can see here.
05:59So better do the same thing with our Camera RAW image as well.
06:03So I'm going to press and hold the Alt key or the Option key in the Mac, I'm going to click this black/white icon,
06:08choose the Levels command and I'm going to call this A and B just to tell me,
06:13that I'm making modifications exclusively to the A and B channels.
06:17You may recall those are analogous to Tint and Temperature where Adobe Camera RAW is concerned.
06:22I'll click OK. I'm going to switch from Lightness. You can only edit one channel at a time in the Lab mode.
06:29I'm going to switch from Lightness to A and I'm going to click in the Black Point Value
06:33and then I'm going to press Shift+Up arrow twice.
06:35And then I'm going to Tab, Tab my way over to the White Point Value and press Shift+Down arrow twice.
06:41So in other words I'm making symmetrical modifications, so just as I'm adding turquoise or,
06:46if you prefer green to the image, I'm adding crimson or if you prefer magenta to the image.
06:51You'll see why I call these colors what I call them.
06:54Next I'm going to switch from a to b and I'm going to click in this Black Point Value again and press Shift+Up arrow twice
07:01which adds cobalt blue to the image and then I'm going to tab,
07:06tab and I'm going press Shift+Down arrow twice to add yellow to the image.
07:10And we are done. These symmetrical modifications allow me to increase the Saturation of the image and that is it.
07:15More on that later but for now go ahead and click OK and this is the final modified version of the image.
07:23So just so that we can see them all here, lets go ahead and fill the screen actually with the image and Tab away the palettes.
07:29This is the JPEG image that was corrected a little bit inside of Camera RAW and a lot bit inside of Lab.
07:36And then here is the last image the one that was corrected primarily inside
07:40of Camera RAW and then just a little bit inside Lab.
07:43Now many of you are going to look at this final one and say that is the one, especially compared to the JPEG file
07:49or the slightly hybrid Adobe Camera RAW and JPEG file thing.
07:55This one is that comes straight from the camera's RAW file format, that is the best of them all.
08:00And I'll tell you what, I agree but that is because we are working from 10 bits of data per channel,
08:05instead of just 8 bits of data per channel.
08:07So we are working from better information in the first place, given that the JPEG file is starting
08:13with less information, whether corrected just inside of Lab or with a little bit of help from Camera RAW.
08:20I would say that is just utterly amazing.
08:23So all kinds of stuff you can do with Lab here, all kinds of different variations that you can apply.
08:28But the amazing thing is, the thing that I want you to remember is
08:31that no matter what, it's better than RGB and it's better then CMYK.
08:36In the next chapter I'm going to tell you what Lab is, we are going to tour the Lab Color mode,
08:42so we have a sense of what this crazy mode is all about and then after that we will start to begin
08:47to see the amazing many, many things you can do in Lab.
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1. What Lab Color Is
Don't fear the Lab mode
00:00At this point I could start right in showing you ways to correct your images in Lab.
00:05If you are impatient to see me do just that, skip to the next chapter. But be forewarned,
00:10the next chapter takes all of what I have to show you in this chapter for granted. Because we can't have a meaningful
00:16conversation about what you can do in Lab
00:18until you understand what Lab Color is.
00:21For example, the letters in Lab, L-A-B, they stand for the 3 channels, Lightness and two opposing color axis arbitrarily named A and B.
00:30Lightness is pretty easy to understand but A and B, what the heck is going on there? And there are more basic questions.
00:37Why break Luminance and Color up in the first place? And if you got to do that why not just two channels, Lightness and Color?
00:44What about HSL? Remember that? Hue, Saturation, Lightness, where does that fit in? And how does any of this compare to
00:51RGB or CMYK? I mean forget all that. How do you even mix a color in Lab?
00:58These are all questions I had once upon a time,
01:00which is why I sought out answers.
01:03Here's what I found.
Collapse this transcript
Why color is 3D
00:00And actually Lab color is not the first thing you attack inside a Photoshop.
00:04It is not really topic for beginners.
00:06So I'm assuming that you have a fair amount of experience where the program is concerned.
00:11But I find that even very, very experienced Photoshop users, they rarely know what is going on under the hood and you have
00:18to know what is going on under the hood in order to take on Lab because it is all about examining the colors under the hood here.
00:25So we are going to start very, very basically where that under the hood concept is concerned.
00:30I'm looking at this file called Why color is 3D.psd and for those of you who are premium members or have access to the DVD,
00:38you can go that exercise_files folder there in you will find a folder called O1 what_it_is and therein
00:45of course you will find this file Why color is 3D.psd.
00:48And it bakes the question and it actually helps to answer the question, why does color require three dimensions of information.
00:56Why can't we just represent it using one channel, for example or two channels even? Why do we have for example, Red,
01:02Green and Blue, in case of RGB color, or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, those are primaries in case
01:07of CMYK, or Lab of course in case of Lab color?
01:11Well what I'm looking at here is essentially a representation of another color model that is out there,
01:18it is not really rendered inside a Photoshop the way the others are but it is called Hue, Saturation,
01:23Lightness and I have it broken out into an independent layer as you can see here.
01:26So the Lightness layer just one dimension of information its gradient essentially going
01:31from black at the bottom to white at the top.
01:33So a single line of information right there.
01:37On top of it, I'm going to add a layer called Saturation, so go and click on it.
01:41You can see inside of this layer thumbnail it is going from white on the left hand side,
01:46so no saturation, to high saturation, a vivid red over here on the right hand side.
01:50So it is going horizontally instead of vertically.
01:53And when I turn it on, now we get a two dimensional color space where we have light,
01:59no saturation going on in the upper left hand corner; dark, no saturation going on in the bottom left hand corner.
02:05Up here in the upper right hand corner we have light high saturation and then down here
02:10in the bottom right corner we have dark high saturation.
02:14But that doesn't give us all the hues that we want to.
02:16Right now we are just seeing red just as sort of dummy placeholder hue.
02:19If we want to go in and see the various hues then we have to add a third dimension of information,
02:24in this case it would be the Hue layer, which is represented here inside the sample file as an adjustment layer.
02:29I'm going to go ahead and turn it on and then I'm going to double click on the icon in order to bring
02:34up the Hue/Saturation dialog box and you can see it is presenting us with the three channels of information that would be available
02:42to us if HSL was a color mode inside Photoshop.
02:44Once upon a time it was back in the old days but it is not any more.
02:47So we already have Saturation rendered out, we already have Lightness rendered out.
02:51So in this case where this adjustment layer is concerned it is good for Hue.
02:54And you can see now that it can use this slider in order to access all the other hues that are available to us,
03:01visually that are available to us in the HSL spectrum.
03:05Alright so going across the entire Hue wheel from, as you can see here, because I'm over here negative
03:11of a 170 actually, I will take it all the way over to negative of 180.
03:15We go from Cyan, then we go into Blue and then we go into our Purples and our Lavenders and Magenta
03:21and then we are going finally to Red in the middle there and then if we proceed into the positive values,
03:27we go Orange, Yellow, Green and finally back to Cyan.
03:32Now if we were to some how render every single one of those values, from negative 180 to positive 180,
03:37every single one of those 360 steps- because positive 180 and negative 180 are the same-
03:42every one of those 360 steps out as separate frames in an animation or some like that, we were to look at them all at once,
03:49we would see the entire range of colors now that are available to us inside the Hue/Saturation/Lightness space.
03:56So that gives you sense that it why you need three dimensions in order to render color in the first place.
04:02In the next exercise I swear to you this is going to make more and more sense as we go along here, in case if you're kind
04:07of puzzling through this going, what in the world?
04:09In the next exercise I'm going to show you, I'm going to compare and contrast the three color models that are available
04:14to us, the three different three dimensional spaces, RGB, SMYK and Lab.
04:19Stay tuned.
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Device-dependant RGB and CMYK
00:00In a previous exercise, I explained why you need three dimensions of information in order to express color inside of
00:07any piece of digital software or hardware
00:10whether it's Photoshop or Illustrator or any of those or digital camera,
00:15anything like that needs three dimensions of color
00:17and I showed you that using an HSL diagram, a diagram that involved the Hue, Saturation and Lightness layer mixed together.
00:26The thing is there is no HSL color model inside of Photoshop. If you go up to the Image menu
00:31and you choose Mode, which is how you get to the various color models,
00:35you'll see that there is no HSL. There used to be in the old days back in Photoshops 1 and 2 but there isn't anymore.
00:40Instead what we have is our RGB Color, CMYK Color and Lab Color.
00:45Now, I'm going to show you how the first two work inside of this exercise, RGB and CMYK, and then I'll show you how Lab works in the next exercise.
00:52Now we happen to be working inside of a Lab image at this point, the one I have open,
00:57because Lab encloses all of the colors that you can represent using RGB and CMYK, at least in the theoretical universe here.
01:06So the name of the image that I have open, this Lab image that I was telling you about ,is The Big Three.psd, the big three meaning
01:12the big three color models RGB, CMYK and L-A-B,
01:16and it's found inside the O1 What It Is folder.
01:20I have got a bunch of layers set up inside of this file and I have some Layer Comps as well. Inside the Layer Comps palette,
01:25you can see I have four Layer Comps. I am just showing you that
01:28because that will explain the little magical slideshow I am about to present to you. I have a keyboard shortcut that advances me
01:34from one Layer Comp to the other just so you know what's going on behind the scenes there.
01:39Alright, anyway I'm going to tab away the palette. It's not really necessary you open this file because I'm going to be demonstrating it to you here.
01:45I'm going to tab away my palettes and I'm going to switch to the Full Screen mode
01:49and you can see the title of this, it's called the Big Three Color Spaces Work and let's bring up the first color space, the one that's
01:56the most common color space you are going to work with inside of Photoshop and that's RGB.
02:00Both RGB and CMYK are device dependent spaces,
02:04meaning that the definitions of colors vary depending on what device you are using.
02:08Now, RGB is the space used by any light capture or projection device. So anything that captures light or displays light
02:17and in the capture department that would mean scanners or digital cameras and in the display department,
02:22that would mean your monitor, your screen or your projection device, what have you.
02:27In that case we are looking at a Red channel, a Green channel and the Blue channel that interact as follows.
02:32The darkest colors in any one of those channels is always going to be black as you can see over here on the right-hand side
02:38and the lightest color is going to be the color in question that is red, bright red is the lightest color inside the red channel.
02:44Bright green, a very, very bright green, almost yellowish green is the brightest color represented by the green channel
02:50and then a darkish blue is the lightest color that can be represented by the blue channel.
02:56So, you start with utter and complete blackness and you build color on top of that inside of RGB.
03:03Moving right along the next guy is CMYK and CMYK is specifically designed to accommodate process color commercial printing.
03:12Many color laser printers also use CMYK.
03:15Your local Inkjet device probably uses some other combination of colors but you are basically starting with page white
03:22and you are building darker colors using inks on top of that.
03:25So you've got three color primaries right here Cyan, Magenta and Yellow which are opposites of Red, Green and Blue.
03:32So, cyan is the opposite of red. Cyan ink actually absorbs red light and bounces back green and blue, so the green and blue
03:39light mix to form cyan.
03:41And magenta goes ahead and absorbs the green light
03:44and reflects back the red and the blue, so it looks like when the two are mixed together, red and blue full blast mixed together
03:50to form magenta,
03:52and then yellow is reflecting blue to start blue right over here and then it's reflecting back the bright green and
03:57bright red and that forms yellow.
04:00Then we have black, which is the key color, because you don't really get rich blacks out of mixing cyan, magenta and
04:06yellow together so the K is for the key color black. It's not really one of the primaries but it does hold the shadows together nicely
04:13and where any one of these plates of ink is concerned, the darkest color you are going to get out of a single plate is that color.
04:20So, it's going to from cyan over here on the darkest side
04:23to white over here on the lightest side of each one of these channels of information.
04:28Now, the problem with rendering colors in either RGB or CMYK is that it is device dependent.
04:34So one screen for example in the case of RGB, one screen is going to show you colors differently than another screen
04:40and in the case of a printer for example, one printer is going to show you an image differently than another printer.
04:46So, if you mix a color using specific red, green and blue values, those color ingredients are going to come out
04:52differently on one screen than they come out on another.
04:55The idea behind Lab is that its device independent so that you can define a specific combination L-A-B values and
05:03you're going to get a specific color, no matter what, you're going to get that color on any screen or any output device and we'll see how Lab works
05:12in the next exercise.
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Device-dependant CIELAB D50
00:00Now, that we know based on the previous exercise,
00:02now that we know how the device dependent color spaces work that is RGB and CMYK.
00:08How does the device dependent color space Lab or Lab as I prefer to call it, work.
00:14Well, we are still working inside of this document called the Big Three.psd, it's found inside the O1 What It Is folder
00:20and I'm going to reveal the final Layer Comp which is this guy right down here Lab and the specific variety of Lab that is used
00:28by Photoshop is this guy right here. It's called CIE and CIE, by the way, stands for the group,
00:34the group that created this color space and they are the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage
00:41and that's what four years of French gets you, people.
00:45Obviously that wasn't my best subject but anyway in English- that's why it's called CIE by the way-
00:49in English that's the International Commission on Illumination which would be ICI but still same group and it's called L*A*B
00:57with asterisk between the L, the A and the B because this was actually the second variety of Lab that was propounded
01:05and this variety came out in 1976, the specs for this Lab space.
01:10Before that we have this guy Richard Sewall Hunter. In 1948 he began crafting this what he was calling the Lab space
01:18and you can know a little more about it actually by going to www.hunterlab.com and that is Hunter Lab.
01:24Because this is the Hunter Lab, the hunter laboratory, which is why I prefer to call this color space Lab.
01:31Because it did actually start with a lab once upon a time, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere
01:37and also I just think calling it the Lab color space makes it a little less pretentious because RGB,
01:42we are not going to pronounce that RiGaBa and it also stand for something, it stands for Red, Green and Blue and CMYK,
01:48you could say Ceemic, I have heard people say Ceemak, which is ridiculous frankly.
01:53It's C-M-Y-K; it stands for something, the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key, color black there.
01:58Well, Lab doesn't really stands for anything. The L stands for Lightness but the A
02:01and B they are just variables essentially for two different opposing color axes.
02:08Alright, anyway then there is D50 right here. So we have got CIE, Lab, D50 and the reason that this is D50 is
02:15because you can define very specific L-A-B color values and why it's D50 is because you need a white point in order
02:22to define the Lab color values and have to mean something.
02:26You have to setup a white point in advance and the white point that Photoshop uses is D50.
02:31That is 5000 degrees Kelvin, which is a bright sunshiny day.
02:35If you don't care, you don't care. It doesn't really matter that much but that's what's going
02:38on with the Lab as it is defined inside of Photoshop.
02:42So, it's a very specific definition even of Lab because there are different Lab values you could be working with.
02:48In a very general way, what's going on? Well we have lightness, which is the luminance information.
02:53This gradient right here looks just like the black ink gradients but it's actually different in terms how it behaves.
03:00It's the darkest to lightest color inside of the image then this was one of the key things about this particular variety of color.
03:07CIE, this group, the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage, they go way, way, way back,
03:12and they had some other device independent color definitions like XYZ and stuff going on back in the 30's.
03:18But Lab was the first one that was perceptually uniform, meaning that each increment,
03:25each increment that you raise the Lightness value by was going to deliver to you something that looked incrementally lighter.
03:31So, each increment looked liked it was uniformly lighter. Because the way that we see colors
03:36and the way the computers represent colors, the way that any hardware device represents color, is very different.
03:41If we were to just go with what the computer considers to be uniform, we would get a very,
03:45very dark gradient that would have a mid-point right about here actually and then suddenly go white on us.
03:52In order to make it look nice and uniform for us though we have Lab. We have this special treatment of the lightness information
03:59and then we have got the color information represented by two, as I was saying, two opposing color axes,
04:05one of which is A, which is our Tint information. If you are familiar with Camera RAW or Light Room,
04:11they have got Tint controls and that Tint control is the same as the A information here.
04:15So we go with dark color inside of this channel, we get green or a greenish color.
04:20It's not really green; it's more of a turquoise.
04:22I will explain that later.
04:23Goes through to a neutral gray right there in the center and then we, with a positive value, as we will see, we go over to magenta
04:30or red, you will sometimes here it called red as well.
04:33So, green, red, green and magenta, what have you in the A channel and then for the B channel we have blue,
04:38yellow and that's your temperature information.
04:41Once again Temperature is how it's represented inside of Camera RAW or Lightroom and that's how we get L-A-B.
04:48Now, I have yet to answer the bigger question, which is how in the world do these colors mix to form a full color image?
04:55You might be able to imagine how RGB works maybe or CMYK, but Lab, it looks like these things mix to form mud and I'm going
05:04to answer that question, but of course in the following exercises, just to give you a sense of how this is going to work.
05:08In the next exercise, I'm going to explain how the numerical color values work inside of the Lab space, something
05:14that we have to understand and very exciting.
05:16But we have got to understand what's going on there and then in the exercise after that we will see the big Lab color wheel
05:21where all of your colors will be shown to you right before you there on screen
05:25and then we will start examining the independent color channels.
05:27It's exciting stuff. It's really, really interesting, I swear to you. Stay tuned.
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Color by the numbers (mixing Lab values)
00:00In this exercise, I'm going to explain how you define colors using numerical values inside each of the color spaces,
00:07the big three here RGB, CMYK and Lab and we are going to be taking a look at the Color palette here.
00:14Pretty basic stuff as you will see and you are not going be called upon to define colors all that much inside of this series,
00:20this is mostly about image correction but even so this information is going to inform how we work
00:26with our images as you will see in future chapters.
00:30I still got up the Big Three image, The Big Three.psd image that's found inside the O1 What It Is folder and I'm going
00:37to bring back my Color palette right here on screen and you can see that I have got my Color palette set to RGB and you can do
00:45that by going to the top right corner of the palette, this little menu like on there and choosing RGB sliders.
00:51We also have available to us HSB sliders, even though we don't have access to an HSB space, we have sliders,
00:56we have got CMYK Sliders and we have got Lab Sliders.
00:59We can use any of the sliders in any of the spaces.
01:03It doesn't matter.
01:04I'm working inside a Lab image, it's the reason I mentioned this but we can still work with RGB Sliders.
01:10Now, if I was to define a color you can see that 000 that equals black as a background color is selected right there.
01:17If I were to raise the value like the red value in this case, I would get a lighter red color,
01:24incrementally lighter red as I go all the way up to 255.
01:27So we have got 0+255 and 0+255, of course equals 255, but if you consider 0 to be it's own unique integer
01:36because you have one already right there, notice that if I raise that value we have got 1
01:40and then we have also got a unique integer 0 then we have got 256 variations for each one
01:46of these channels, for each of one of the sliders that is.
01:50So, if I was to mix full on 255 red with full on 255 green, I would get yellow and I could mix other colors as well.
01:57Now, this is device dependent.
01:59In this case I would presumably be working if you have seen any of other series, you are working inside of Adobe RGB
02:04or you could be working inside of sRGB that's going to characterize your red, green, blue color information right there
02:11but you are going to get some variety of yellow no matter what.
02:15Let's go ahead and skip ahead we have got HSB as well but we are going to skip over to CMYK Sliders and in the case
02:21of CMYK we are defining colors not using luminance Levels which is we just saw a moment ago,
02:270 through 255 but instead we are using ink percentages.
02:30So, black -- well let's start with white actually, I will go ahead and click on white here,
02:35white is 0% of all of the inks mixed together, so we are just seeing page white and if we start mixing higher percentages
02:42of ink we start getting darker colors, so a 100% ink, is this much cyan for example as we can have.
02:48If we mix full on cyan with full on magenta we get something approximating RGB blue which is what we are seeing right there,
02:55it's not really going to be that bright and vivid but it is going to be a blue on the page.
03:00So we are working 0 through 100 in this case, 101 different variations.
03:04Now, really Photoshop is calculating 256 different variations inside 8-bit per channel image no matter what,
03:11but it's choosing to characterize these color values as 0 through a 100.
03:16Lab splits the difference between the two, it's a little crazy but this is the way it works.
03:20If you got the Lab Sliders right here, you will see that -- let's go ahead and switch to something like black,
03:26you will see that it's 000 once again just as it is with RGB but luminance, notice this guy right here or lightness
03:34if you prefer, lightness is calculated from 0 to 100.
03:38So, it's essentially just like an ink, it's essentially a percentage distinction,
03:42a 101 different variations even though they are truly 256 different variations inside of an 8-bit per channel image.
03:50Then where A and B are concerned, they are measured in terms of luminance Levels but instead of going from 0 to 255,
03:590 as you can see is the neutral color right in the center, so it's not imparting any color information here.
04:05If we want to impart color information one direction we go up with a value to as high as 127, notice that,
04:12so that would get us magenta in the case of A or as low as -128 and again 0 is throwing things off.
04:21So, you have got -128 all the way up to -1, which is giving you your greenish colors,
04:27notice that it looks very cyan in this case.
04:29I will explain that in the next exercise but for now that's your green essentially going on there
04:35and we will see it renders green actually if I take this lightness value
04:38down to 50 you can see how it is truly something resembling a green.
04:41Anyway, we have got -128 to -1.
04:44So those are our first 128 luminance Levels and then we have got 0, I will press the up arrow key to change it to 0 through 127,
04:53those are our additional a 128 different luminance Levels there, so altogether we have 256 variations inside the A channel.
05:01The same thing is going on here, I will go ahead and change this to 0 so that we neutralize that axes,
05:07the same is going on for B. We can go from -128 over here on the blue side to 127 over here on the yellow side.
05:15All right, so that's how you work with the numerical values in the event that you need
05:19to define a specific color inside of Photoshop, using the Lab sliders.
05:24In the next exercise I'm going to show what the wondrous world of Lab color looks
05:29like when we examine the big Lab color Wheel, stay tuned.
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The Hue/Saturation color wheel
00:00Over the next couple of exercises we are going to see colors mapped on to a circle subject
00:04to the conventions of a few different color models.
00:07Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that any of these models or color spaces are absolutely circular.
00:13If you have ever seen a scientific 3D color graph you know that the color spaces looks somewhat like soft cones,
00:20however mapping colors onto a circle serves as a heck of an educational tool, it's very illuminating.
00:25All right, so in this exercise I'm going to show you colors in the HSL space, which also includes RGB and CMY mapped
00:34on to a wheel, and then in the next exercise we will see colors in the Lab space mapped on to a wheel and how things differ.
00:41The name of this document is HueSat color wheel.psd found inside the O1 What It Is folder
00:47and what we are seeing are hue values wrapped around the perimeter of this circle right here along
00:54with declining Saturation values toward the center, that's why the colors are becoming more gray and more drab
00:59and more blanched essentially and I'm going to go ahead
01:03and throw on the labels here so that we can see how these colors map out.
01:06This is subject to the conventions of the HSL color model
01:09but we also were incorporating RGB and CMY in this discussion, as you will see.
01:14So, hue is measured as degree, so degrees on a circle, from 0 to 360 degrees and 0, at 0 degrees we get red.
01:22Each one of these big labels that has an icon associated with it,
01:25those are industry-standard color labels, everybody agrees on these terms.
01:30So, we have got red here at 0 degrees, we have got yellow here at 60 degrees, at a 120 we have got green,
01:37then we have got cyan down here at 180, we have got blue at 240,
01:41we have got magenta at 300 and we have got red back here at 360/0.
01:46Now, you don't need to be taking copious notes or you don't need to memorize any
01:49of those values, I'm just telling what's going on here.
01:52Notice that three of these colors red and green, over here a 120 degrees away and blue another 120 degrees away,
02:00they all have a little screens associated with them because they are part of the RGB space, they are the RGB primaries.
02:06Opposite of each of these colors you will see are the pigment complements.
02:11So, we have cyan opposite red and we have got a printer icon, so that's part of the CMYK space.
02:17We have got magenta down here at another 120 degrees away, it's also opposite green which is it's color complement
02:23and then we have yellow which absorbs of course blue light that is opposite of it.
02:29So, we have got RGB and CMY incorporated into this graph, now I have also added some other colors
02:35at 15 degree increments, I have added color labels.
02:37Now these are my labels I should tell you, I went through a great deal of word trying to determine what these labels should be.
02:43I have consulted all kinds of naming conventions out there but they are still my naming conventions,
02:48they are not industry standard, some of them we would easily agree upon like orange here at 30 degrees,
02:53others like peacock here at whatever degree, this is a 100, whatever that would be 65 degrees,
02:59you might take issue with but still they are good names, darn it.
03:03Anyway, the ones that I want you to notice for purposes of the next exercise because they will come up,
03:08the ones I want you to notice are scarlet, mid-way between red and orange, alright.
03:13Then we have lime up here mid-way between yellow and green, then we have turquoise mid-way between green and cyan,
03:21we have cobalt, which is mid-way between cyan and blue.
03:25If you had to name a blue, somebody showed you a color and you say that is blue,
03:28it would be cobalt because blue is starting to get pretty purply actually.
03:32Then we have got violet down here mid-way between blue and magenta and then finally we have got lavender
03:38over here mid-way between magenta and crimson.
03:42So, it's more of magenta than it is red.
03:44I just want you to notice those now and remember them later.
03:48There is the Hue/Saturation color wheel, which incorporates red, green and blue as well as cyan, magenta and yellow.
03:54In the next exercise, I'm going to show you how things differ when we switch to the world of Lab.
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The slightly skewed Lab color wheel
00:00All right gang, now that we have seen the everyday average Hue/Saturation color wheel that incorporates RGB and CMY,
00:07let's switch over to the much less standard, little known Lab color wheel and it's going to give you a sense
00:12of how the colors shift inside of this wheel and how the colors map with respect to each other, what kind of emphasis is given
00:19to colors inside of Lab, because everything is supposed to be Even-Steven in the world of Hue/Saturation
00:25but that's not the way it works inside Lab as you will see.
00:27So, I have got this image that's called Lab color wheel.psd found inside the O1 What It Is folder.
00:34Notice that I'm looking at my Layer Comps palette that I have squeezed between the Layers and Channels palette just to put it
00:39in this right hand stack so that we can keep track of the Layer Comps at the same time we are seeing the image on screen.
00:44Now, I'm resorting to Layer Comps because there are a lot of layers inside of this image.
00:48Originally we are starting off with a circular representation of the colors that are found when we combine the A
00:55and B axes with each other and we will see how they map in just a moment.
00:59But throughout this circle, the L value is set to a 100 so our L value is maxed out.
01:05These are the colors at maximum lightness.
01:07Now, the problem with looking at the colors at maximum lightness is that we don't really get a sense of the wide which array
01:13of colors that is available to us, a lot of the colors are just going white down in this region here as you can see.
01:19So I'm forcing the third dimension into this 2D image right here when we switch
01:25over to the second Layer Comp, the one that's called Smooth Even Darkness.
01:29So, this is a smooth radio gradient essentially going from black to transparent towards the outer edge here and imagine now
01:37as I say I'm forcing the third dimension, imagine that we have mapped the colors into the inside of a horn that's pointed
01:44at us like a French horn if you will or a trumpet.
01:46So that we are looking into the horn, the center is turning black of course because we are loosing our light at the center
01:52of the horn and then the colors are getting lighter and lighter as they go outside.
01:55So we are looking at the inside of a cone and I'm just doing that so we can get a sense --
01:59once we started subtracting lightness we are starting to see lots and lots more colors inside the Lab circle here.
02:06Now, I'm going to go ahead and add the A and B axes line, so that we can see where I'm mapping A
02:11and B. So I'm mapping the A axes horizontally and the B axes vertically.
02:16You can see that they are absolutely perpendicular to each other in this theoretical world,
02:21this tidy, wonderful, theoretical world of color.
02:24Now, I'm going to add our primary colors, now we are mapping these colors not at 60 degrees increments as in the case
02:29of the Hue/Saturation color wheel but at 45 degree increments and I'm relying on my naming conventions now.
02:36So, we have lavender, we don't have magenta on the positive side of the A axes, we have lavender and actually I will go ahead
02:44and zoom in on this location here and I will switch to my Eyedropper tool by pressing the I key
02:48and notice that I have got my color palettes set to HSB sliders and I'm going to go ahead and eye drop at this location.
02:56Now, the value you are going to get is going to depend on what RGB space you are working in, I'm working in Adobe RGB,
03:02you might be working in sRGB or one of the others, so you will get a slightly different result.
03:06But notice if I eye drop right there, I'm getting 330, which is more of that crimson color that I had on my chart.
03:12It's absolutely not magenta, magenta is a 300 degrees but if I start clicking around other locations
03:18like if I start clicking toward the center of the graph so I am lifting darker colors, I only get slightly different values,
03:24like at this location I'm getting 318 degrees that's why I am splitting the difference in calling this color lavender,
03:31you could call it crimson, you could call it whatever you want, the point is, it's not really technically magenta or red.
03:37There is scarlet about 45 degrees up, there is yellow, I think we can all agree that's yellow at the top,
03:42the positive side of the B axes, we have got lime over this location,
03:46another one of those colors, I told you to notice then and remember now.
03:50Here is turquoise and that's midway between green and cyan as you may recall.
03:54There is cyan another 45 degrees along the graph, there is cobalt on the negative side of the B axes,
04:01there is violet 45 degrees later and finally on a positive side of the A axes we are back to lavender.
04:06So, whether or not you agree absolutely with my naming conventions they are not the same as the Hue/Saturation wheel,
04:14we are not going from green to magenta strictly speaking, we are not going from blue to yellow strictly speaking.
04:20We have slightly different colors going on.
04:22Here is our numerical values, incidentally and I was telling you how the most positive value you can have for either A
04:28or B is 127, the most negative value you can how is -128, all of my negative values are showing up as white,
04:35all of my positive values are black, you can see that I have mapped scarlet at 64 A and B right there
04:42and you can check my work if you want to, if you zoom in on that location for example here in switch over in the color palette
04:48to Lab sliders and click right about here you will see that I'm getting something very close to 64 A,
04:5564 B. I also happened to be getting something close to 64 L but that's just coincidental, incidentally.
05:03Anyway, so I have mapped out this graph meticulously by the way just to make sure that we have these values setup,
05:10we have equal amount A and B at Lime as well just that it's a negative A with a positive B and so on.
05:16If you don't see an A or B value, that's because it's set to 0.
05:19So, at yellow we have got 127 B with 0 A and at cobalt we have -128 B with 0 A and so on.
05:27Just to give you a sense of how lightness affects colors inside of Lab because it has a profound effect,
05:34it makes the colors wander with respect to Hue/Saturation.
05:37I have gone ahead and added strict A and B bars above and to the left of the graph,
05:43I have also noticed that that moves the lavender and turquoise Labels a little,
05:46squeezes them over to accommodate for these axes.
05:48Now, notice here is my A axes, I'm going to go ahead and Shift+Tab away my palettes for a moment.
05:53Here is my A axes and so the multiple A axes because we are going from negative over here on the left to positive values over here
06:01on the right subject to different lightness values, a 100 for the top bar, 80 for the second bar, 55, 25 and 0.
06:09Notice at a 100 our axes really appears to go from about cyan to magenta and we start getting greener as we go darker
06:18and we start getting more lavender, if you will, more crimson and more red actually as we go darker as well on the positive side
06:26of the axes, just something to bear in mind so the lightness value does effect the color.
06:32Also, notice that this isn't strictly speaking linear here.
06:35I'm dropping from a 100 to 80 so a soft drop and then a bigger drop from 80 to 55, a bigger drop still from 55
06:42to 25 and a slightly smaller drop from 25 to 0.
06:45I was telling you that one of the ideas behind Lab is that lightness is perceptually uniform so that it should drop
06:52down strictly speaking from a 100, 75, 50, 25 and 0, however in my experience it doesn't quite work out that way
06:59so that you have a more severe drop off in terms of your perception of the lightness right at the beginning
07:05when you first start dropping down those values and again that's what I have experienced, you may experience something different
07:10on your screen but I have worked with a lot of different screens here, lot of different RGB spaces.
07:15Anyway, we have got B axes setup the same way, positive
07:17at the top this time again just yellows throughout really not affecting the hue when we are reducing the lightness value
07:24and down here at the negative side of the B axes we are getting cobalts pretty much strictly speaking cobalts.
07:29It gets a little bluer at the darker colors but not that much bluer, it's pretty much sticking with the cobalt hue right here.
07:35Just something to bear in mind you know just FYI interesting stuff,
07:39now here is where things I think get even more interesting, let's go ahead and map out a few secondary colors
07:44and the secondary colors happen to be what we were initially our primary colors here,
07:48red and green and something like blue down here, magenta and so on.
07:53I'm going to go ahead and circle by clicking on HSL primaries.
07:56I'm going to go ahead and circle those hue saturation primaries red, yellow, green, cyan,
08:01blue and magenta and then we will go ahead and map them out.
08:04So here is the RYGCBM map Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta map inside of Lab.
08:12You can see how the two color wheels are somewhat rotated with respect from each other so that if you want to think
08:16of it this way you can, the Lab color wheel is rotated down into the right
08:21in a clockwise fashion with respect to the Hue/Saturation wheel.
08:25But what's more important here is how the colors are distributed, so if you see this axes line that goes with red toward the center
08:32and this axes line that's associated with cyan, it's color complement, they have been widened with respect to each other
08:40so that we have more colors inside of the orange range, more to work with there so more flesh tones and we have more to work
08:46with inside of this orange to green range which favors nature and we have more to work with where the greens
08:54to the cyans are concerned which favors skies and take a look at this way too, if you go from blue up here to yellow you can see
09:03that this area has been expanded as well because these guys are color complements in the world of Hue/Saturation,
09:09so that we have really expanded all of our sky tones, our sea tones and the sky tones are expanded.
09:15What gets compressed is the area between blue and red, so that violet to lavender zone gets compressed which is interesting
09:22to know probably the area that should get compressed.
09:25The whole idea here is that it's tracking the way that we see colors better than RGB
09:30and CMYK and the other device dependent color models.
09:34Alright, so a bunch of FYI, a bunch of really terribly interesting stuff that will come in the play of course later
09:41when we look at practical applications in the next exercise, I am going to show you something terribly, terribly theoretical,
09:47we are going to descend or rather ascend I would say into the world of imaginary color here inside Lab.
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Lab's wide world of "imaginary colors"
00:00In this exercise, we are going to probe the world of imaginary colors in the Lab color space.
00:06Now, what am I talking about? Well bear this in mind, Lab is all about getting away from the devices.
00:12So we are not relying on the capture and display devices, which require RGB and we are not relying on the output devices,
00:18which require CMYK or some other ink variation.
00:22We are not beholden to those colors spaces anyway.
00:25We are working in this color space that is designed to stimulate the world as our eyes and brains actually perceive it.
00:32So we have got Lab on one side, seeing the world the way our eyes do and then we have got our eyes
00:37on the other side seeing the way the world our eyes do, but we have got a middleman in between us and that is the RGB screen.
00:45We can't get rid of that translator that is forcing its way in between us.
00:50Lab is just crying out on the other side of screen trying to show us the world the way our eyes see it, but we can't really see it.
00:56And so this world of colors that really can't be accurately represented by RGB or CMYK,
01:02these are what I'm terming the imaginary colors and they really are imaginary, because we are never going to get to them.
01:08We really aren't because no matter how we end up displaying our Photoshop images,
01:13they have to be going to screen or print somehow or other.
01:16We can get closer to them overtime as we get better technology, but still they are going to remain imaginary.
01:21But it means that we have got a lot of headroom to work with inside of Lab and that is going to really help us
01:26out when we are applying practical applications with the Lab color space in future chapters.
01:31So let me just show you where these imaginary colors are and just blow your mind a little bit,
01:35you will just get a sense of what is going on.
01:37I'm working inside of this HueSat color wheel.psd document that we opened a couple of exercises ago,
01:42of course it is found inside the 01 what it is folder.
01:45Notice that I have got the Labels turned on here inside the Layers palette,
01:47but I have got this Adjustment Layer that is turned off right now.
01:50I'm going to turn it on and it is not going to change anything right away because it's a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer
01:55that is currently zeroed out, so nothing is going on.
01:57I'm going to double-click on its icon to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog box.
02:02You could play around with the Hue value if you want to that is just going to rotate the Hues around the circle
02:07that might qualifies your idea of fun, if you don't have enough going on in your life.
02:11Anyway it is kind of fun to watch once, I have seen it happen too many times.
02:16I'm going to change the Hue value back to zero, no sense whatsoever in playing with Saturation but Lightness,
02:22now is a point to this and what I want to show you is that if you max out,
02:25this is a relative Lightness adjustment now, bear in mind.
02:28If I have Lightness set to zero, it is not going to make any changes to the existing colors inside of the image.
02:33So we are going to see these vividly saturated Hue values along the perimeter of this circle.
02:39If I go ahead and maximize the Lightness value, all of my colors turn to absolute white, so I completely lose them.
02:45If I minimize the Lightness value, I set it to negative 100 then everything goes black on me.
02:50The more or less you would expect it to be.
02:52So we start to see colors as we enlighten the Lightness value, we are really going to see colors in the mid-range right here.
02:58This is sort of medium Lightness values around zero and then things are going
03:02to start blenching out as we get to high with Lightness.
03:05So just bear that in mind, once again, see it remember it in just a moment, I'm going to Cancel out.
03:10Let us switch over to the Lab color wheel document, now this is a final version of that document.
03:17I'm going to switch over to my Layer Comps palette and click in front of the L:100.
03:22So this is an L value of a 100 or Lightness value of a 100 and yet we are seeing tons of colors going on here,
03:28just worth bearing in mind, I'm going to switch over to my Layers palette.
03:33And notice three layers up in the stack, above the Background Layer that is to say,
03:38there is yet another Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer.
03:40The thing is the difference is we are working inside of the Lab color space instead of inside of RGB.
03:45I'm going to turn it on. Again it does nothing because it is zeroed out.
03:48I'm going to double-click on this guy and actually you know what, I'm going to turn on my a
03:52and b axis guys right there, just so that we can keep track of them.
03:55We can remember where the a and b axis are.
03:58All right, now let us get back down here.
03:59I will double-click on the Hue/Saturation thumbnail and now if I increase the Lightness value, it doesn't do anything,
04:07I just cannot go beyond the Lightness of a 100.
04:10So I still have all of these colors showing up.
04:13I just cannot get rid off them, we are missing some colors in this range, they are just going white on screen,
04:17bear that in mind, on screen my friends, because this is an RGB device, but they are there.
04:23Then watch what happens when I start reducing the value beyond zero, things are getting darker and darker,
04:28more and more saturated in many cases, we are getting some rich vivid colors down in this low Lightness range.
04:35Watch what happens when I go all the way negative?
04:38They persist, the colors still live.
04:42Now, not throughout, we are not really seeing too much in a way of black, yellows.
04:47We are not really seeing too much in a way of black whatever you want to call these guys the turquoise colors,
04:51but we are seeing black cobalt and we are seeing black lavenders, black reds, flash magentas over here as well.
05:00It is impossible to just completely take the Lightness out of the picture and still have color left.
05:05But it does still happen inside of Lab, that is the kind of range that it gives us,
05:11not only that I'm going to go ahead and accept this for a moment.
05:14I will just go ahead and click OK inside the Hue/Saturation dialog box.
05:17Not only that, I'm going to go ahead and expand my Layers palette so that we can see this layer two
05:21up from the Background Layer, that is called Lab circle.
05:24I'm going to Shift+Click on the circle in order to turn off that vector mask and at least
05:28on this square layer mask for what it is worth.
05:31But it's showing that we can't go ahead and map the Lab color space into a square because we have A values going all the way
05:38from negative to positive and we have B values going all the way from negative to positive.
05:43So that fills up a square space.
05:45So we have got all of these colors out here in the corners to work with this well.
05:49They don't exist inside the Hue/Saturation wheel.
05:51The Hue/Saturation wheel is a wheel, it is a circle, theoretically once again.
05:56But there is nothing even theoretically outside of that circle.
05:59Whereas once again theoretically with Lab we have got a square to deal with and then when you consider if I double-click
06:06on the Adjustment Layer once again and play with the Lightness value,
06:09you consider that we have this entire dimension of Lightness to play with.
06:13We are extracting this Lab color space into a cube, and we have just got loads and loads of colors to work
06:20with here, outside of that spherical or conical space.
06:25So it is all theoretical, it is all imaginary, if you will,
06:28but it all does have practical applications as we will see in future chapters.
06:32So get site we have a ton of wriggle room, a ton of color to extract from our images here inside Lab.
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Examining RGB and CMYK channels
00:00Now that we have seen how you can mix colors inside the Color palette
00:03in the Lab Color mode we have seen what the Lab Color mode looks like inside of that big color graph.
00:09We have got an essence of what the purpose behind the Lab Color is, let us see where the real action takes place,
00:15which is here inside of the Channels palette.
00:18I'm going to ahead and click on the Channels tab, neighbor of the Layers and Paths palette here.
00:22You can also go up to the Window menu if you want and choose Channels.
00:26Now the Channels palette is showing us the individual colored channels inside of the image.
00:30I'm not going to go into too much detail about how Channels work because I have this entire series devoted to that,
00:36it is called Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks and its available to you as part
00:41of the lynda.com online training library, it is nothing if not exhaustive.
00:46But we will take a cursory look at these Channels to get a sense of what is going on and then we will, of course,
00:50spend a fair amount of time with Lab color Channels.
00:53So here is this RGB image that I have opened on screen, it is called flowers & face.jpg.
00:58It is found inside the '01what_it_is folder.
01:00It is a beautiful image, we are not going to need to correct it because it is already nicely corrected here, looks great.
01:05It comes to us from photographer Alexandra Alexis, one of my favorite photographers, with iStockPhoto.com and we are not going
01:13to correcting any photos until the next chapter.
01:15The great thing about this image, however, it serves as a great test case for examining the Channels
01:20because it has a lot of different Hues inside of it.
01:22We have these beautiful Crimsons over here on the left side of the image and inside of the lips.
01:27We have these wonderful, if pale, flesh tones and we have some nice blue eye shadows, so we have that Hue going,
01:33we have got the Greens and the Yellows over here on the right side of the image.
01:37So everybody is pretty well represented.
01:39Let us check out what the individual Color Channels look like.
01:42Now we can get to the various Channels by pressing Ctrl+1.
01:45I'm not going to keep saying these keyboard shortcuts over and over again.
01:47I'm going to be using them, I'm going to say them like once or twice
01:51and then I'm just assuming that you know how to get around here.
01:54So it is Ctrl+1 for the red channel and the reason we are going to be using keyboard shortcuts is I'm going to hide this palette
02:00in a moment, so that we can see the entire image all at once.
02:03So it is Ctrl+1 for the red channel that will be Cmd+1 on the Mac.
02:06You can also click on it if you like.
02:08There is Ctrl+2 or Command 2 for the Green channel, Ctrl or Command 3 for the Blue channel and then we have got Ctrl
02:15or Cmd+~ for the Full Color Composite and that ~ key by the way is just up there in the American keyboards
02:21in the top left corner of you keyboard there, just next door to the 1.
02:25All right, so here we go.
02:25Let us check out these Channels, now that we know how to get around.
02:28Ctrl+1 for Red, there it is very light version of the image because this is a portrait shot,
02:33so there is a lot of Reds going on inside the image.
02:36Here is the Green channel, it has the highest amount of detail going on, so lot of contrast inside of the Green channel
02:43and here is the Blue channel, it is going to look the strangest where the RGB Channels are concerned.
02:48But it is still a grayscale variation on the image and they all are.
02:52Here is Red once again, here is Green and here is Blue, all reasonable if different,
02:59grayscale variations on the Full Color Composite.
03:03Let us compare that now to CMYK, I'm going to go up to the Image menu, I'm going to choose the Duplicate command and I'm going
03:10to go ahead and name this guy CMYK like so and click OK.
03:14Now just naming an image, duplicating and naming it CMYK does not make it CMYK, notice that CMYK image is still available to us
03:22in the RGB space, so let us Shift+Tab our palettes back in to view so that we can see this miraculous transformation.
03:28You will see a slight change happening to the image on screen here, so keep your eye on the Crimsons of the flowers.
03:34Those are outside of the CMYK gamut.
03:37So when I go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose CMYK Color to perform the conversion,
03:42you will see that those colors change a little bit, they become more muted inside the CMYK image.
03:50You will also see the Channels completely transform here inside the Channels palette.
03:54So they go from Red Green Blue to Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, which is Ctrl or Cmd+4 not surprisingly.
04:02So let us switch between these Channels, I'm going to go ahead and Shift+Tab away the palettes there.
04:07This is the Cyan channel, the Cyan version of the channel, again very bright and vivid inside of this portrait shot,
04:14and it is not all that different from the Red channel.
04:17I'm going to press Ctrl+Tab, that is the same keyboard shortcut on both platforms, to switch over to the RGB version of the image
04:23and then I will switch to the Red channel there.
04:25So this is the red channel inside of RGB and this is the Cyan channel inside of CMYK,
04:31not too different there is Red again, there is Cyan again.
04:35Now, in a perfect world they would be identical to each other,
04:38they would be completely identical because Cyan and Red are color compliment.
04:42Cyan is absorbing the Red light and reflecting back Green and Blue and therefore, perfect world as I say, identical Channels.
04:49The world is not perfect.
04:50Inks are impure, as they like to say.
04:53Basically it is a much trickier process putting ink on papers, then it is shining light from a monitor.
04:59So we need that K Channel in order to fill things in an order to fill in the shadows, because the inks are never going
05:05to mix to form black, it is what comes down to.
05:08So some of the detail associated with the Red channel, here it is by the way there is the Red channel,
05:12some of it has to be off loaded to the black channel.
05:16It is what is happening here.
05:17All right, since we are in the RGB image I will switch to the Green channel.
05:21So there is the Green channel, let us Ctrl+Tab back to the CMYK image press Ctrl or Cmd+2 to switch the magenta channel.
05:27So comparing contrast here, this is Magenta; this is Green, here again very similar.
05:32In a perfect world they would be identical, in this imperfect world in which we live, they are very similar.
05:37Here is Yellow, now inside the CMYK image Ctrl+Tab back to the RGB, here is Blue, so Blue compared to Yellow.
05:45Again, very similar, not quite identical, but reasonable grayscale variations, as compared with.
05:51Here is the Black channel, very different from the full color CMYK image, very blown out.
05:57And that is because we are just filling in the shadow detail using this Black channel here.
06:02Alright so I will go back to the CMYK Full Color Composite, let's switch back or Ctrl+Tab back to the RGB image
06:08and we will Ctrl+~ our way to the RGB composite, that would be Cmd+~ on the Mac.
06:14So that is RGB CMYK, every one of the Channels with the exception of K potentially,
06:19is a grayscale variation on the Full Color Composite, something that we could recognize
06:23and potentially work with, something that is not going to scare us.
06:26Let us Shift+Tab the palettes back in to view here and we will take a look
06:30at the fundamentally different appearance of Lab color Channels in the next exercise.
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The strange (but powerful) Lab channels
00:00In the last chapter, we saw how the individual color Channels inside of an RGB image and at least the Cyan,
00:06Magenta and Yellow channels inside of the CMYK image are reasonable
00:10if very different Grayscale Variations on the Full Color Composite.
00:15So they are at least recognizable if nothing else, they are recognizable as being part
00:19of the full color image in which we are working.
00:22That really isn't the case for specially the a and b channels inside of a Lab color image.
00:29They are sufficiently bizarre and cruddy looking to, I would say to strike fear in the hearts of many people who have come
00:36across Lab images and tried to and just then modify them.
00:38Let us take a look at those channels, why don't we?
00:41Now I'm working inside of that original flowers & face.jpg file which is the RGB version of the image
00:48from photographer Alexandra Alexis of iStockPhoto.com, found inside of the 01what_it_is folder.
00:55I'm going to go up to the Image menu, I'm going to choose mode and I'm going to choose Lab Color.
01:00Now keep your eye for a moment on the RGB image itself when I choose Lab Color in order
01:05to convert it, we see no color change on screen.
01:09You should see nothing changing on screen.
01:12Whereas, I will go ahead and Shift+Tab away the palettes for a moment and Ctrl+Tab to CMYK version of the image
01:18that I still have open, that is the CMYK version, see how the colors are dropping out.
01:23The intensity of the Crimson color as here inside the flowers is dropping away inside of the CMYK version.
01:29So this CMYK and this is the brighter more vivid Lab version of the image.
01:36And we will just go back and forth between RGB and Lab for a moment, I will press Ctrl+Z to go back to RGB
01:42that is the RGB version of the image Cmd+Z on a Mac and this is Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z again to go back into Lab.
01:47So you should not see any difference.
01:49So here is the point, the change between RGB and CMYK is well known to be a destructive modification.
01:58In other words, you want to go once and only once in the CMYK, you don't want go back and forward to RGB and then to CMYK
02:05and then back to RGB and then to CMYK again, that is going to harm the image over time, if not just right away.
02:12Typically what you want to do is you want to perform all your modifications inside the RGB or Lab color space and then go
02:18to CMYK at the end if and only if your are going to press, if you are going to a commercial printer.
02:25Whereas, you can go back and forward between RGB and Lab color, not as much as you like, but with greater flexibility.
02:32Now I'm not going to go out there and say the change between Lab and RGB is completely non-destructive, it is not.
02:39It is slightly destructive.
02:41Some of the Mask does change invariably two pixels
02:44that were two different colors inside the image will coalesce to become one color.
02:48But I will tell you this, this guy out there, named Dan Margulis
02:52who has written what I would say indisputably the most comprehensive book on Lab color out there.
02:58It is called Photoshop Lab color from Peachpit Press.
03:02He claims to have converted back and forward between RGB and Lab some insane number of times like ten or a 100
03:09or something along those lines, without any market difference inside of the image without any perceivable difference either
03:16on the image on screen or the image in print and he is out there claiming essentially it is
03:21for all intensive purposes and non-destructive transformation.
03:24I'm going to tell you it is some what destructive, but not so much,
03:28it is really going if you just go back and forward like once or twice.
03:32Just take it easy but feel free to wander back and forward between RGB and Lab.
03:38Alright but let us take a look at the channels that is why we are here, right?
03:41Here is the Lab image, the Full Color Composite at the top of the Channel stack.
03:45Then we have the Lightness channel, to make this little lighter, so we can see the word lightness.
03:49And then we have a and b. You can already see they are weird creatures.
03:53Let just go ahead and switch to lightness, which we can get to by pressing Command or Ctrl+1.
03:57Shift+Tab away those palettes.
03:59Wow, it looks like a grayscale version of the image in fact,
04:02this is like the best Grayscale Variation there is, really that we have seen so far anyway.
04:08There are folks out there that claim like this is the way you should convert an image to Grayscale.
04:12You should convert it to Lab and then you should go up to the Image menu, you should choose Mode
04:17and you should choose Grayscale, it will dump the a and b channels, see it is going to say Discard other channels,
04:22OK, and then you have got your Grayscale image.
04:25If I Shift+Tab back to palettes, you can see if I have got one channel Gray and that's it,
04:28and that is the best possible Grayscale Version of the image there is.
04:31I have heard that claim, I will tell you I completely disagree with that.
04:35That is not in least true.
04:37Shift+Tab away the palettes, Undo that modifications, so that we are back inside
04:41of the Lightness channels inside the full color Lab image right there, the full color Lab image.
04:46So back to Lightness channel but it is a very credible Grayscale Variation, there is all kinds of ways to create,
04:51really great black and white images inside a Photoshop.
04:54This is not the best method, it is a method and it is a nice Grayscale Version of the image.
04:59Compare that to, Command or Ctrl+2 for the a channel.
05:03Oh my goodness what is that?
05:05What kind of train wreck have we encountered where the channels are concerned.
05:09That is not only, it is completely bizarre and just weird but it is ugly.
05:16I don't think that there is any denying that is an ugly channel.
05:20It doesn't even have any contrast going on inside of that, we have no highlights, no light colors, we have no shadows,
05:25no dark colors, we just have a bunch of nebulous mid tones in here.
05:30So, fully on the A channel right.
05:33Here is Ctrl or Cmd+3 for the B channel, black also bad but the thing is, ok,
05:39they look cruddy but these channels are awesome.
05:42You will run learn to love them initially they are repugnant, but over time you will come to like them.
05:48I'm going to bring back the Channels palette.
05:50I also want to show you what the two channels look like if you click in the eyeball, in front in one of the hidden channels.
05:56So that you can see both the 'a' and 'b' channels at the same time.
05:58Even when we are seeing the channels in color, all of the rich color of the image rubbed of all
06:04of its luminosity; it is still ugly to look at.
06:07I just want you to get the sense of what is going on there.
06:09In the next chapter we are going to be exploiting this wonderful ugliness here.
06:14We are going to be bringing out all kinds of wonderful colors inside of the images.
06:17But for now I just want you to know it is here because it will and for more we do in the future.
06:21And I really want to give you a sense of how these channels, how is it that these two little dreadful like these a and this b,
06:30these thing one and thing two of the Channels palettes here, how do they blend together to create these colors
06:36and how do they blend with Lightness in order to create the Full Color Composite, this beautiful image right here.
06:41I'm going to show you how that blending works, beginning in the next exercise.
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How RGB and CMYK channels blend
00:00Now, we are going to examine how the various channels in an image, in a full color image, how they blend together in order
00:07to create the full color composite, how does that process work.
00:11Especially since we just have a bunch of grayscale variations on the image.
00:14I'm looking at by the way, the original version.
00:17I have got to hit and restore the original version of Flowers & face.jpg.
00:21So, we are looking at the RGB version of the image.
00:23How do these grayscale variations of the image merge and mix to form the RGB composite?
00:31Well, I'm going to explain how it works inside of RGB and CMYK in this exercise and then in the final next exercise
00:37of the chapter, I will show you how the channels mix in Lab, in Lab.
00:43First thing you need to know is that you can view the color channels in color by going to the Preferences command
00:48and the simplest way to do this, press Ctrl+K, Cmd+K on the Mac.
00:52Then we go over here to this guy, Interface and you turn on Show Channels in Color and you can immediately see the channels
00:59in color here inside the Channels palette in the background.
01:03Now, the reason that these are not shown, when I click the OK button there, the reason that they don't appear in color
01:08in the first place by default is because these channels are really useful for creating masks, Alpha Channels
01:14and so on as I told you all about that in my Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks series.
01:18It's hard to evaluate how you can mask an image if you are seeing the channels in color, like it is very difficult
01:25to read what that image looks like right there.
01:28But this is the way Photoshop sees the channel.
01:31So, the lightest color is red what used to be white, before it was formerly white, it's now red and black shows up as black.
01:38The Green channel, white shows up as green and then black is black and then Blue channel,
01:42white shows up as blue and then black is black.
01:44Then you can turn on multiple channels at the same time in order to merge them together,
01:49in order to see what those two channels look like when blended together.
01:54So, that's RGB, let's take a look at CMYK in the CMYK version of the image.
02:01So, let's take a look at the Cyan channel which is now colorized.
02:04The darkest color is cyan because we are on white paper now and the lightest color is white and then in the Magenta channel,
02:10black becomes magenta and white remains white.
02:13In the Yellow channel, black becomes yellow and white remains white and you can see what I'm talking about,
02:18it's very difficult to read what in the world that channel looks like when we are seeing it yellowized like this
02:24and there is the Black version of the channels.
02:26Looks the same as it did before when it wasn't colorized.
02:28All right, now the reason I'm showing you this is because they inform how the channels mix together.
02:33So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to this image right here.
02:37What I have opened is an image called RGB blending.psd and it's found inside the Mode blending subfolder that's inside
02:45of the O1_what_it_is folder and it's not only an RGB version of the image as you can see here inside the Channels palette,
02:51but if you switch over to Layers palette, you can see that I have gone ahead and captured Red,
02:56Green and Blue versions of the image, the actual Red, Green and Blue channels, I have captured them pixel for pixel
03:05and expressed them as layers inside the Layers palette.
03:08Now, I'm going to mix them together.
03:09So, I'm going to turn off everything but Red, actually I have got the Background layer turned on as well,
03:14that doesn't matter, but I have got the Red channel turned on.
03:16Now, I'm going to turn on Green, I'm going to click on the Green channel and I'm going to change it's Blend mode
03:22from Normal to Screen and that's going to go ahead and blend those two channels together subject to the rules of RGB imagery.
03:32So, when you screen two layers together, you get the exact same effect
03:36as mixing two RGB channels together inside the Channels palette.
03:41So, this is the exact same thing we would get by mixing the Red and Green channels.
03:46Let's go to the Blue layer right there, turn it on and then change its mode to Screen
03:51as well and we have the full color composite image.
03:55So, it's screening these colors together.
03:57Now, if you don't what the Screen blend mode does, it's basically the same as putting let's say the Red image and the Green image,
04:04expressing them as slides, putting them in separate projectors and shining the two projectors on the same screen.
04:11So, the color is incrementally lighting each other and that's why we are getting these colors lightening on top of each other
04:17in order to create the full color composite and if you don't believe me that it's identical, then Alt+Click or Option+Click
04:22on the eye ball in front of Background and you will see just the background image.
04:26Now, Alt or Option+Click again to see the image as it's expressed by blending the Red, Green and Blue layers together subject
04:32to the Screen blend mode, it is exactly the same.
04:36How about CMYK?
04:38Let's go ahead and switch over to the CMYK version of the image.
04:42I'm calling this guy CMYK blending.psd, also found inside of that Mode blending subfolder and you can see
04:49that once again I have expressed the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black channels as independent layers inside the Layers palette.
04:58If Screen allows us to merge color channels together an RGB image, then if we want to darken,
05:05if we want to heap these relatively light channels on top of each other in order to create darker results,
05:09then we want to use the opposite of the Screen blend mode and that is Multiply.
05:14So, I'm going to turn on Cyan and I'm going to switch over to Magenta, turn it on,
05:17make sure it's active and change the mode from Normal to Multiply.
05:22Multiply is like taking these two separate channels right here Cyan and Magenta, putting them on different transparencies
05:30and then placing them on top of each other in a light table, so that the light has to go
05:34through both transparencies, so that's projecting the colors at us.
05:37So, it has to go through more and more colors that are layered on top of each other.
05:41It's also analogous to just laying ink on top of ink on top of ink as happens it the commercial printing process.
05:48So, anyway, we have got magenta mixing with cyan exactly like they do inside the Channels palette, let's go to Yellow,
05:54turn it on, switch it's Blend mode to Multiply, we get the color version of the image without any of the shadow detail.
06:02So, now let's make the Black channel active, turn it on and change it to Multiply as well
06:09and we get the full color composite version of the image.
06:11Again, don't believe me, let's prove it, Alt+Click or Option+Click on the eye ball in front
06:15of the Background layer, it looks exactly the same.
06:17Alt or Option+Click on that eyeball to show all of the layers looks the same.
06:21We do have a perfect match.
06:24So, if we are mixing RGB channels together subject to the Screen blend mode and we are mixing CMYK channels together,
06:31subject to the Multiply mode, how does Lab work?
06:35What Blend mode is analogous there?
06:37Well, I will show you, you might be able to guess, if you know a thing or two about blend modes,
06:40but I will show you exactly how it works in the next exercise.
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How channels blend in Lab
00:00So, in the previous exercise, I showed you how Photoshop mixes the RGB channels subject to the conventions
00:06of the Screen blend mode, the exact same mathematics going on.
00:10It mixes the CMYK channels together using the Multiply blend mode.
00:14What Blend mode must be at work where Lab color is concerned?
00:18And by the way, this all happens under the hood, you don't have to worry about this at all.
00:22You don't have to know what Blend modes that Photoshop is using in the Background.
00:27I just find it to be personally illuminating, that's why I'm sharing this with you.
00:31In fact it kind of makes sense, what's going on here.
00:35Let me show you, I'm working in a Lab image, it's called Lab blending.psd found inside of the O1_what_it_is folder,
00:42here in the Channels palette we can see the Lightness, a and b channels.
00:45I have set the channels to display in color by pressing Command or Ctrl+K to bring up the Preferences dialog box
00:52and I go to Interface and I have got Show Channels in Color turned on.
00:56So, when we take a look at the Lightness channel, it appears as a grayscale image, because it's just the luminance information.
01:02When we take a look at the a channel, it's no longer this glob of gray, it is instead a glob of these sort of indistinct lavenders
01:11and grays and turquoise colors and here is b, we now have our cobalts and our grays and our just these lack luster yellows,
01:19how in the world do we go from these yellows right here to these beautiful yellows in the case
01:24of the full color composite, just these bright vivid yellows here.
01:28Well, you can take a look at these two channels at the same time, I showed you what a
01:31and b look like together, they don't look like much.
01:34But if we take a look at Lightness and one of the channels together,
01:37we start to get a better impression, so I will turn off a for a moment.
01:40So, we can see just Lightness and b and now,
01:42that luminance information is really dRAWing forth the yellows and the cobalt colors.
01:47But we are still left with just yellows and cobalts and we can see that if I turn off b and then turn on a,
01:52we are really dRAWing forth that lavender information or that crimson if you prefer and that turquoise information over here,
01:59but it's still lavender and turquoise, it's not the green.
02:03We need to bring in the green by bringing in that b channel right there.
02:07So, how does that work?
02:08Well, let's go over to Layers palette and again I have set things up, so I have captured the Lightness channel right there
02:13and the a channel which is the tint channel of course and the b channel which is the temperature channel where Lab is concerned.
02:20Inside of this Lab blending.psd document, how do we blend them together.
02:24Well, let's turn on just Lightness along with the Background Layer in the background there, it's set to the Normal blend mode,
02:29leave it that way, go to Tint, go ahead and click on it, turn it on.
02:33We will change its mode.
02:36I was telling you that there is Multiply and there is that some of the modes are missing now inside of the Lab color space.
02:41We have got Multiply for similar case, Green for RGB.
02:44We need a combination of the two for Lab and their combination is Overlay, check it out.
02:52Choose Overlay and you mix that Tint layer that a channel along with the Lightness layer there, the Lightness information subject
02:59to the exact same rules, the exact same mathematics that have worked inside of the Channels palette.
03:05Let's go to b, make it active, turn it on and change it from Normal to Overlay as well.
03:11And we have the full color composite people, we dropped out those grays, we kept the color information, that's how it work inside
03:18of those two channels, mixed it with the luminance information from the Lightness layer right there
03:22and we get the full color composite, the exact same thing.
03:24Just to compare and contrast, Alt+Click on the eyeball,
03:27Option+Click on the Mac to show just the Background layer, that's how it looks.
03:30Alt+Click or Option+Click again to show the composite of all these layers right here
03:34and they look pixel for pixel exactly the same.
03:38So, that's what's going on with Lab, I hope that helps, I hope that makes sense, I know I haven't passed a long a lick
03:45of practical application of the Lab Color model yet, but that's about to change starting in the next chapter.
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2. What Lab Color Can Do
Bad becomes great, great becomes better
00:00Now that we have seen how Lab color works, it's time to see what it can do
00:04and what it can do is blow your mind.
00:07I mean that quite seriously.
00:09Notice I didn't say literally. Lab will not explode your brain. Trust me, I'll see to that.
00:15Rather Lab will have a profound effect on you. It will surprise you with its power, it will amaze you with what it can do,
00:22it will blow your ever-loving mind.
00:26For example, first thing I am going to have you do is open an image that looks great.
00:30Not a thing wrong with it.
00:31And then I'm going to show you how to correct it in Lab and then you are going to look at the old version and think, "Oh my God!
00:37The corrected one is so much better." Later, we'll take a terrible image, one of those things that just makes you think, "Bag it!
00:44This isn't going anywhere" and we're going to turn it into something fairly awe inspiring.
00:49That's Lab for you, take something great, make it better; take some awful, make it great. I mean look what it did for me. Here,
00:58Let me show you.
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Cheapening a perfectly good image in RGB
00:00We are going to start things off, one of the most practical applications of the Lab color space there is, is that you can take
00:06a perfectly good image, nothing wrong with it in all the world,
00:09and make it way better.
00:12That's what we are going to be doing. In this exercise we'll show you how we might approach such an image in RGB,
00:18a rather feeble attempt I have to warn you,
00:20and then in the next exercise we'll do it in Lab, not feeble at all.
00:24So, we're working inside of another photograph
00:28from that same photographer, Alexander Alexis
00:30of istockphoto.com, and it's the same model too. I don't know what her name is.
00:34But it's just a different shot from that same series as we saw in the previous chapter.
00:39This image is called Flowers & face II.jpg and it's found inside the O2_what_it_can_do folder.
00:45As I say, there is nothing wrong with this photograph. It's a beautiful photograph with all kinds of hues and
00:51just wonderful makeup, beautiful model, lovely flowers.
00:56But the one thing I would say after looking at the image for a little while is it lacks a little bit of punch,
01:02which is a heck of a comment to make about an image that has this much punch associated with it.
01:06But it could use some darker blacks,
01:10now that I sort of contemplate it, and I could stand to have a little bit more saturation associated with this image.
01:16I want the colors to really punch, more than they are already punching.
01:20So, I am working inside of an RGB image at this point, you can see it's RGB up here in the title bar.
01:25I'm going to go over here to the Layers palette. I could just apply the Hue/Saturation command
01:29from the Image, Adjustments submenu right here.
01:32As long as we are working in Lab and we are talking about this great color space, let's stick to some really great habits
01:38and we'll go ahead and apply an Adjustment layer here.
01:41I'm going to press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac and I am going to click this black/white icon
01:45and I'm going to choose Hue/Saturation,
01:47which is ostensibly the best command inside Photoshop anyway
01:52for increasing the saturation of an RGB image.
01:55That we see in Lab, we use a totally different command. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and choose Hue/Saturation and because I had
02:01the Alt or the Option key down, it'll ask me what I want to name this image and I am just going to call it raise sat or something
02:06so that I know what it's doing, it's raising the saturation
02:08and I'll click OK.
02:11And then I get the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Let's go ahead and click inside of the Saturation value here and
02:16I'm going to press Shift+Up arrow
02:18let's say four times in a row.
02:20So, we're raising the Saturation to +40
02:24and I'll click OK in order to accept that modification. And that's great in a way.
02:30If I click off the eyeball there in order to reveal the original image, she does now look a little pale, a little pallid
02:36by comparison to the increased saturation version of the image, which certainly has more vivid colors, you have to give it that.
02:43However, I would call this version of the image garish
02:48and not just because the colors are just flying out of control here, but also because we are losing definition inside of
02:56the stems and inside of the flowers petals and inside of her lips and so on. Let me go ahead and turn that eyeball off again
03:01and you will see that we have some nice volumetric detail and when I say volumetric detail,
03:05I mean that we can see the chiaroscuro, the shadows and the highlights that embellish this stem right here and make it look really sculptural,
03:15like it's coming out at you. You want that obviously in this kind of photograph.
03:18As soon as we raise the saturation using the Hue/Saturation command,
03:23we're starting to flatten that detail.
03:26So, it's becoming more shallow and we certainly don't want that. You can see it happening in other portions
03:31of the photograph as well if you play around with that.
03:34All right, so that's one way to work, that's the RGB way to work. I could also go ahead and pile on another command,
03:40if I wanted to go back down here to the background.
03:42And I could Alt or Option+Click on the black/ white icon, I could choose the Levels command
03:48and in this case, because I have the Alt or Option key down, bringing up the New Layer dialog box once again.
03:53In this case, I am going to go ahead and call this
03:56blacker blacks or something along those lines because I want to increase the darkness of the pupils and the other dark colors here
04:03and I'll click OK.
04:05I'll just go ahead and raise this black point here to the other side of the valley. Notice this little valley inside
04:12the Histogram right there. So we're cutting those colors off. We are going to go ahead and clip those blacks, it's actually-
04:18it will work okay for us I think and I will click OK.
04:20Now, I will go ahead and Alt+Click on this eyeball or Option+Click on this eyeball in front of Background so that
04:26we're seeing the before version of the image. So that's before. Alt+Click again or Option+Click again, that's after and
04:32she certainly has a lot more punch associated with her, but once again, we still have that flatness.
04:36There's no getting around that since we applied such a heaping helping of the Saturation value
04:41and now we're loading two commands on top of each other which means we are starting to get a little bit destructive. It would be nice
04:47if we could make all of our changes with a single Adjustment layer. Well, I have got news for you, we can do a heck of a lot better job
04:54and we can use the single adjustment layer if we work with the Lab color space as we are going to do in the next exercise.
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Making a great image even better in Lab
00:00Now, that we have seen how to cheapen a perfectly good image in RGB
00:04and I have to say we have taken this beautiful woman right here, beautifully photographed as well,
00:10and we have turned her into an absolute harlot.
00:12I don't feel good about what we have done.
00:14I feel quite remorseful.
00:16We did a bad thing, folks.
00:17We are going to see how to take a great image and make it look even better in Lab.
00:23So, what I want you to do, I'm working inside of a catch up document that represents the results of what we did
00:28in the previous exercise and it's called Much too garish.psd, because I want to show you a little trick
00:34for taking a layer and extracting it into a new document.
00:37So, I'm going to click on the Background layer here at the bottom of the Layer stack and I'm going to press
00:42and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and I'm going to drag that Background layer onto the little Page icon.
00:49As soon as I release because I have Alt or Option down and forcing the display of the Duplicate layer command,
00:53rather than duplicating the layer inside of this same document, we will send it to a new document,
00:58by going to the little document, pop up menu, choosing New and then we can name the document something like Lady Lab
01:05or something along those lines and click OK in order to create the image.
01:09So, notice that this is a flat image.
01:11This is the original image as it was captured and posted by Alexander Alexis of istockphoto.com.
01:18Now, let's go ahead and convert her to the Lab mode by going up to the Image menu, choosing Mode and choosing Lab color.
01:25She is now a Lab image.
01:27Now, we could increase the saturation of this image in exactly the same way we did inside RGB,
01:33which is to say using the Hue/Saturation command.
01:35I could go ahead and press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac,
01:38click and hold on the black/white icon and choose the Hue/Saturation command.
01:41Let's go ahead and name this guy raise sat once again, click OK, brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box.
01:49Click inside the Saturation value, Shift+Up arrow four times in a row and click OK.
01:55Let's go ahead and compare these two documents, this is a Ctrl+Tab to see the RGB version of the image and this is Ctrl+Tab
02:03to see the Lab version of the image, it's still too garish.
02:07It's just garish in different ways where accentuating the lips or making them pinker
02:12than we did inside of the RGB version of the image.
02:15As you can see this is the RGB version, this is the Lab version.
02:19What I'm trying to tell you is that Hue/Saturation still misbehaves,
02:23even inside the Lab mode, it's not giving us the results we want.
02:26Now, you can use Hue/Saturation, you can give an image a little bit of a saturation bump if you want to inside of Lab.
02:33But I just wouldn't go this far.
02:34I wouldn't go as high as +40 because it's just too much.
02:38So, let's go ahead and turn off that raise sat adjustment layer.
02:41So, if that's not the way to go, what is?
02:43I will show you.
02:44We can do it all in one command.
02:45We can go ahead and sync those shadows, make them nice and black and we can raise the Saturation values using a single command
02:51and that command can be either Levels or curves, you can work either way.
02:55We are going to start with Levels because it's easier way to work.
02:58We will move on to curves later.
03:00So, I'm going to click on the Background layer here to make it active that I'm going to Alt or Option click
03:05on the black/white icon and choose the Levels command and I am going to call this one blacks & sats in order to indicate
03:13that we are correct in the blacks and the saturation values, click OK in order to bring up the Levels dialog box.
03:19Now notice whereas when you are working on an RGB image with a Levels command, by default you will be working
03:25on the RGB composite which is to say all channels at the same time that is not even possible
03:31when you are applying the Levels command to a Lab image, you have to work on one channel at a time, that's your only option.
03:37So, we will start with Lightness and I'm going to go ahead and increase this black point value to about 20 in order
03:45to scalp those values right there, sync them to black.
03:48So, we are going to clip those darkest colors inside of this image.
03:52Now, you can see we now have darker darks.
03:55So, this is before if I turn off the Preview checkbox, this is before, this is after.
03:59Now, it doesn't really take care of the image though, it needs more color punch.
04:04So, let's go ahead and switch over to the a channel and we will see this tiny little histogram, remember that a
04:10and b are fundamentally gray channels, they are midtones without any highlights or shadows
04:17and that's the way the histogram is going to show up as well.
04:19So, you are going to see a bunch of midtones there,
04:20you are not going to see any highlights, you are not going to see any shadows.
04:24So, what we need to do is expand this range of grays right here, so that we have a little bit of shadow and a little bit
04:31of highlight and that's going to increase the punch of the a axis.
04:36Now, we will turn around and do the same thing for the b axis.
04:38So, here is how it works.
04:39If we want to get a similar effect, it's not going to be the same.
04:42It's a similar effect to raising the Saturation value to 40.
04:45As I say, this is rough, by the way.
04:47We are just trying to get something that's roughly the same.
04:49I will go ahead and raise this black point value here to +40.
04:53So, I will select it as I have and then I will press Shift+Up arrow four times in a row like so.
04:58Now, because we are adding shadow to the a channel, that means we are darkening the a channel, so we are trending the image
05:05as you may recall to our turquoise or green if you prefer.
05:09Then I'm going to Tab+Tab over to the white point value and I'm going to press Shift+Down arrow four times in a row.
05:16So, we get a value of 215 right there, so you should have 40 on the left, 215 on the right
05:20and we are making the image more lavender or crimson or magenta or red or however you want to think about it.
05:27But we are balancing now the a axis, but we aren't balancing the b axis or favoring the pinks inside the image especially
05:35over the other color values here, particularly the blues that could stand to have a little more punch, believe it or not.
05:43The yellows inside the image as well.
05:46So, we will move on to the b channel right there and you can use these keyboard shortcuts
05:50as well saying keyboard shortcuts we had in the Channel palette.
05:53So, Ctrl+1+2+3, Cmd+1+2+3 on the Mac to switch channels.
06:01I just find it's a little clunky on the PC, that's why I'm choosing these options.
06:06You can have to hold the key down on the PC, on the Mac, it works much better.
06:11So, I'm going to go ahead and click in the black point value there and I'm going to press Shift+Up arrow four times in a row
06:21like so and we are now adding shadow, adding darkness to the b channel.
06:26So, we are making the image more blue or more cobalt or however you want to think about it.
06:33Then I'm going to press the Tab key twice in a row in order to highlight the 255 value, the white point value and I'm going
06:42to press Shift+Down arrow four times in order to reduce that value to 215 and that balances the entire image now
06:51at this point, because we are adding yellow to the image, which is balancing the blue and that by balancing the b axis,
06:57we are offsetting the changes we made to the a axis and notice that we are keeping our changes to the a and b axis identical.
07:04So, here is b, 40, 215 no change to the Gamma value, here is a, 40, 215 not change to the Gamma value.
07:13So, if the colors in the image were already balanced than the first place,
07:16no color cast in other words then keep your modifications identical, keep them nice and symmetrical
07:22and then whatever you want to do to the Lightness channel, up to you.
07:27All right, now click OK in order to accept that modification
07:32and this is our beautifully rendered highly saturated version of the image.
07:36Notice that our stems are still nice and sculptural, so this is before if I turn that one adjustment layer off,
07:42you can see that we had sculptural detail before, but it is a paled image by comparison,
07:46kind of pasty, by what we have now, here it is after.
07:50Oh my goodness!
07:51Look at those rich colors, let's go ahead and compare it to the not so good RGB image, the harlot of an RGB image.
07:56I will go ahead and Ctrl+Tab over there.
07:57There it is, see?
07:58Garish, beautiful.
07:58You get what I'm saying, so we are taking a perfectly good image and we are making it just absolutely sync in Lab.
08:01An amazing simple professional application of the Lab Color mode.
08:03If you learned nothing else, learn this about Lab and you will make your images that much better.
08:05In the next exercise, we are going to see what to do if we just rebalance the colors ever so slightly, once again, inside Lab.
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Saving a Lab image file
00:00All right, I want to squeeze in one additional bit of information where this image is concerned.
00:05Before we move on to the topic of balancing colors, favoring one color over another when we are performing a Lab edit
00:11which I will show you how to do in the next exercise.
00:13I want to show you how to save a Lab image.
00:16It's mostly pretty brain-dead, but there are a couple of things to note.
00:20So, I have got this Lab version of the image, this corrected Lab image that I created in the previous exercise
00:26and you may recall it's so beautiful, so nicely done, this is the corrected Lab image by comparison to the corrected RGB image
00:34which is way to garish, lots of flat color is going on here, here is Lab once again, much better, nicely rounded details
00:43and of course this is the image compared to its original paled cell.
00:46So, it definitely needed the correction, even though it's great image to begin with.
00:50So, let's go ahead and save it out by going up to the File menu and in this case because I created a new image,
00:55I could just choose Save command or I could choose Save As.
00:58I will go ahead and choose Save As.
00:59Just be careful, it's best practice.
01:02Now, you will know that you can not save to JPEG anymore, you can save and RGB image to the JPEG, you can save a CMYK image
01:08to the JPEG, you can not save a Lab image to JPEG.
01:12You can go to the native Photoshop format, which is what I would use in this case or you could go to TIFF, if it's a flat image,
01:18you might want to use TIFF, if you are working with a layered image, I would suggest the native PSD file format here.
01:24Notice you are saving the layers, so that's a good thing to do, but also notice you can not select a color profile.
01:31So, just as you can select is you are advised to select a profile when you are saving RGB image or a CMYK image.
01:38You are neither advised nor can you save an ICC profile along with the Lab image, the reason, because there is one
01:45and only one Lab offered by Photoshop, one and only one flavor of Lab.
01:51CIELabD50, that's the only one you got.
01:55So, there is no reason to profile it because that profile is going to automatically be assigned to this image.
02:00So, go ahead and click Save in order to Save that file out and that's all there is to it, I just wanted no JPEG, no ICC profile.
02:08In the next exercise, I will show you how to balance those colors.
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Favoring yellow to balance skin tones
00:00In this exercise, we are going to see how to balance the Saturation values again, raise them up.
00:06We are also going to do a little bit of brightness tweaking and while we boost the Saturation values in the image,
00:12we are also going to warm up the skin tones a little bit.
00:15So, we are going to favor the skin tones, balance out the colors a little bit.
00:19The name of the image that we are going to use this time around is this guy right here,
00:22it's called Cello punk.jpg found inside the O2_what_it_can_do folder and this image comes to us from photographer Pascal Genest
00:31of istockphoto.com and it's a really great image.
00:34You can see he has got this excellent dull hair and he also has his wonderful artificial irises.
00:40He has to be wearing some contact lenses.
00:44I wish I had those contact lenses.
00:45Although probably they get a little itchy after a while.
00:47But I really want to punch up the colors in this image, even though they are already through the roof, right?
00:53I mean this hair couldn't be much bluer, but as you will see of course inside the Lab Color mode,
00:57in most certainly could be bluer, but we could bring out the colors on the face a little bit,
01:02we sort of make him a little yellower, because right now he is a little too pink I think.
01:08We might even bring out the colors in the cello, what the hack.
01:11All right, so I'm going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit here, this image is an RGB image to begin with.
01:16So, we are going to go ahead and convert it over to Lab, by going up to the Image menu, choosing Mode and choosing Lab color.
01:23Now, I'm going to Alt or Option+Click this black/white icon and choose the Levels command
01:28and I will call this guy color enhance like so.
01:31Then I will click OK in order to bring up the Levels dialog box.
01:34Now, right now I'm not going to do anything to Lightness, we will come back to that in just a moment.
01:38Let's start with a and b. So, let just do our standard increase saturation thing that we did before,
01:44press Shift+Up arrow four times and then I will Tab-Tab to the white point value and press Shift+Down arrow four times,
01:51we should be looking at values of 40 and 215.
01:54Now, this is starting to looking like magical numbers like every time you approach an image,
01:58you are going to want to give it 40 and 215, that's not actually true.
02:01It just happens to work for these highly saturated images here.
02:04Otherwise we are going to start clipping the colors and the a and b channels where these images are concerned.
02:09Later we will do different values that you will see.
02:11Now, I'm going to press Ctrl+3 or Cmd+3 on the Mac in order to switch over to the b channel and I will go ahead
02:18and click inside the black point value, press Shift+Up arrow four times in a row.
02:22Makes the image very blue as you can see, it is possible to make that dull hair even bluer and then I will press Tab-Tab to get
02:29to the white point value and press Shift+Down arrow four times in a row.
02:33But let's say I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this space once again.
02:35Let's say we want to yellow up that skin which sounds like a strange thing to do, why would we want to add yellow to the skin,
02:42that sounds to me like make him look jaundiced which he certainly doesn't need at this point.
02:47But in truth, the skin is a little too pink and if want to tan it up, then we are not actually making the image darker
02:54or the skin darker as if he actually has a tan, we are just adding a little sunlight to the image
03:00if you want to think of it that way to the skin tones.
03:02I'm going to press Shift+Down arrow a fifth time, notice how that adds a little bit of healthy yellow to the image,
03:08so it's offsetting that sort of lavender tone, that sort of crimson tone that we have to the skin right now
03:13and I will press Shift+Down arrow once again to take it to 195.
03:18So, we are taking 60, we are shaving 60 of the white point value here.
03:22So, we are setting all of these colors of whites who were ever so slightly clipping to the colors inside of the b channel here.
03:28That gives them the nice sort of healthy yellowness.
03:31Now, if we have gone too far, which we may have, let's go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification.
03:37If on balance, you feel like you have gone too far with your color modification, this is before and this is after
03:44and by going too far I mean maybe we have made his skin look a little too yellow or maybe this is even more important,
03:50we are starting to lose detail inside of an area of the image.
03:53So, this is before down here in the cello, this is before, we see a lot of woodgrain going through the image right here
04:00with some pealing varnish, that's good, nice little touch there and this is after we increase the saturation
04:07and notice we are starting to lose a little bit of a grain close to this steamy poo thing that's part of the cello.
04:13I should remember what that's called, I used to play a violin, but I can't.
04:16So, I'm going to reduce the opacity value in order to tone down this correction a little bit.
04:20I'm just going to press the 7 key to take the opacity value down to 70%.
04:24You can see that we regained some of that grain.
04:26So, if you go too far as opposed to going back into the Levels command and tweaking those values because that's kind of a pain
04:31in the neck, you can just reduce the Opacity value for the Adjustment layer.
04:35Now, I'm going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit more.
04:38So, we can take in the entire image again.
04:40Now, let's say I want to deepen the colors just a little because there is a lot of blown highlights,
04:44this is a high key image that's fine, has a nice look to it.
04:47But let's say I just want to sync the flush tones, just a little bit here.
04:51So, I will go ahead and double click on my Adjustment layer
04:54and that little Adjustment layer icon to bring up the Levels dialog box.
04:58I'm going to click in my midtone value right to the Gamma value and I'm going to press Shift+Down arrow three times in a row
05:04to darken up this area of the skin, pretty nicely, it's a lot of darkness that I'm applying there, but I like it.
05:10I will go ahead and click OK.
05:13You might not want to go that far normally, but for the sake of really seeing what we can accomplish here inside of Lab,
05:18I want to go maybe just a little bit, to give it that extra mile.
05:21Now, one thing that you might very well disagree with and I would not blame you at all is you might say,
05:26all these corrections are pretty darn good, this is before, this is after, his skin certainly benefits
05:32from this modification, his hand should benefit as well.
05:35This part of the cello appear, this is before, this is after, has a nice resonance going on inside of that -
05:43once again that nicely sculptured detail right there.
05:46But, what about the dull hair, did it really need any more bluing?
05:51I don't think so.
05:51This is before and this is after, it was really sufficiently blue in the first place and we are starting to flatten a little bit
05:59of the detail that was already pretty flat to begin with, inside of this hair.
06:02So, why don't we back off to the blues and just the blues?
06:07And I will show you how we accomplished that in the next exercise.
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Dropping out the blues
00:00In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to back a correction off of the single group of colors,
00:06which is something that we can do using the Luminance Blending options
00:10which work a little differently in the Lab mode than they do inside of RGB.
00:14Now, I'm working inside of this corrected image and it's a catch-up document
00:19that I'm calling He plays blue.psd that's found inside of the O2_what_it_can_do folder,
00:25so called because he is talented, he doesn't have to play blue.
00:29But he does of course, he is playing, but he doesn't need to play quite this blue.
00:34So, we have gone too far with the dull hair and the artificial irises, this is before and this is after, nice changes elsewhere,
00:42but the blue has to go, the extra blue that is to say.
00:45So, rather than double clicking inside of the thumbnail right here, the Levels thumbnail which would bring
00:51up the Levels dialog box as we have seen, I am going to go ahead and cancel that there.
00:55Double click over away in the blank area of the layer, not in the layer name either, but in the blank area in order to bring
01:01up the big layer style dialog box and notice that we have all kinds of blending options to choose from.
01:07Down here are our Luminance Blending sliders and I tell you all about those again.
01:13I tell you how those work inside of my Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks series.
01:18I believe it's in Chapter10 actually, if you remember, of the lynda.com Online Training Library.
01:24They work a little differently though where Lab is concerned.
01:27So, you can either modify these values according to the Lightness settings.
01:33So, in other words I could drop out the shadows like so by dragging this first black slider triangle,
01:41so that I'm creating holes where the shadows are inside of this Adjustment layer
01:46or I could drop out the highlights as well like this.
01:49Of course that looks wretched, we have all kinds of prompts going on there.
01:52So, let's put those guys back where they were.
01:54What we want to do is remove the blue.
01:56So, we are going to switch this Blend If value from Lightness to b which is
02:01where we have our blues, right the cobalts through the yellows.
02:03I'm going to go ahead and choose b right there and we can see, there is our cobalt, there is our yellows.
02:09I'm going to go ahead and drag this value over.
02:11Notice as I do, I'm dragging this black point over to the right here
02:15as I do I'm getting rid of the corrections in the blue area.
02:19So, here is the corrected blue that is the bad correction and here -- look at that hair, look at that dull hair right there
02:27and see how it gets revealed as I drag this black slider triangle over to the right I the farther I take it over,
02:35the more that we are going to see that we are sort of running aria inside of this image, we are creating some bad skin
02:43as if he got sun burnt and sort of pealing right there.
02:46And we also have some problems up here in this region especially let's see if I drag this back down,
02:51we have got there is the problems right there.
02:53You can see that we have got some brittle jagged transitions.
02:57What we need to do is we need to create some fuzziness inside of these corrections, we need to create a little bit
03:02of what's called a fuzzy drop off and I'm going to do that by Alt dragging or Option dragging the right half
03:10of the slider triangle over to the right a little bit and that separates the triangle into two pieces
03:15so that we have a soft drop off in this region right here.
03:18So, we are saying that anything that has a luminance level of 154 or higher and no longer is Photoshop talking to us in terms
03:26of 0 being the middle and 127 being the top and negative 128 being the bottom and so they are just talking
03:33to us in 0 through 255, it sometimes does that.
03:36So, it's a little confusing when we are working inside these various dialog boxes,
03:40because they all choose to express Lab a little differently.
03:42But anyway, this one we are saying anything that has a brightness value, a luminance level of 154
03:47or higher is going to be opaque, so the yellows are opaque.
03:50The cobalts, 125 or lower are going to be transparent and this area between 125 and 154 is going to be a smooth drop off.
03:58Now, that doesn't necessarily work all that well for the skin, thought it's good for this guy
04:02or the background, but it doesn't work that well for the skin.
04:04So, let's go ahead and take these values farther apart.
04:06I'm going to take the right hand side of the triangle up to 200 and I'm going to take the left hand edge of the triangle,
04:15the left half down to 30 like so and we have that big drop off now.
04:20So we should have a very subtle transition.
04:23That's going to service well even in this brow area that's where we are still leaving a little bit of brittleness.
04:30But you can see it's much better than it would be if we were to just go ahead and sort of move these values closer together.
04:35So, this is the way the image looked when the two halves of the triangles were very close,
04:40you can see that brow right there is becoming more pronounced, more jagged.
04:46All right, so let's go ahead and take these values back to where they were.
04:49You have to inspect the image pretty darn closely when you are doing this kind of work,
04:52it's basically what I'm trying to emphasize.
04:54So, go ahead and sort of drag the image around,
04:56take a look at the various transitions, it should look pretty good at this point.
05:00Go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification.
05:03Let's go ahead and zoom out, so just to give you a sense of what we accomplished here inside this exercise, this is before
05:10and you can see that there hair has gone little bit too far right there.
05:12This is after, we have a little more detail left in the hair, that's the original detail inside of that hair, so that's good.
05:18We have a nice correction overall, so let's go ahead and zoom out to 50% there.
05:22This is the before version, the original version as posted by Pascal Genest at istockphoto.com
05:29and this is the corrected version here inside Lab.
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Correcting a very bad image in RGB
00:00Now that we have seen how to take some beautifully captured photographs
00:03and make them look even better with the help of the Lab Color mode.
00:07Let's see how to take a really bad photograph and make it look better.
00:11So, the idea is that you can dRAW forth colors where either you have very little color to work with in the first place
00:18or seemingly no color at all as in the case of this image right here.
00:23God light.tif, so called because we have the streaks of light raining down from the heaven.
00:29So, it's a typical God light shot here, with the exception of the fact that barely has any contrast and it doesn't seem
00:36to have really anything in the way of color saturation for all intensive and purposes like a grayscale photo.
00:43But there are colors there, now this image is found inside the O2_what_it_can_do folder if you want to open it on up.
00:50We are going to take this image and we are going to dRAW forth this image right here and those are natural colors folks,
00:56these are not colors that I painted in, I didn't add the Photofiltre or anything like that,
01:01these are all colors that are actually extent inside of this image right there, believe it or not.
01:08Now, this correction was created in the Lab Color mode and you are going to be able
01:13to get much better result in Lab than you are RGB.
01:16For example, here is what I'm able to accomplish in RGB, not bad but not this good either.
01:23So, let's go back to the image that hand here.
01:25Let's start things off by attempting a correction in RGB and this is an RGB image.
01:31I'm going to go ahead and Tab back my palette.
01:33You can see the Histogram palette up on screen here.
01:35So, we have just got a bunch of mid tones to work with, almost nothing in a way of highlights, nothing in the way of shadows.
01:42So, the first thing that we need to do is hit it with the Levels command in order to increase the contrast.
01:46So, I'm going to go ahead and press the Alt or Option key and click the black/white icon and choose Levels and that will bring
01:53up the New Layer dialog box, I will call this guy Contrast and I will click OK and that brings up the Levels dialog box.
02:01Now, possibly the easiest thing to do here, just to get a sense of what kinds of shadows and highlights we have available to it.
02:08The easiest thing to do is to click on the Auto button,
02:10which invokes the Auto Levels function here inside the Levels dialog box.
02:14That goes ahead and corrects the image on a channel by channel basis.
02:17So, notice that we don't have any values assigned here inside the RGB composite view.
02:23So, I have to press Ctrl+1 or Cmd+1 on the Mac in order to switch to the Red channel for example and then I can see
02:28that the black point and the white point had been altered.
02:31The Gamma value is not altered at all by Auto Levels and there is the Green value.
02:37So, you can see each one of the channels is altered independently, thanks to Auto Levels.
02:43The problem with working that route, it sometimes can be actually quite successful, but the problem, the downside,
02:48the potential downside is that you are going to introduce colors that are not really native to the photograph.
02:53What if you would prefer to adjust all of the channels in kind?
02:58Why, then you would click on the Options button right here and instead of enhancing Per Channel Contrast,
03:03you would enhance the Monochromatic Contrast.
03:05So, go ahead and click on that item and now we will see this invokes the Auto contrast function
03:11as you can see there in parentheses inside of that hint.
03:14I will go ahead and click OK and what that does is it applies the exact same modifications inside each one of the channels.
03:20So, here I'm looking at the Green channel, 59, 217.
03:23If I go back to the Red channel, 59, 217.
03:26Now, I don't want it to be quite that type.
03:28Notice that the black point is just sort of abutted right against that histogram, against the far edge of the histogram there.
03:37It's going into it, just ever so slightly and that means we are going to get a lot of contrast, but it also means that we have
03:43that potential for increasing the amount of noise in the image or for quite that type to the edge of the shadows there.
03:50Because we are going to be bringing out a ton of noise
03:52in this image no matter what we do, I suggest that we ease up on this value.
03:57So, I'm going to take it down to 55 and then I'm going to Tab over to the white point value and I'm going to take it up to 230
04:04and then I'm going to Shift+Tab back to the Gamma value, Shift+Up arrow to take it to 1.1.
04:09So, 55, 1.1 and 230 and I'm going to do the exact same thing for the Green channel, 55, I'm going to just enter those values,
04:161.1 and 230 and then for the blue channel, we are going to be operating pretty much the same, 55, 1.1 again.
04:25But rather than going with 230 which would retain the natural colors that were captured by the camera,
04:31I'm going to introduce the little bit of additional blue by taking this value down to 220.
04:36So, we are emphasizing the blues by reducing the white point value.
04:40In other words we are making more of the colors blue inside the image.
04:43All right, then I'm going to click OK to accept that modification.
04:46So things look better, this is before, this is after still pretty nebulous, but we do have a little bit of contrast going on
04:53and we are spreading out the histogram as you can see here inside the histogram palette.
04:56It has got lot of gaps in it, so it is not a good histogram but it's a better looking image than it was before.
05:02Now let's bring out the color saturation by Alt or Option clicking on the black/white icon, choosing Hue/Saturation.
05:08Go ahead and call this guy up sat, click OK.
05:12You can take the Saturation value as high as a 100 if you are crazy and you want
05:16to just completely damage the image beyond all possible recognition there.
05:21We do want to take it really ultrahigh, partially because we want to bring out those colors partially
05:26to see how raising the color saturation to this extent inside RGB doesn't work all that well
05:32but it really works pretty darn well inside of Lab.
05:35Anyway, so we are going to take it up to 85, +85 which is really super high, you would pretty much never do that in real life.
05:41But we are going to the Mac for this image, click OK in order to accept that modification and go ahead and zoom in on the image
05:48if you care to and you will see that we have got all kinds of problems going on now.
05:53We are bringing out a lot of noise, we have a ton of banding going on now.
05:58We can get rid of some of that, we can limit that to an extent
06:01by focusing the Saturation value that we just applied on just the saturation.
06:08The weird thing about the Saturation function inside the Hue/Saturation command is that it effects luminance Levels
06:14and if you wanted to just effect color saturation, then you need to apply it to the Saturation values or you need
06:20to actually choose Saturation from a Blend Mode pop up menu and I am going to do that and notice how things calm down quite a bit.
06:27When we apply that function now, we still have a lot of noise, if you have to zoom in some more,
06:31you can see all kinds of color noise going on.
06:33But we don't have the degree of luminance noise that we had just a moment ago.
06:38So, this is the color corrected version of the photograph, this is the original one, we just opened a moment ago.
06:44This is the corrected version here inside of the RGB mode.
06:48It's better, I won't go so far as to say it's best, you can see may I look over here in the upper right corner of the image,
06:54you can see that we have quite a bit of luminance noise going on over here and we are not going to get quite that much,
06:59we are going to get some in Lab Color mode, but not as much as we get here in RGB.
07:04But there is one more thing we need to do and that is we need to sharpen this image, it's just too cloudy.
07:10We need to have more sharpness associated, more details associated with this God light.
07:15So, we are going to apply some sharpness in the next exercise.
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Sharpening luminance independently of color
00:00In the previous exercise, we took a terrible image. We took this guy right here.
00:05This low contrast, exceedingly low color cloud image
00:10and we corrected it. We corrected the colors, the contrast and the saturation values here in RGB to the extent that we could
00:19and so we have pretty much blown the saturation values to the roof. We had to raise the saturation value to +85,
00:26which is craziness.
00:27Now we need to add some additional craziness by sharpening this image so that we can draw forth the detail and we're going to
00:33do that the smart way by adding a Smart Filter and we are actually going to be applying the Smart Sharpen function.
00:40And if you are interested in information about sharpening, I am kind of assuming you know a thing or two here.
00:45If you are interested for the full story on sharpening, you can check out my Photoshop CS3 Sharpening images series
00:52that's part of the lynda.com Online Training Library.
00:55But here's what we're going to do. We are going to go down here and it explains basically why I am approaching this the way I am.
01:00This is just the smartest way to go.
01:02I am going to click on the Background layer to make it active and by the way I am working inside of a document, I went ahead and
01:07saved my progress so far as RGB clouds.psd, found inside the 02 What It Can Do folder.
01:13I'm going to go ahead and convert this image to a Smart Object by going up to the Filter menu and choosing Convert for Smart Filters.
01:20You may see this warning that's telling you that you are making a Smart Object. Just go ahead and click OK or you could say
01:26Don't show again and then click OK if you like.
01:28And that's going to go ahead and turn that layer into a Smart Object. Let's call it RGB SO, so we know where we are
01:35and next what I am going to do is
01:38I am going to go up to Filter menu, I am going to choose Sharpen and I am going to choose Smart Sharpen.
01:43That brings up the Smart Sharpen dialog box. I am going to go ahead and increase these values pretty significantly here.
01:50We don't have much in the way of real detail inside this image. All of the edges are pretty nebulous
01:57or cumulus if you prefer.
01:59So I am going to have to take that Radius value through the roof really high. Another through the roof analogy for our sky image here.
02:05I am going to take this to 12, 12 pixels which would be again madness for a typical, everyday, average image,
02:12but for this guy it's what we need. You can see now we are starting to bring out some of the detail in the image
02:17and then I'm going to raise the Amount value, just for laughs, up to 250%.
02:24Further craziness. Look at that image. It's starting to really fall apart
02:27and then I will change Remove from Gaussian Blur to Lens Blur. Lens Blur is better for fixing the focus of digital photographs
02:36and you can see that things actually settle down a little bit in the background there. If you were keeping an eye out.
02:40Now I will go ahead and click OK
02:42in order to accept that modification
02:45and we do have a sharpened version of the image most certainly.
02:50Now it may take a few moments here for the Smart Sharpen function to apply because
02:56the thing about Smart Objects, even though they are very flexible, they aren't very fast.
02:59And I am going to grab that Filter Mask right there. I am just going to throw it away. I am just going to drag it to the trashcan
03:04because we don't need it right now and it's easier to recreate if you need it later. Just gobbles up a bunch of room here inside the Layers palette.
03:11Now the big problem, if you zoom-in on this image, you are going to see all kinds of horribleness now.
03:16Even though the image overall looks pretty darn better actually,
03:20the details inside the image are pretty messed up. We are starting to draw out all kinds of weird patterns inside of the photograph.
03:28All kind of banding and weird sort of puddles
03:31that are forming inside the clouds, we don't want that.
03:34Now what we are doing here is we're- notoriously when you are sharpening inside of RGB, you are sharpening each one of
03:41the color channels independently and that means you're exaggerating any differences between the information in the Red Channel
03:46and the Green Channel and the Blue Channel and as a result you can end up creating these very colorful sharpening artifacts.
03:52If you want to get rid of the colorfulness of it then you want to double click on this little guy here,
03:57this little Blending Icon. Go ahead and give it a double click. That will bring up this little Blending dialog box. So you have to get down
04:03with a progress report.
04:05Photoshop has a rather irritating habit of having to reapply Smart Filters
04:10at the drop of a hat really.
04:13All right, there we go. We now have the Blending Options function.
04:16Let's change the Mode from Normal to Luminosity. So we are only affecting the luminance levels inside the image
04:23and we're not exaggerating the color discrepancies and that's going to calm things down. Did you see all those little color puddles went away?
04:29We still have luminance banding, which is not nearly so bad as what we had before.
04:33Now go ahead and click OK. This is just a standard thing you do when you are sharpening images in RGB
04:37and as we'll see, this is the standard thing you do when you are sharpening images
04:40inside the Lab mode as well.
04:42And that is the corrected version in RGB. Now I could do some other things. I could go different ways.
04:48I could double-click on the Levels Adjustment layer, make some modifications, if I wanted to draw forth different colors and so on
04:54and so on. So you could certainly spend a lot more time on this image if you wanted to but from this point on everything
05:00we've done so far is pretty quick. From this point on you can spend a lot of cycles, that is you're going to spend a ton of time getting very little done.
05:08Making that kind of 10% incremental progress whereas we could just switch over to Lab
05:13and make all kinds of additional progress in a lot less time and that's what we were going to begin doing
05:19in the next exercise.
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Correcting a very bad image in Lab
00:00In the exercise, we are going to begin to reattempt to correct this dismal photograph right here
00:06but this time inside the more powerful Lab Color mode.
00:10Now it's amazing that we were able to get this far in RGB in just a matter of a few minutes.
00:14We were able to transform this into this in the RGB Mode and it just proves how powerful Photoshop is that you can do that.
00:22However, we are not taking advantage of all of the power of Photoshop the most we get to here inside the Lab Color mode.
00:28Now it will take us a few exercises just to get here but we will do it if you stick with me.
00:33All right, now this is the original image, go ahead and open it up.
00:36This is the God light.tif file found inside the 02 What It Can Do folder.
00:39If you have been working right along with me go ahead and save off that RGB correction
00:44as a different file and then reopen this one.
00:47The first thing we are going to do is go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose Lab Color in order to convert it
00:52to Lab color space, that doesn't automatically correct the image of course, it looks the same as it ever did,
00:58but we have managed to transform the RGB Channels into Lab Channels into Lightness,
01:05A and B and check it out here is our Lightness Channel looks more or less like you think it would look
01:10and it's just a gray scale version of this which is to say not too different actually,
01:15but check out A and B, you thought they were bad before.
01:20Well, we are looking at those really great photographs.
01:23When you are looking at a really low color photograph like this one here, you have got virtually nothing to play with.
01:27Check out the Histogram inside the Histogram palette here.
01:30I will go ahead and click the Update button so we can see it.
01:32In all of its splendor there is the B Histogram, just a little dinky guy.
01:36Just kind of a column in the middle of this box here and if you thought
01:40that was bad checkout A. I will go ahead and click on the A Channel.
01:43Just like the cutest little histogram on the face of the planet.
01:46Almost nothing to work with.
01:47It's just kind of this sapling of a histogram, crying out for us to water it and that's what we are going to do.
01:54So click back on Lab Version of the image.
01:56Let's switch to the Layers palette.
01:58All right, let's go the bottom of the Layers palette here.
02:00Alt or Option+Click in the black white icon, choose the Levels command once again.
02:03We will start with Levels anyway.
02:04We will see if we could make more progress with curves but we will do that later.
02:09Let's go ahead and call this one color enhance, sort of words to that effect and click OK because as you may recall,
02:16we can both correct the contrast and the saturation from the Levels Command here inside the Lab Color mode.
02:23The Lab Channel is active.
02:25Let's just go ahead and click on Auto to see what it comes up with.
02:27Now Auto unlike what we saw when we are working in RGB, the Auto function doesn't change all of the RGB Channels independently
02:36of each other or even all of the Lab Channels independently of each other.
02:40Rather it just changes the active channel, which is Lightness and notice if we click
02:44on Options, you don't have the same options this time.
02:45You lose all those little radio buttons that we saw before.
02:49So we just have one auto function to choose from.
02:51It's a little tied to the histogram once again so I'm going to take this value
02:54down from 61 to 60, so it's just ever so slightly down.
02:57Going to leave the Gamma value alone for now and let's go ahead and raise the white point value up to 230.
03:03So we are just giving ourselves little more wiggle room trying to avoid the noise once again.
03:07We are still going to get a lot of noise but maybe not so much.
03:10All right, now let's go to a, our little V Histogram here in a that were going to try to just spread out like crazy.
03:17Now that is going to create noise.
03:18Nothing to be done about that.
03:20That's just the way it is.
03:21But check it out.
03:21We are really going to spread it.
03:22I'm going to click inside of the Black Point Value and I'm going to press Shift+Up Arrow 10, count them 10 times in a row
03:29to get a value of a 100 and that turns the image this incredible shade of turquoise as it would any image of course.
03:37Now, click in the White Point value and let's press Shift+Down Arrow 10 times in a row until we get a value of 155
03:43and that balances out the turquoise by introducing that crimson or magenta or red or whatever you want to call it, lavender.
03:50All right, so the A Channel looks balanced by the way it doesn't look like we have any color.
03:54We have a little bit of crimson down here at the bottom of the clouds, just kind of nice and that's about it.
04:00All right, let's switch over to B. That's going to give us some more color.
04:03Click in the Black Point Value.
04:04Let's just go ahead and change it to a 100 as we know that's what we want, if we were going for symmetrical values
04:08which we are right now and then tab, tab and 155 for this guy.
04:13So first we made the image really super cobalt and now we were balancing it
04:16with yellow and this is the version of the image we get.
04:18Now bear in mind when we were using the Levels Command like this, we have got four different options,
04:24four different values to balance out our saturation as opposed to just one mallet
04:29of a Saturation value inside the Hue/Saturation dialog box we have four values to play with.
04:33That gives us a lot more control as well as of course, a lot more responsibility and so it's going
04:38to take you a little extra time but let's make some creative decisions here.
04:41Guess what's coming.
04:42Let's say I decide for example that I want more blue in the sky.
04:45Well here I'm in the B Channel.
04:47So I will click the Black Point, which is blue.
04:49So blue is over here in the left and yellow is over here in the right and I'm going to take these value up in order
04:56to introduce more blue and I press Shift+Up Arrow then Up Arrow few times by itself to get a value
05:01of 115 that gives us a lot of blue as you can see.
05:04That's too much so let's balance it out with a little bit of additional yellow by taking this value
05:08down to reduce the yellow value in order to make it yellower and actually we will take that value down to 147,
05:15not all the way down to 145 but 147 and now that's looks pretty good.
05:19Now we need to balance our big modifications, our exaggerate modifications in the B Channel with some exaggeration
05:25to the A Channel because we need to balance out the opposing excess, don't you know?
05:30Let's click in the little turquoise value right here.
05:32So turquoise on the left, crimson if you will on the right and I'm going to take this value up to 108, tab,
05:39tab over to crimson and take this value down to 146.
05:43That looks pretty good and then I will click OK in order to accept that modification.
05:47Just to give you a sense of what we have accomplished my friends, my fine friends, oh, by the way I want to tell you one thing,
05:53this is a little bit of an aside, and then I will show you what we have accomplished.
05:55Notice how when I'm adding Adjustment Layers you are not seeing a mask, you maybe seeing layer masks that are taking
06:01up this atrocious amount of room, if you don't need them there is no point to having them there.
06:05So here is what I suggest you do, just in case you are wondering how I got here.
06:08I clicked this little menu Icon and I chose palette Options
06:12and inside this dialog box I turned off Use Default Masks on Adjustments.
06:16It's On by default.
06:17You turn it off because it's an evil little option, turn it off, click OK.
06:22It's easier to add masks when you need them in my opinion.
06:25So evil was that?
06:26That wasn't fair, not evil just menacing.
06:29All right, so let's tab away to palettes.
06:31Here is what we were able to accomplish so far in Lab.
06:34This is what we got in RGB.
06:36So there are slightly different results.
06:37Not only do we have a lot of sharpening going on inside the RGB image,
06:40we will come to that in the next exercise but the colors look little bit different.
06:44So we have got a little bit of rosiness in the highlighted portion of the sky here inside of RGB whereas
06:50in Lab it's a little bit yellow or a little bit more neutral and then there is some differences going
06:55on down here at the bottom of the sky and so on.
06:58You do not want to spin your wheels trying to get exactly the same results in RGB
07:01and Lab because they are fundamentally different color models.
07:04You are by definition going to get slightly different results out of these two color modes.
07:09Just bear that in mind.
07:10Anyway here is the corrected version of the image so far.
07:13It's not really what we were finally going for.
07:15This is the final version of the image that we are going for but we will get, have faith.
07:19In the next exercise, we are going to sharpen the detail inside of this photograph in Lab,
07:24then you will see how that is both potentially different than it is in RGB and actually exactly the same.
07:32Stay tuned.
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Sharpening the Lightness channel
00:00Alright gang it's time to sharpen this image that we have corrected inside of the Lab Color mode.
00:06I'm working inside of a catch-up document so I have saved my progress so far as lab clouds (Levels)
00:11because so far we have corrected the image using Levels, later we will curves.
00:15.psd found inside the 02 What It Can Do folder.
00:18Now when it comes to sharpening a Lab image, you are going to hear people give you advice,
00:24if you know any technical types who sharpen in lab all the time.
00:28What they do is the following.
00:30I will show you the typical way to sharpen a lab image and then I will show you the better way
00:33that actually gives you identical results and it's the identical approach that we apply with RGB
00:41but it's different results in RGB, same approach.
00:43You will see what I mean but let me show you how people recommend you do it.
00:46Then we will see that really that's not the right way.
00:48All right, I'm going to click on the Background image.
00:50I'm going to go to the Channels palettes.
00:52I will click on Lightness in order to make it active and then I will click the eyeball in front of the Lab composite
00:59so that we can see the entire full color image even though we are just going to be editing lightness and now I'm going to go
01:04up to the Filter menu and I'm going to choose Sharpen then I'm going to choose Smart Sharpen
01:10and it should show us the last settings we applied which were an Amount Value of 250%, a Radius Value of 12 pixels,
01:16Remove set to Lens Blur and we are only working on the Lightness Channel, nothing more.
01:22So we are seeing a gray scale version of the image here inside the dialog box.
01:25Go ahead and click OK in order to accept your results and what Photoshop has done is it's gone ahead
01:31and just sharpen the luminance information independently of the color information.
01:36So we don't have those horrible weird sort of colored puddles that we saw in RGB a couple of exercises ago
01:44and so that's a really great way to work and nothing against it except that this is a static adjustment we have just applied.
01:51I can't go back and modify it later in case we want to change the values.
01:55So what do you do if you would prefer to use a Smart Filter, which is the better approach.
02:00Well, you can't apply a filter just to one channel if you apply it as a Smart Filter to a Smart Object
02:07because you are affecting the composite image or can you?
02:10Well actually with the help of the Blend Mode you can.
02:12So I'm going to go ahead and undo that modification.
02:15Click on Lab once again, go back to Layers.
02:18Make sure the Background layer is active.
02:20I'm going to go up to the Filter menu.
02:22So this is the same approach we took with RGB.
02:24Go up to the Filter menu, choose Convert for Smart Filters in order to convert it to a Smart Object,
02:29let's call this guy Lab SO, so that we know it's a Lab Smart Object, so that we can just look at the Layers palette
02:36and tell which color mode we were working in.
02:38Now I'm going to go up to the Filter menu and choose that very first command Smart Sharpen to reinvoke that dialog box.
02:45Once again 250, Radius of 12, Remove set to Lens Blur, click OK.
02:50Oh my goodness, why in the world did I do that?
02:52Because look at what a mess it's going to be, don't pay any attention to this infuriating Progress Bar go, go, go,
02:57just look at the colors back here in the background.
03:00They look terrible.
03:01We haven't introduced color puddles this time.
03:03This is some sort of like colored sand art or something.
03:07Well, the first step, let's get rid of this filter mask just because we don't need it.
03:10Just to tidy up and then what you do is you double click on the little Blending Icon, it's the same thing we did with RGB
03:15but it produces a slightly different result this time.
03:18Double click on the Blending Icon and that's going to bring up --
03:22after an hour and half of waiting for the Smart Sharpen Progress Bar to go by,
03:26it's going to bring up that little Blend dialog box we saw just a moment ago
03:30and again I'm going to change Mode from Normal to Luminosity.
03:35Now you might think it would be nice if there was like an additional option
03:39when you are working in a Lab Mode that said Lightness.
03:41So you know you are just affecting the Lightness Channel inside of the image, but actually you are that's what luminosity does.
03:49It limits your modifications to just the Lightness Channel, that's how it works
03:54and it avoids sharpening either the A or the B Channel.
03:57Go ahead and click OK.
03:58Now I know this to be effect.
04:00I have performed many, many test and done all kinds of comparisons and they are pixel for pixel identical.
04:08Just so you know, in my experience.
04:10So that's how you work.
04:11If you want to work inside of lab image and you want to affect just lightness channel independently of A and B
04:16and you can even see if you click on the A and B channels you will see that it's just soft as anything.
04:20Look at those guys.
04:21They don't have any sharpening that's been added.
04:23There is B, there is A, no sharpening whatsoever and we are seeing the color channels and colors you can see
04:28but lots of sharpening applied here inside the Lightness Channel.
04:31Thanks to the fact that we converted the entire image here to a Smart Object, applied Smart Sharpen to it
04:39and then limited our modification just to the Luminosity Blend Mode.
04:45So there we have it, Thus far we have got a pretty decent image I think.
04:50This is how our Lab Image looks so far.
04:53Compare it to how the RGB version of the image looked and so, so far you may say well, Gosh, I don't know which one I like better.
05:01Here is the Lab version.
05:03Here is the RGB version.
05:04I might go so far as to say I kind of like the colors inside the RGB version a little bit better but if I go back
05:11to Lab version you can see that it don't have those highlights blowing out in this region
05:15of the clouds the way they do in RGB and here is the real trick.
05:19I don't have the problems up in the upper right corner of the image.
05:21So this is the Lab version of the image.
05:24This is the RGB version.
05:26Checkout all that noise and all that clunkiness in the upper right hand corner.
05:29Don't have it inside of the Lab version.
05:33But we can still do better than that.
05:35We can do much better than this.
05:37We can make the image look this if we switch from Levels to Curves and we are going to do exactly
05:43that as you might imagine in the next exercise.
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Finessing the Lightness channel with Curves
00:00So far we have done a good job of correcting the colors in this image in the Lab Color mode,
00:06but our goal is not to do a good job, it's to do a great job.
00:09So this is Lab version of the image thus far and the name of this document by the way I have gone ahead and saved my progress.
00:15It's called The Lab clouds so far.psd found inside the 02 what it can do folder.
00:21These are the RGB clouds, which look somewhat better in the color department a little bit I would say but look much worse in terms
00:29of the noise department, witness most prominently up here in the upper right corner
00:32of the image and this is what we are going for.
00:35We want to get this effect here which is just it's almost noiseless,
00:39has very little noise associated with it and it just oh, just beautiful.
00:43All right, so let's see what we can do here.
00:46Our mistake thus far as that we are relying on the Levels Command.
00:49The Levels Command is great if you only need to go so far because it's easy to use.
00:54It's little more predictable in my opinion.
00:56But you kind of top out.
00:58Whereas with the Curves Command you have a lot more flexibility but you also have a lot more to manage.
01:03So let's give it a try.
01:04I'm going to tab back my palettes here and I'm going to turn off the Levels Adjustment Layer.
01:10You could if you wanted to.
01:12You could just go ahead and click on the Levels Adjustment Layer.
01:14You can go up to Layer menu and you could say Change Layer Content and you could choose Curves
01:18and that will transform it into a Curves Adjustment Layer.
01:21But you will lose all of your adjustments.
01:24It will start over from scratch.
01:26So what I suggest you do instead, go ahead and Cancel out.
01:28What I suggest you do is just turn it off.
01:30That way you can come back to it if you need to and then click on the original version of the image.
01:36What is now a Smart Object.
01:38Press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, click on the black/white icon and choose Curves
01:42and by the way it's perfectly acceptable to add a bunch of adjustment layers to an image that you are not using,
01:47because they take barely any room up inside of your image file.
01:51It only added a few K, they are very small.
01:53So I'm going to change the name of this guy to curves you know modification or something along those line and then I'm going
02:00to click OK and we are working in the Lightness Channels for starters and then there is the A and B Channels as well.
02:06Now the Curves dialog box works differently.
02:09We can't see here in Photoshop CS3.
02:11We can see a histogram in the background.
02:14So we know where to put our white and black points.
02:18So here is the Black Point.
02:18By default you should see this setup here where you are seeing black in a lower left corner and white in the upper right corner.
02:24That's the way I prefer to work.
02:26Some people prefer to work differently but if you are going to work along with me you need to make sure,
02:29notice that I click this double down pointing arrowhead thing.
02:32You need to make sure that Show Amount of is set to Light, not Pigment.
02:36That way we are working the same way we are used to working and I'm going to go ahead drag this Black point over to the left
02:43and notice that as I do it or I could just click on Auto.
02:47That's what I will do click on Auto and then it will just automatically fix just like we did with Levels.
02:51That will automatically fix that Lightness Channel.
02:54But notice instead of setting the Input Value to 61 as it did in the case of Levels, a couple of exercises ago you may recall,
03:03it sets it to 23 and instead of setting I will go ahead and click on the White point, instead of setting it to what was it before,
03:09it was something like 221 or something I can't remember exactly what.
03:12But it sets it to something around 80, the high 80s, the low 90s because it just kind of moved it when I clicked on it.
03:19Let's click Auto again.
03:20See what it sets. 89.
03:21Is what it sets it to.
03:23So what in the world is going on?
03:24Well, we are not working with luminance levels anymore or at least we are but it's not talking to us that way.
03:30Curves is, instead of talking to us from zero to 255, the way the Levels dialog box was talking to us,
03:36it's talking to us from zero for Black to 100 for White.
03:41So we have 101 different levels.
03:44We actually still have the same 256 different levels it's just the values don't react in the same way.
03:49So it's a little confusing, which is another reason I kind of prefer to work with Levels.
03:53But anyway let's go back down here I'm going to Ctrl+Tab, if you press Ctrl+Tab inside the Curves dialog box
03:59and this is either a Mac or a Windows Ctrl+Tab, you will switch back and forth between points.
04:04So that you don't run the risk of like clicking on it and slightly nudging it to a different location.
04:09I'm going to change this Input Value to 21 by pressing a left arrow key a couple or three times,
04:14actually more than three times, as many times as it takes to get it down to 21.
04:18Because every time you nudge that from the keyboard you are changing a luminance level,
04:24so have 256 different luminance levels to work with but you only have a 101 values that are going to show up here.
04:31So it's going to take you probably five presses of the left arrow key to get from 23 down to 21 there.
04:38Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to add --
04:41well actually you know what, I'm going to Ctrl+Tab up to this white point there and let's go ahead
04:46and press the right arrow key a few times until we change the Input Value to 93.
04:52So we are just saying anything that has an Input of 93 is going to change to an Output of a 100.
04:56So it's going to get brighter and now I'm going to add a few significant points to the graph,
05:00and the way that we do that is you just drag around inside of the image.
05:04You just click and drag around inside of the image and you follow the bouncing ball.
05:07See that bouncing ball is showing up here in the upper right-hand corner.
05:10When I drag again and that shows you that this range of colors if you want to be able to control them are
05:15around the array indicated by the bouncing ball and if you just want to add a point to that location then you Ctrl+Click
05:22or you Cmd+Click inside of the image on the Macintosh side of things.
05:26We don't have to press the Shift key or anything the way we do in RGB.
05:29We just get a point at this location, just inside the Lightness Channel because that's the channel we are working on.
05:33You can only work in one channel at a time when you working in Lab and let's go ahead and take this guy.
05:38Right now for me it's showing up as an Input Value of 76 and Output Value of 76.
05:43What we want is an input of 75 and we want an output of 79.
05:49So you can change the values or you can just press the arrow keys.
05:52You change the Input Value, if you are pressing arrow keys.
05:55You change the Input Value by pressing the left and the right arrow keys.
05:58You change the Output Value by pressing the up and down arrow keys and that's what I'm doing.
06:03Work any way you like to work and then let's sort of click over here in this region in order to sort of lift the color
06:10and I'm going to Ctrl or Cmd+Click right there in the section of the clouds and I get 28, 38 whatever but we wanted
06:17to be because an Input of 44 that's what's going to work best for us and how did I figure this out.
06:23Good little trial and error, I found some values that work for us.
06:26Input of 44, and Output of 32 is going to hold us in good stead here.
06:31Now, that's not giving me as much brightness as I want down here sort of in this low level,
06:36this far distant portion of the clouds down through the bottom of the image.
06:39So I'm going to click midway between these two points right here.
06:42I'm going to click right about there in order to set a point and we want that one
06:46to be an Input of 54 and the Output Value should be 50.
06:53So I'm going to go ahead and take that down.
06:55So I took it down into the left and then finally I'm going to set another point
06:58down here just so that we can sink the darks a little bit.
07:02I really want those clouds to be nice and dark.
07:05We want some nice shadows.
07:07Some rich shadows going on, so click right about there and we will change that guy to --
07:12well, let's say how about 37 as I recall it's going to work out Well for us.
07:17An Input of 37 and an Output of 10.
07:19Oh, it's already set to an Output of 10.
07:21So this should work out pretty nicely.
07:24So just to review all the points we have in our lumpy looking graph here.
07:27I'm going to press Ctrl+Shift+Tab in order to go to the first.
07:32You can go backward to the points with Ctrl+Shift+Tab forward to the points with Ctrl+Tab.
07:36So we have got 21, 0 and then we have got 37, 10.
07:41I'm reading the Input Value first and the Output Value second and then we have 44, 32 and then we have 54,
07:4850, we have got 75, 79 and we have got 93, 100.
07:54How would you know to use such values?
07:57You would play around and try to figure it out.
07:59You can always go back, right?
08:00Click OK in order to accept those modifications.
08:03If you change your mind later, all you have to do is double-click on this icon to bring up the Curves dialog box
08:08and play some more until you get exactly the result you want.
08:11All right, I'm going to click OK because that's enough for now.
08:13All we have done is we have transformed the luminance levels because we just changed the Lightness Channel and nothing else.
08:20In the next exercise, we are going to correct the A and B Channels.
08:25Get sight.
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Applying Curves to the a and b channels
00:00In the previous exercise, we saw that despite the fact that the Levels Command is exceedingly powerful and often times all
00:08of the power of you need, the Curves Command is more powerful still.
00:11So if you need more control over the luminance Levels inside of an image then you need to switch
00:18up from Levels to Curves and that's exactly what we did.
00:21And I'm looking it by the way; I'm looking at a catch up version of the document.
00:25So I have gone ahead and saved my progress so far as this image here it's called Finessed Lightness.psd.
00:31So called because we have finessed the Lightness Channel but not the A and B Channel so far.
00:35This image is found as usual inside of the 02what_it_can do folder.
00:39Now I'm going to go down here to the curves modification adjustment layer that I have created.
00:45And thanks to the fact we are using adjustment layers we have the opportunity to modify our settings as much as we please.
00:51So I'm going to double click on that Adjustment Layer Thumbnail in order to bring up the Curves dialog box and you can see
00:56that in addition to a Black Point and a White Point and a Gamma midpoint which is all we get with Levels.
01:03We were controlling a total of four points between the black and white points here inside of Curves.
01:10So that gives us control over things like a Quarter Tones, on the three Quarter Tones and a Mid Tone and everything.
01:15We just have all kinds of control over exactly where that specific brightness values are landing.
01:21And that means we can really add some impact, a lot of impact to these rays of light that are going to the cloud.
01:28Let's see if we can do something similar with the A and B Channel so that we can.
01:31So I'm going to switch over to the A Channel here.
01:34See that the histogram, we can barely see it.
01:36We have got tiny little histogram going on right there and it looks
01:41like the vertical line is just a little bit smeared but that's the histogram folks.
01:45And I'm going to go ahead and click on this white point value right there to make it active.
01:50And as long as neither the output nor the input values is active,
01:53which is true for me that I can press Shift+Right Arrow several times in a row.
01:58I don't know how many times in all but until we get an Input Value of -28.
02:02So we are going from an Input Value of -28 to an Output Value of -128 and notice by the way Curves is talking to us
02:10yet again differently than the Levels Command did.
02:14So Levels when we are working of inside of Lightness, A or B was always talking to us in terms of luminance Levels as measured
02:21from 0 to 255, whereas Curves is talking to us the way that the Color palette we saw
02:26that in the previous chapter, the way that the Color palette does.
02:29So zero through a 100 in the case of Lightness and -128 through, I will go ahead
02:34and click on this guy +127 here inside the A and B Channels.
02:39Now when I clicked on this point x they only nudged to down a little bit.
02:42So we wanted to start off at 127, 127 and then I am going to press Shift + Left Arrow several times
02:49in a row until I change the Input Value to 27.
02:52So we are going from an Input of 27 to an output of 127 in order
02:56to exaggerate the turquoise and crimson colors inside of this image.
03:02Well done.
03:02Let's go ahead and we are just trying to stick with symmetrical changes thus far, just as we did with the Levels Command.
03:07Let's go to B now and I have got -- notice I have the white point active here.
03:13I'm going ahead and clicking on it.
03:15Now you may find for whatever reason that one of your values becomes active down here.
03:20If then happens it's really difficult especially in Windows.
03:23It's very difficult to get it to stop being active
03:26and if that's the case you can just press Shift+Down Arrow, if the input value is active.
03:32You press Shift+Down Arrow in order to reduce that value as many times as necessary.
03:36Reduce that value to 27 and that would actually be ten times in a row and then I will click on the Black Point down here
03:43and that makes my values inactive which is great.
03:45So now I can press Shift+Right Arrow.
03:48So whatever it takes you can drag them as well so that we have an Input Value of -28 and Output Value of -128.
03:56So again, we are going with symmetrical adjustment thus far.
03:58Now we make some additional modifications.
04:01We are going to decide which colors we want to emphasize and I want to bring some more blues out inside of the image.
04:06So I'm going to press Shift+Right Arrow once in order to make the Input Value -18 and then I'm going to back it off
04:13by pressing the Left Arrow Key a couple of times.
04:16So I'm making the input value -20.
04:19So we are working with Luminance Level.
04:21So in this case, each press of an Arrow Key is going to change the value by an increment of one.
04:27It's just the Lightness Channel that reacts strangely.
04:29Now I'm going to press Ctrl+Tab to switch over to the other point, the yellow point as it were and I'm going
04:36to nudge the Input Value over to the left until it changes to 24.
04:40So 24 for Input and 127 for Output.
04:44For the other point, it's -20 for Input, -128 for Output and that gives us little bit of yellow and the blue going on.
04:52Little bit of yellow and blue action but I really want the A Channel to sink inside of this image.
04:58I want to see some powerful almost some violets inside of this sky.
05:02So I'm going to go over to the A Channel and I am going to make sure that this guy is active.
05:08Let's go ahead and click in the White Point which represents the crimsons and I'm going
05:12to press the Left Arrow Key until I get an Input Value of 18.
05:17So Input of 18 going to an Output of 127.
05:20So we are really making the sky more purple actually in this case.
05:24Then I'm going to press Ctrl+Tab to switch to the Black Point, which represents the turquoise values,
05:30and then I'm going to press the Right Arrow Key just once to change it to -27.
05:35So Input -27, Output -128.
05:38Now that doesn't quite do it for us.
05:40I want some of the colors in the middle range.
05:43I want to bring the colors away from this gaudy purple that we have going on.
05:48And so I'm going to click right about there let's say midway right in the center that is the horizontal center of the graph
05:56and that gives me an input of zero and output of 16.
05:59I'm going to change the Input to two.
06:01Notice that just that slight movement of the Input Value over to the right.
06:06See that this is the sky as it looked before purplish.
06:09I'm getting rid of that purple by scooting the Input Value over to two and I just press the Right Arrow Key two times in order
06:16to accomplish that and then I'm going to press the Up Arrow Key a few times until I get the Output Value up to 21.
06:22So we want that guy right there to be 2, 21.
06:25Again, trial and error.
06:26So it's just was messing around until I came up with this and then it was like, that's it.
06:30Now I have could, of course painstakingly muck around with this some more if I wanted to but by golly this is good.
06:37Now I will go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification.
06:41So this is what the image look like when we started things off, basically no color image.
06:46This is what it looks like now.
06:48Thanks to the modifications that we have made.
06:50I'm going to go ahead and tab away my palettes here.
06:53That's a big difference than the RGB version of the image right here.
06:56So that's the RGB correction.
06:58This is our much enhanced; much better Lab correction to this image.
07:05And you can see also we are not getting nearly the noise.
07:07We do have a lot of noise going on.
07:09Here is the RGB version of the image.
07:11I will go ahead and zoom-into this area and you can see all the noise that's going
07:15on in this upper right corner of the image as compared to.
07:18Let's go ahead and zoom-in on the Lab Correction so far and you can see that there are some areas of noise
07:25and some areas of posterization but it's not nearly so bad.
07:28We have much smoother transitions going on.
07:31That's not quite good enough.
07:33It's pretty done great.
07:34I will go on recur to saying I like this modification.
07:37Its sure, heck, it looks better than the original but it could be just slightly better
07:42and we are going to go ahead invest that effort.
07:44We are going to make it that much better.
07:45That extra 10% better.
07:47It's not going to take that much more work and we are going to do that in the next exercise.
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Sharpening for effect, blurring away noise
00:00This is a final exercise, people.
00:02We are taking this image to the mat, we are going to win.
00:05This image is going look utterly and completely beautiful.
00:08Now it already looks pretty dRAWn great actually.
00:12This is our progress so far.
00:13I have gone ahead and saved it out as file called God is ecstatic, not God is happy,
00:18God is ecstatic.psd found inside the 02what_it_can_do folder.
00:24But God could still be just a little bit happier if there wasn't so much noise in the shadow detail here.
00:30I think that would be a good thing, so we need to get rid of that noise plus I'm going to emphasize the rays
00:36of light a little bit more, I want to add a little bit more sharpening.
00:39Now if you have seen my Sharpening series, you know that I'm pretty free about sharpening,
00:44I'm okay with sharpening on top of sharpening.
00:46If we are sharpening details in the image and then we are also Sharpening for a fact and that's what we are going to do.
00:51So we have already sharpened for detail.
00:53Now let's go for effect, I'm going to press the Tab key to bring up my Layers palette and I'm going to go ahead
00:58and click on the Lab SO Layer right here, we have already got one heaping helping of Smart Sharpen applied.
01:05Let's apply another one and this time we are going to use the same amount setting,
01:10we are going to change out the radius settings and we are going to focus in on a narrower target.
01:15So I'm going to go up to the Filter menu and I'm going to choose this first command, it should be available to you
01:21as well first if you have been following along with it.
01:23If not, if Smart Sharpen isn't in the first command then go down to the Sharpen menu, the Sharpen submenu that is
01:29and then choose Smart Sharpen and that'll bring up the Smart Sharpen dialog box.
01:33And I want you to reduce the radius value to 4, so an amount of 250, radius 4, Remove set Lens Blur, that's all there's to it.
01:40It going to have a lot of noise inside this image, click OK.
01:44Oh my gosh, look how sharp it is.
01:46It looks really, really great.
01:48The only thing is that we are adding a ton of noise to the image of course, look at that.
01:54Oh my gosh, this looks terrible in the shadow detail here.
01:57Plus, I'm bringing out a lot of color noise.
01:59Now of course, I can get rid of that color noise, the new Smart Sharpen is on top,
02:03by the way down here at the bottom of the Layers palette.
02:06So this tops Smart Sharpen is the most recent one we have applied.
02:09And so you want to double click on the little blend slide there top of the two blend sliders, double click on that guy.
02:15And that'll bring up after we wait for the progress bar of course.
02:19It's lovely to see that again.
02:23Eventually you'll see the Blending Options dialog box here, go ahead and change Mode; once again from Normal to Luminosity
02:29in order to focus all of the sharpening attention on the lightening channel exclusively
02:33and to not sharpen the A or B channels one little width.
02:38And notice what happen, all of that weird color sharpening went away.
02:41So this is what the image looked like before, look at here, look at all that color puddling that's going on
02:47and this is what the image looks like after we choose Luminosity, we still have a lot of luminance noise
02:52but we don't have any color noise anymore, or that is to say we don't have much,
02:56we don't have any exaggeration to the color noise.
02:58There is certainly some color noise there.
02:59Now then we have been fairly foolhardy, I have to say because we have brought out a ton of noise
03:06in the shadow detail, just lots and lots of noise in the shadows.
03:09And it's kind of cool noise if you wanted a high ISO field to the photograph, that's what you are looking
03:14for but let's say we are not looking for that.
03:16We want that wonderful exaggeration that we just applied, look at that.
03:21To the rays of light inside of the image, so just to give you a sense I'll click on the eyeball in front of the top Smart Sharpen
03:28and that's going to take a moment to turn it off.
03:30This turning off an effect requires the display of yet another progress bar, but I'll show you how to avoid this in the future.
03:37So we'll just get this progress bar once.
03:38So this is the before version, before we applied that second helping of Smart Sharpen rather than turning it back on,
03:46if you are doing it before and after just press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac in order to look at the after state.
03:53So now I can flip back and forth with Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Z.
03:56This is before, pretty sharp but not nearly as sharp as this after
04:01and just in case you are not quite seeing that let's go and zoom in a 50%.
04:04This is before.
04:06We have some nice detail going on there but this even better detail afterwards.
04:10It's just the shards of light coming down; there is no sense in not going for it.
04:15But we have exaggerated the noise here inside of the shadows.
04:19Let's get rid of it.
04:20Here's how it's pretty darn easy.
04:22Go to the Channels palette and I want you to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on just the Lightness channel,
04:28Ctrl+Clicking or Cmd+Clicking on that channel will load that channel as a selection outline
04:34so what Photoshop is doing is it's selecting the highlights and deselecting the shadows.
04:39That's exactly the opposite of what we want, so go up to the Select menu and choose Inverse in order to reverse the selection
04:46so that we are selecting the shadows and deselecting the highlights.
04:50Now go back to the Layers palette, make sure that Lab SO is active and then I want you to go up to the Edit menu
04:56and choose this guy right there, Copy Merged or you can press Ctrl+Shift+C or Cmd+Shift+C on the Mac.
05:02And that's going to copy a merged version of the area inside the selection outline.
05:06Now all you need to do is click on Curves Modification to make sure it's active because we want to paste this guy,
05:13this new layer we are about to create, on top of the Adjustment layer.
05:16And then you can just go up to the Edit menu and choose Paste, you don't have to choose Paste Into or anything,
05:20just choose Paste or Ctrl+V, Cmd+V on the Mac.
05:23And we have pasted this new layer that's only check it out if I Alt+Click or Option+Click
05:28on this eyeball you can see that's only the shadow detail inside of the clouds and that's it.
05:33All right, I'll Alt+Click or Option+Click to bring back my original layer the ones that were visible.
05:38And I'll call this shadows and we are going to ahead and blur that image and we'll just do a Static Blur
05:44because we are just trying to cover up the shadow stuff.
05:47I go up to the Filter menu, I'll choose Blur and I'll choose Gaussian Blur and then I want a Radius value of 6,
05:54that works very well, it is probably set to 1 by default, go ahead and raise it up to a value of 6, click OK.
05:59And that's gone ahead and blurred all of that nasty stuff that we had going on.
06:05So we can see it before or after this time, let's go and zoom all the way into a 100% so we can see that nice up close.
06:11So you can still see -- there is a little bit of noise left over but it's nothing like it was before.
06:15So this is before, look at all that noise, I lost a lot of noise I'm afraid.
06:20And this is the way it looks now, much better.
06:23All right, so let's go ahead and zoom and take in the entire image.
06:26I'm going to tab away my palettes and I'm going to press the F key a few times to switch to the full screen mode
06:33and this is my corrected Lab version of the image right here folks, compare it to the RGB version of the image with all
06:43of it's noise and everything intact still and it's limp color modification that we had applied there,
06:49don't make me laugh RGB by comparison to what we were able to accomplish here inside of the Lab Color mode.
06:56Just amazing, what you can do especially considering that we started with this.
07:00That we were able to take this and make it into this inside the Lab Color mode, is nothing short of absolutely fantastic.
07:09God bless us all, Lightness, A and B.
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3. A Typical, Nondestructive Lab Correction
The convergence of all things nondestructive
00:00All right, that stuff we saw in the previous chapter, pretty amazing, but while such extreme examples help to demonstrate
00:07the range and versatility of Lab, they don't quite tell the whole story. Your more typical photo would be one that looks
00:13neither great nor terrible but somewhere in between.
00:17Compositionally for example, it might be fine but the contrast is a bit lackluster, the colors are drab.
00:23Simply put the photo fails to live up to the image you saw when you pressed the shutter release.
00:29In this chapter, we will explore a very typical color correction scenario
00:34and you'll see just how strange and wonderful Lab can be. We will convert an image to Lab. We will apply a couple of
00:41adjustment layers one of which I think will very much surprise you.
00:44We will turn the image into a Smart Object and sharpen it and then we will turn that Smart Object into an RGB image so we
00:52can resolve it's chromatic aberrations, you'll see, while all at the same time keeping the larger composition in Lab.
00:59It sounds weird and complicated but it is actually fairly straightforward and amazingly flexible. It is like every
01:06single nondestructive function in Photoshop working together, adjustment layers, blending options, Smart Filters,
01:13color models, all coexisting so that you can tweak the images as much as you like without harming a pixel and the result is
01:20a much improved, much more accurate depiction of the scene.
01:24Take a look.
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Correcting saturation and color cast
00:00In the previous chapter we saw some best case and worst case scenarios.
00:03So we saw how you can use the Lab Color mode to either make really great images even better
00:08or you can take really lousy images and make them pretty great as well.
00:13Well in this chapter we are going to try out a more typical scenario.
00:16This is a kind of approach that you are going to apply to just image after image, after image inside a Photoshop.
00:24Especially your exterior shots.
00:27So here I'm working in an image as captured by the digital camera.
00:31I haven't even bothered to rename the image.
00:33It's _DSCO841.JPG.
00:36Found inside the 03typical_Lab folder.
00:40This is the name that was assigned to the image according to the infinite wisdom
00:44of this particular digital camera, which was a Nikon D80.
00:48Now that's an SLR camera but I was just treating it like a 0.2.
00:51This is the most pedestrian shot possible.
00:53This is actually my own backyard.
00:55It was just kind of a nice little snowy day.
00:58You can see that there is little snow coming down.
00:59I shot it out of my office.
01:01I have a separate building where my office is on the second floor.
01:04And I shot out the window into my backyard.
01:07All I did was fire off two JPEGs.
01:10That's all I did.
01:11I didn't even take lot of shots.
01:13I didn't even go outside.
01:15I was too lazy to go outdoors.
01:17This is what the camera picked up, but that's not what the scene looked like to me.
01:21It didn't look this drab.
01:23It wasn't the most colorful day on Earth, but to me the image looked more like this and that's what we are going to create.
01:30So that we have these beautiful lustrous green trees going on and this wonderful wood, these nice wood tones.
01:37We can actually distinguish the new wood from the old wood of this gate right here as you can see.
01:43We have this nice bricks and all the colors coming out just beautifully inside
01:47of this rather suburban, bucolic, pastoral, colorful, cheerful theme.
01:52I mean that's the kind of day it was.
01:54It was a pastoral, bucolic, cheerful day and I want to communicate that with this image.
01:59So, what we are really talking about doing is not so much correcting the image inside the Lab color space
02:04but developing it, properly developing it, because so far this image is not developed at all.
02:10Just gone through the usual JPEG conversion here inside the housing of the digital camera.
02:16All right, so here's what we are going to do.
02:18We are going to begin the correctiveness exercise.
02:20Having opened this image, I want you to go up to the Image menu.
02:23Choose Mode and choose Lab Color, always the first step of course.
02:27And we are going to see how that little first step, the tiny little motion there where convert that image into Lab.
02:33Not only brings us into this, it serves us the entrance into this world of power inside a Photoshop, but it also messes things up.
02:41It prevents us from accessing certain features.
02:43If you will look at the Filter menu for example, you will see a lot of stuff that's not available to you,
02:48and we will see it work around later in this chapter.
02:50Anyway, if I go the channels bar, you can see that I now have Lab image, I have got to lighten this channel no surprise there
02:56and even less of a surprise we have this A and B channel which are doing very little for us.
03:01So the A channel, you can see, just got a little bit of a histogram going on there.
03:05The B channel as well.
03:06Again, this is not a typical.
03:08This is kind of stuff if you are going to run into with your exterior shots over and over again.
03:13Hopefully, your images will offer little more color than this, but if they don't then you are in good shape.
03:18Alright, so the next thing that we want to do is I want you to press and hold the Alt key or the Option key in the Mac
03:23and click the black white icon down here at the bottom of the Layers palette and I want you to choose Levels.
03:28What we are going to be doing is we are going to correct just the A and B channels inside of Levels,
03:34so I'm just going to say A and B, and that's it.
03:37That's all we are going to correct.
03:38So we are just going to correct for the color information inside of the image.
03:42We are going to leave luminosity alone for now.
03:44The reason is because I'm going to show you an incredibly easy and wonderful way to correct luminance inside of a Lab image.
03:52That is unlike anything you can do.
03:54It's so simple and it's so much better than anything you can do in RGB.
03:58It's awesome and it doesn't work the same way in RGB.
04:01It's really great.
04:02All right, now click OK.
04:03So we will just take care of the A and B channels.
04:05So we will be using separate adjustment layers to pull this off, but that's okay because we are going
04:08to be attacking just the color with one adjustment layer and just the luminance information with another adjustment layer.
04:14As I said, it's going to work out brilliantly.
04:16All right, let's go to the A channel and click in the black point.
04:19Then we are going to start by applying our typical, everyday, average symmetrical color adjustment here.
04:24So I'm going to press Shift+Up Arrow eight times this time in a row in order to infuse the scene with lots of Turquoise
04:32and then Tab, Tab over to the Crimson value here and I will press Shift+Down Arrow eight times in a row in order
04:39to introduce some Crimson/Lavender to the scene and offset the Turquoise.
04:44Of course and we have got a regular career-naive shot now as you can see,
04:48because we have got all these Greens and these Pinks and stuff.
04:50Let's add some Bartels and James to the mix here.
04:52Let's go over to the B channel and I will click in what's the Cobalt value essentially and let's just change it to 80
04:58because we know that's where it needs to be and then Tab, Tab 175 for this guy.
05:03All right, we have applied a symmetrical adjustment that has elevated the colors quite nicely.
05:08A little bit too much elevation where the Oranges and the Reds are concerned.
05:13But it's symmetrical so that's good.
05:15At this one we are not too terribly concerned about the fact that our woods getting too hot.
05:19We want to make sure that everything else in the scene, the majority of the scene is working out nicely and it is.
05:23We are bringing out some weird art effects, some color art effects, we will take care of those later.
05:27But for now let's just try to get the overall color cast of the scene down.
05:32Now, I think in sort of looking at the scene that it's still too cool.
05:37It is a cool light source because the sun is going through the clouds, so there is uniform cloud coverage up here.
05:43And as a result that's cooling down the light source the sun, that is to say.
05:47So we need to warm things up a little bit by adding back a little bit of Yellow.
05:51So I'm going to click on that 175 value there in the B channel and I'm going to press the Down Arrow key.
05:56One, two, three times and you can see every single luminance level that you subtract
06:04from that value makes a contribution to the scene.
06:07You can actually see that scene change on the fly.
06:10172 looks really good to me.
06:12Now, let's add back a little bit of green.
06:14I feel like we have got a little too far towards the -- what I have been calling the Crimson/Lavenders.
06:20Let's go ahead and I will set that with a little bit of additional Green, and this is the most amazing thing here.
06:25I'm going to go ahead and zoom in, having switched to the A channel.
06:29Let me make that clear.
06:30Let's go and zoom in on the house a little bit here, and maybe taking a little bit of tree action as well.
06:36Then I will click in the Green value, which is this guy, this is the turquoise and it's the AD value there.
06:42If I press the Up Arrow key, watch the scene change.
06:45You can actually see the scene go greener.
06:48I think it will be a little bit too close to see it the way I want to.
06:50Let's try it there.
06:51Let's go from -- there is 80.
06:53That's 81.
06:54You can actually see the scene slightly green up.
06:57That's 82, that's too much.
06:59So what we want is 81 and we would never know that.
07:03If you were using a different command, like let's say you are using the Variations command.
07:06Really typical beginner's way to correct a color cast inside a Photoshop.
07:12It's a great tool and it's very easy to use.
07:14It offers us those little buttons that say this little thumbnail is more Cyan, more Green, more Yellow.
07:19But they are so tiny, those little thumbnails are so tiny and clicking on anyone of them makes
07:23such an incredibly large contribution and then you ratchet that little Coarse/Fine Slider down the fine
07:30and then you can't even what you are doing anymore.
07:32Here inside the Lab mode, inside the A or B channel in a Levels command, you can see everything, just laid out before you.
07:39And tiny little adjustments will make a contribution.
07:42So, 80, that's not enough.
07:44That's the mama bear.
07:4582, that's too much.
07:4781 is baby bear, just right.
07:49Alright Goldilocks, go ahead and click okay in order to accept that modification.
07:53Now, what do we do having got in the scene in general to a good place where color is concerned, what do we do about the fact
07:59that our Oranges and our Reds are out of control.
08:01Well, I will tell you in the next exercise.
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Fading the oranges and reds
00:00Deke McClelland: Alright, we have corrected for the color and cast inside of this image.
00:05Hence, I have gone ahead and named this catch up document here.
00:08My progress so far, I have named it Color and cast.psd and it is found of course, inside the 03 typical Lab folder.
00:14But we have gone a little too far with our oranges and our reds.
00:18The problem is we have tried to back off our oranges and our reds by going back into the Levels commands,
00:23switching over to a for example and oranges and reds are going to be represented by the right hand values,
00:30by the white point values inside both a and b, because when you add yellow which is b value and you add lavender
00:36to it essentially that crimson from the a value, you are going to get reds and oranges.
00:40What you want to do is back off, like so, right, but in doing so if you get the wood
00:45to look right the rest of the scene is going to look totally wrong.
00:48So this is not the approach to take at all.
00:50You want to correct for the large scene first and then back off your modifications like so.
00:56So I just went ahead and escaped out of the Levels dialog box.
00:58I'm going to double click over here in the empty portion of this adjustment layer in order to bring up the Layer Style dialog box
01:05and I will go ahead and move the scene over as much as I can so that I can see a little bit
01:09of the house and the bridge and so on at the same time.
01:12This is a little stream that runs through our property and when I say stream I mean it is an irrigation ditch
01:17for the farmland that is on the other side of this.
01:20But we call it stream because it sounds better.
01:22Alright, I'm going to change Blend If here because we want to drop out the oranges, don't we?
01:26We are going to change Blend If to a for starters and then we are going to go ahead and reduce this layer and when I'm doing,
01:32when I'm changing this layer value here is I am saying that certain colors in this layer,
01:38in this adjustment layer will drop out and become transparent.
01:41So certain information that is being translated by this layer will drop out and will reveal the colors below
01:46and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this down to let's say down to 150 and you can see,
01:50look at the scene in the background there, there was before, here is the before so keep your eye over there on the left hand side
01:56of the screen, there is a big, hot radioactive wood and then here it is with the value reduced to 150.
02:03So we are saying anything with a luminous level of 150 or higher is becoming transparent, 150 or lower which is going
02:08to be mostly our greens are turquoise values that is are going to be opaque.
02:12I'm going show up where this adjustment layer is concerned.
02:15Alright, well that is a little bit too much backing off.
02:17So let's do that softness thing.
02:19Now, we may not be able to see any hard transitions at this point, you may or may not be able
02:23to see sharp transitions inside of this image.
02:25But they are there, even you can't see them you know that they are there, we have seen those in the past.
02:29So let's just go ahead and Alt+drag or Option+drag the right half of this triangle
02:34over to the right until we get to a value of 210.
02:38actually, you should do this pretty nicely.
02:40Alright, let,s zoom back out again so we can take in the scene.
02:43So this is what things looked like before, too drab, notice that if you are looking at the bridge and the wood and the trees
02:48and all that just and here it is now with the wood tones picked up a bit.
02:52Alright, now we need to do the same thing with yellow, so let's go to the b channel here,
02:57go ahead and choose b. The reason I'm doing this is because I want to get rid of some of the yellowness that is associated.
03:03You can see that there is a lot of yellowness in the other portions of the image here
03:07such as the chimney and the chairs and so on.
03:09So let's go ahead and take that yellow value down.
03:12I'm going to take it down to 150 once again, seems like a good place to start.
03:16Notice, I'm draining a lot of colors out of those areas there too much of course.
03:20So then let's go ahead and Alt+drag the right half of that triangle back up and this time,
03:26I'm going to take it to 220 and unfortunately, you can't enter values.
03:29You just have to sit there and drag that darn thing which is a pain in the neck as far as I'm concerned, but it works.
03:34I'm grateful that the function is there at all.
03:37Yes, I'm.
03:38Thank you Adobe so much.
03:39Anyway, click OK and by the way, Adobe if I can have some numerical values, that will be great.
03:44Alright, so I click OK, just wanted to tamper my great being with a little bit of -- gosh, aren't those engineers wonderful?
03:53Alright, so this is it, this is the fairly corrected version of the colors.
03:58Anyway, the color and the cast.
03:59this is before when we had way too hot, let's go and zoom in again, I keep zooming in and out but let's go and zoom in,
04:04this is before when we had too much in a way of oranges and reds and this is after.
04:09Now, things have been tempered ever so slightly to the level that they need to be tempered.
04:14In the next exercise, I'm going to show you how we go about correcting.
04:18We have now corrected the color, we need now to correct the luminance and we are going to do it using a command.
04:24You are just not going to believe the command we are going to use to do this and you are not going
04:27to believe how wonderfully well it is going to work.
04:29Stay tuned.
04:3003_02_fadetheoranges.mp3 Transcribed by Tech-Synergy Page 2 of 2
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The secret power of Brightness/Contrast in Lab
00:00In this exercise, we are going to correct the luminance information inside of this image using a command I used to
00:06recommend people steer clear of at all cost. But for this image and many other images that you run into
00:13where Lab is concerned, it is the best command you could possibly apply.
00:18And I will show you what I mean. We are going to walk through the entire thing.
00:21I 'm working in an updated version of the document
00:24that represents my progress so far and it is called Safety in lumbers.psd found inside the 03 typical Lab folder.
00:32So called because our wood is no longer radioactive. It is now safe. All right, but we still got a problem with the brightness and
00:39contrast in the scene. The scene is too dim is basically what it comes down, too low contrast as well. Now I could go into my
00:45adjustment layer here, my Levels adjustment layer, double-click on the thumbnail
00:48and I could go to the Lightness info and I could try to increase the contrast
00:55by raising the black point value and lowering the white point value and I can even go beyond. Notice, that I can go
01:01well into my histogram here without blowing highlights or blowing shadows and the reason I can do that is because of
01:08those imaginary colors. Remember how you can have color even inside of blacks and whites in the Lab Color mode.
01:15So we can go well into the histogram and not clip shadows or highlights, which is a wonderful thing,
01:21but that doesn't necessarily mean that we are going to do the best job of increasing the contrast and brightness of the scene.
01:26This is pretty good. It is not bad, but it is not as good as we could do.
01:30What we'd really like to do- I am going to cancel out of there-
01:32I would really like more control. I want control over my quarter tones and my three quarter tones that is to say over exactly
01:38where my shadows and highlights are landing and so what I might do is I might go ahead and add a Curves adjustment layer here
01:46and then inside of the Lightness channel I would do one of these numbers. I would click in the center in order to lock down
01:51the center point, to lock down that gamma and then I'll click down here in the Shadows and make my shadows darker and I would
01:57click up here in the Highlights and make my highlights brighter, something along those lines and then I might take my midtones down
02:02a little and continue to mess with this, but this requires a lot of finessing. You got to figure out
02:09exactly where the significant colors are inside of the image. So it takes a little bit of work.
02:14I am going to cancel out of there because let me show you what is the best command and actually, by the way,
02:18it delivers some awfully nice results, I have to say.
02:22Go down here to the black/white icon, I am going to press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click that
02:27black/white icon and I want you to choose this command right there, Brightness/Contrast, believe it or not. Now I have made a lot of
02:33how this command has been rewired essentially in Photoshop CS3 and later. It used to be a horrible command that you steered
02:40clear of at all costs. Now, it is actually lifting the brightness and contrast controls directly out of Camera Raw
02:47and those are good controls. So it is a completely better command and as we will see in Lab,
02:51it's a really great command. So I am going to go ahead and choose Brightness/Contrast. Because I have the Alt or Option key down
02:57that brings up the new Layer dialog box. I'm going to call this luminance fix because we're just going to fixing the luminance information.
03:03Then I am going to click OK
03:05and I am going to increase the Brightness value by 10 by pressing Shift+Up arrow
03:10then I am going to Tab over to Contrast
03:13and I am going to press Shift+Up arrow four times in a row. By the way, make sure that Use Legacy is turned off,
03:18that's very important, otherwise you will get a questionable result. But anyway, you can see I am taking the Contrast level up to 40
03:25which looks pretty darn good and makes me think I really need to take my Brightness value up higher. So I will go ahead and
03:30Shift+Up arrow that to +20. So we have +20 Brightness, +40 Contrast. It looks pretty darn good. It might look a little too light.
03:39If so, you can take it down ever so slightly, but actually, I am going to keep it up
03:43because we are going to take care of some of the washed out feel of the image later and I am going to go ahead and click OK in order to
03:48accept that modification.
03:50Now then if I click on this Update button right here for the histogram you can see that I am not blowing
03:56any highlights or shadows. So we have all kinds of luminance levels still left inside of this image and check this out.
04:04Now at this point you might be thinking well, we have got to be affecting because I just went ahead and applied the
04:09Brightness/Contrast function to the entire composite image. We are affecting the lightness information and the a and b
04:16information as well. So we need to change Normal, right, this blend mode from Normal to Luminosity,
04:21which would just affect the luminance information, right? Just the Lightness channel. Well, watch the scene, watch the scene
04:26when I choose Luminosity.
04:28Nothing, nothing happened. Brightness and contrast inside Lab automatically only affects the luminance information,
04:36It's so smart. I am going to go and change it back to Normal because there is no reason to change it. It is so darn smart. It is a really,
04:43really great command and it's just so darn easy to use. So every once in a while, I get questions from people saying, "Oh, gosh.
04:50I am glad to hear that brightness and contrast have been fixed essentially inside Photoshop CS3, but when do I use it?"
04:56Well, here is where you use it, inside Lab.
04:58You can use it to fix the luminance of a scene. It works beautifully. Give it a try on your next image.
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Smart Objects and sharpening
00:00All right, we have managed to fix the color information inside of the image and the luminance information.
00:05So we have increased the saturation, we have taken care of the color cast, just a slight color cast
00:11and we have addressed the luminance problems.
00:15We have increased the brightness and contrast using the Brightness and Contrast command and in fact,
00:18the name of this image is Brightness and contrast.psd found inside the O3 typical Lab folder.
00:26But we still have some problems.
00:27We have got some detailed issues now and actually, a lot of detail problems.
00:31But one thing, the image needs sharpening because it is a little bit dull.
00:34Our edges are a little bit soft and the more you zoom in,
00:37the more you can see that we have just got fairly soft information inside of this image.
00:42So let's take care of that by adding a pass at the Smart Sharpen filter
00:46and if you have seen my Photoshop CS3 sharpening images series then you know that I use Smart Sharpen in order
00:53to sharpen high frequency images which is this, any image that has rapidly transitioning luminance Levels.
01:00So we are going from Shadows to Highlights very quickly inside of the image because we have a lot of little details.
01:05So that is the job for Smart Sharpen.
01:07You are going to click on the background layer to make it active and we are going to go ahead and convert it because we want
01:12to keep all of our changes as non-destructive as possible.
01:15We are going to change this to a Smart Object and you will see, this is really going to help us down the future.
01:20I'm going to go up to this command right there Convert for Smart Filters, one way to convert an image to a Smart Object,
01:26so go ahead and choose that and you may get a warning, a little dialog box warning.
01:30But if you click Don't show again just as I did in the previous chapter then it won't show up.
01:34Alright, now I'm going to go ahead and call this guy Lab SO just so I'm aware again that I'm working in a Lab mode
01:40and I will press Return or Enter in order to accept that.
01:44Now let's go up to the Filter menu choose Sharpen and choose the Smart Sharpen function
01:49and here is the value that I want you to apply for this image.
01:51This is too much sharpening as you can see here.
01:54We are just trying to account for the detail in the image.
01:56We will try to figure out what kind of Radius is going to do you well and something along the lines of two Pixels.
02:01We are not sharpening for output here, we are just sharpening to account for the details inside the image to bring it out
02:05and that does a good job of bringing out that detail and then I'm going to go back to the Amount value and change it
02:10to 200% and remove, set to Lens Blur is just great.
02:14We don't want More Accurate turned on for this scene.
02:16We will leave that turned off and those are some great values where this scene is concerned.
02:20Now I will go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification and then we get this filter mask right there.
02:26I'm going to go ahead and throw that guy away because we don't need it right now.
02:29We will use it later, but it is easier to recreate it than to start with it in the first place.
02:35All right, so we have got Smart Sharpen applied to a Smart Object.
02:38Here is a dumb problem for you.
02:39If I zoom in here by virtue of the fact that I have sharpened the scene we can really make out some wicked up here
02:45in the upper right hand corner of the image, some wicked chromatic aberration
02:48and that is something we can fix using the Lens Correction function.
02:52Here is a problem, if I go up to the Filter menu choose Distort and choose Lens Correction.
02:57I can't, it is dimmed.
02:59Why it is that?
03:00Is it possible you can't apply Lens Correction to a Smart Object?
03:03No, that is not the problem you can.
03:05The problem is you can't apply it in Lab.
03:07In a second, I will show you why that is just the dopiest thing ever, because it is actually using Lab map
03:13to correct the image, but you can't do it in Lab.
03:14You have to do it in RGB and I'm going to show you the wildest,
03:17trippiest thing about working with a Smart Object inside the Lab mode.
03:21You can actually have an RGB object inside of a larger Lab construct, inside of a larger Lab composition
03:28and we will see how that works in the very next exercise.
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Fixing chromatic aberrations in RGB
00:00As you may recall, we have uncovered some chromatic aberration inside of this image
00:05by virtue of the fact that we have sharpened it.
00:07It was already there, but by virtue of the fact we have sharpened the image, it has become even more clear and of course,
00:12the a and b adjustment layer right there which is increasing the saturation of the image
00:17that is going a long way toward making this effect worse as well.
00:20I have gone ahead and saved my progress thus far inside of an image called Wicked chromatic aberration.
00:26It's so called not because it is wicked cool, but it is wicked horrible chromatic aberration found inside the O3 typical
00:32Lab folder.
00:33Chromatic aberration is caused by color channels not aligning with each other properly.
00:38Basically, you are going to see it out here in the corners of the image.
00:42So I'm looking at the upper right corner of the image.
00:44You will see it also in the upper left corner, down in the lower right corner and so on.
00:48You won't see it so much in the center.
00:50In the center of the image, it is going to look okay.
00:52Notice there is a little bit of chromatic aberration on the snow right there.
00:55But I think the dead center of the image is over here and this is the best to get to the dead center of the image.
01:00You just Spacebar+drag a 100 times- not really.
01:03But you could see down here toward the center area, nothing great to look at here,
01:08but it does show us that we don't really have that bad chromatic aberration going on.
01:12All right, I'm going to go to the navigator palette and I'm going click up in the trees.
01:16That will be a good place to look.
01:17You can see some chromatic aberration going on there.
01:20You can fix chromatic aberration just in two places where Photoshop is concerned.
01:23One is Camera RAW.
01:25Well, that boat is sailed.
01:26So we are not going to use Camera RAW in order to solve this problem
01:29because we already have the image open inside of Photoshop.
01:31So instead, we have got to use this filter under the Filter menu that is called Lens Correction.
01:36Unfortunately, it is not applicable to Lab images so the tempting thing to do is go up to the Image menu,
01:41choose Mode and choose RGB color and just flatten the whole image and then correct for the chromatic aberration.
01:48That is the wrong thing to do.
01:50It is unnecessary.
01:51Here is what you will really do.
01:52You go down to your Smart Object that you so meticulously created,
01:56good for you because you are keeping the document nice and non-destructive.
01:59You double click on it in order to open the image inside of an independent window
02:03and notice that Photoshop is going to give you this message.
02:05It is just telling you how you update a Smart Object.
02:09Go and say Don't show again because I'm going to tell you and click OK.
02:13So if you don't get that warning it is just because at some other point of time you have said don't show again.
02:17Here is the image, alright here is the original, uncorrected image.
02:20It looks drab and boring, just like it originally did.
02:23Now, I will go up to the Filter menu, choose Distort and choose Lens Correction.
02:27Still not available, darn it.
02:29Reason? Because we are still in the Lab mode.
02:31Check it out up here in the title bar we are still in the Lab Color mode.
02:34That is okay because we can just change it.
02:36Go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose RGB color.
02:39Now we are not changing the larger Lab composition.
02:42We are just changing this Lab image right here, we are changing it to RGB color.
02:46It is not a non-destructive transformation of flip back and forth between Lab and RGB but it is a low destruction transformation.
02:54It is not much that is going to happen to your image if anything.
02:57If you are able to perceive any change and I doubt we are at all in this image.
03:00I would have to look around quite a bit I think.
03:02Let's now go ahead and solve for the chromatic aberration.
03:05I'm going to zoom into the upper corner of the image
03:07because it is a little more indicative, actually let's zoom out a little bit.
03:10I just want to see it in a 100%.
03:12It is a little more indicative of how our correction is going to fair.
03:14Now, I'm going to go up to the Filter menu.
03:16You know what, let's go ahead just because we want this to be as non-destructive as possible, right.
03:21We might want to come back and adjust our settings.
03:23So let's go ahead and convert this guy for Smart Filters.
03:25In other words, we are creating an embedded, a nested Smart Object.
03:29I will tell you all about that in my Photoshop CS3 sharpen images series.
03:33By the way, I like to do this every once in a while.
03:35This is how this series was created by the way.
03:37We originally created channels and masks series and I asked people inside the channels and mask series,
03:44"Would you like to see a Lab color correction series?"
03:46We got so many people saying yes because we didn't know if that was going to fly or not.
03:50Then we decided what the heck, we will do a Lab series.
03:52Now I'm asking you, "Would you like to see a Smart Object series?
03:56Would you like to a series that is devoted to using Smart Objects in Photoshop?"
03:59Just let us know.
04:00All right, so I'm going to go ahead and choose Convert for Smart Filters and that is going to turn this into a Smart Object
04:05as you can see and I'm going to go ahead and call this one RGB SO.
04:09So I know once I come in here, oh, here is my RGB Smart Object, interesting.
04:13All right, now let's go to the Filter menu, apply Distort or choose Distort that is and then choose Lens Correction.
04:20Notice it is available to me now so it is not a Smart Object issue; it is an RGB versus Lab issue.
04:25So I'm going to go ahead and choose a command and now if this image comes up inside of a grid and it is not showing
04:30as the portion of the image that I wanted to see.
04:32So I'm going to turn the grid off by going down here in the Show Grid check box and turning it off.
04:36The grid is useful for measuring lens distortion, but we don't have a real problem
04:41with barrel distortion or pin cushioning inside this image.
04:44So what we do have though is a problem with chromatic aberration, so I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and I'm doing
04:48that by the way by pressing the Ctrl and dragging around an area that would be command dragging on the Mac and I'm actually going
04:56to press Ctrl+ in order to zoom to 100%, that is Cmd+ in the Mac.
05:00All right, notice our Chromatic Aberration option is right here.
05:04We have got a little bit of turquoise on one side of a limb and a little bit of lavender on the other side.
05:09Hence, we have some problems with the a channel.
05:12Right, the a channel and the b channel are misaligned with each other and look, wouldn't you know it.
05:17Right there it says, Fix Red/Cyan Fringe so another thing you can call the a axis.
05:20You could say it is going from cyan to red if you want to.
05:23Then we have got another one for b, for the b channel, Blue/Yellow right there.
05:28So why can't we just, out of curiosity, somebody at Adobe, why can't we use these sliders, which are obviously using a,
05:35b math, why can't we use them in the Lab mode?
05:37Call me crazy, but anyway, alright, so we need this to go one direction or the other and you can just drag it
05:43to see is this is getting better if I go this way?
05:45Well, I went too far and notice that is pretty bad, but at about this point, things were getting pretty good
05:50and then if I go the other direction it just gets worse and worse.
05:52So I want to go to the right.
05:54So in other words, I can't really tell you a formula to work with here.
05:57You just want to test it out.
05:59Something around about +10 looks pretty good.
06:01I have found +8 actually looks even better and then I'm going to go ahead and take this up to 2 for the blue/yellow fringe
06:09because it is just a little bit a blue/yellow fringe that gets fixed by doing that.
06:13Now I'm looking at the upper left hand corner of the image.
06:15Notice that it is not entirely fixed, but it is better.
06:19If I go to the other side of the image, the other corner and I'm going to go down to that window here,
06:25you can see that it is not entirely fixed either, but it is better.
06:28Notice I will go ahead and turn off the Preview check box.
06:30So this is before and then I will turn Preview back on.
06:33This is after.
06:34So we have got a different kind of chromatic aberration.
06:37We have got more of yellow/purple going on now, a yellow/violet, but it is better than it was.
06:42I'm accepting these little bits of snow, it is actually a little worse.
06:44But this is as good as we are going to do.
06:46If you don't believe me, you can fool around some more with these options here and try to get it better,
06:49but this is the best correction I can find and then I will click OK.
06:53So it is not perfect, it is good, click OK, you are going to get editable Lens Correction filter right there
06:59or Smart Filter so you could change it in the future.
07:01If you decide that it is not exactly what you wanted, you can update it, you can tweak it.
07:04Go ahead and get rid of that mask, we don't need it.
07:06I just like to tidy that up.
07:07All right, we are done now inside of the Smart Object, so here is how you update to Smart Object.
07:12You go up to the File menu and you choose the Close command or you can press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+W or Command W
07:17on the Mac or click the Close button, anyway you want to close the image.
07:19It is going to ask you, do you want to save it?
07:21All you do is you click Yes.
07:22Don't worry about where it is getting saved.
07:23It is actually getting saved in RAM.
07:25It is getting saved to memory.
07:26So it is not getting saved to disk.
07:27Just go ahead and click Yes.
07:28It is really updating the image and Adobe has said that they might change them in the future.
07:33They might make that an update button instead.
07:35I would like it if they did.
07:36There are quite a few changes to Smart Objects I wish they would make.
07:38Anyway, notice how it is converting the colors on a fly.
07:40So I left it in RGB.
07:41I didn't change it back to Lab.
07:43I figure our minds will just leave it in RGB inside of the Smart Object, but notice here,
07:48inside of the larger composition we are still in the Lab mode.
07:51Check it out up here at the top of the image inside the title bar.
07:54So this is before, I will go ahead and do a Ctrl+Z and this is after.
07:58So it is Cmd+Z on the Mac, before and after.
08:01So it is better, it is not best, but it is better and it hasn't harmed any of the overall colors inside of the image.
08:06We still are working in the Lab mode.
08:09We just took advantage of a special opportunity made available to us by the wonderful world of wacky Smart Objects and I do,
08:17I emphasis wacky because they are pretty weird.
08:19But anyway, we have now corrected, somewhat corrected the chromatic aberration.
08:23Let's check out that window just so we can see some more here because that is where we are so bad.
08:27This is you can see, we have still got some there, but this is before, worse, right we can agree on that and this is
08:34after especially when the drain pipe is concerned it is a little better.
08:37Not best though, so we still need to fix it further and we are going to further fix the colors of this image.
08:43We are going to get rid of this altogether using a really old function, Median, in the next exercise.
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Adding clarity with High Pass
00:00As you may recall we fixed the chromatic aberration.
00:03Well, we "FIXED" the chromatic aberration in the previous exercise because quite obviously, it's not fixed,
00:10it's not completely better, it's just improved.
00:13We need to make it completely better or at least as much better as we can and we are going to do
00:17that by applying the Median command here inside the Lab mode.
00:22I'm working inside of a progress document called Better chromatic aberrations, no longer wicked,
00:26it's Better.psd found inside the 03 Typical Lab folder and before we apply median,
00:32I want to go ahead and sharpen the image further.
00:35I want to add another pass of sharpening and this time I want to add what's known as clarity sharpening in order just
00:41to increase the contrast along the edges inside the image.
00:44I'm going to do with the Lab SO Layer selected here.
00:48I'm going to go up to the Filter menu and I'm going to choose Other and then I'm going to choose High Pass
00:53and we are going to apply a big heaping radius value.
00:56So I will go ahead and choose this command and I will change the Radius to 15, not to 100, that would be too far, 15.
01:02A really great sharpening function inside of Photoshop High Passes but it looks a little weird at first.
01:07We have all these grays that are showing up.
01:08So basically, the edges try to retain their original shadow and highlight field, but the non-edges turn gray, so I will go ahead
01:15and click OK in order to accept that modification.
01:18Now, what you do is you go down to the High Pass Smart Filter here in the stack down below the Lab Smart Object
01:24and double click on its slider right there in order to bring up the Blending Options dialog box, it might take a moment
01:31or two for that dialog box to appear and then in this case, I want you to change the mode from Normal
01:36to Soft Light because we are really going to back it off.
01:39Any of these modes, any of these guys right here are going to back it off pretty nicely, but the least of them,
01:44the one that's going to back it off the most and create the most subtle effect is Soft Light and notice that right away
01:49that High Pass blends in with the rest of the image and I'm going to take the Opacity down to 75% actually,
01:55just to back it off ever so lightly and then click OK.
01:57Just to get a field for what High Pass has done let's go ahead and zoom into the scene just a little bit there and you want
02:03to view the scene by the way at 25% or 50% or 100% or something along those lines in Photoshop CS3
02:09so that you get smooth transitions between the pixels.
02:12I'm going to turn off High Pass for a moment.
02:14I'm going to turn off its eyeball and that might take a moment.
02:17It's another one of these things that brings up a progress bar to show you that Photoshop is working on those Smart Objects
02:23and then so that's the original version of the image, prior to High Pass and then Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to see the after version.
02:30So this is before and this is after.
02:32So we have some nice clarity.
02:34I have gone ahead and created some clarity inside this image.
02:37All right, so now that that's done, now, let's apply the Median Filter.
02:41We need the Median Filter not only for the chromatic aberration, but also for all this color garbage, all this noise that's going
02:47on inside of the painted wood for example and if I switch to the Navigator palette over to this area,
02:52you can see that we have got a ton of noise going on inside of all the green surfaces of the house and inside of the windows
03:00and even inside of the sky, if you look closely at the sky,
03:02but it's mostly showing up inside this green areas and pretty good too.
03:06We have got some very bad problems as you can see and we are going to take care
03:08of those problems not now, but in the next exercise.
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Reducing color noise with Median
00:00In this exercise we are going to use the Median command to calm down the amount of color noise that we have going
00:06on inside this image, as well as the chromatic aberrations remaining, chromatic aberrations.
00:10Right now we're zoomed in on a noise detail.
00:13If I go ahead and switch to the upper right corner of this image here inside the Navigator palette,
00:17we will see the remaining problems with not only the color noise, but also the chromatic aberration.
00:22I'm working inside of a progress document called the With Clarity.psd found inside the o3 Typical Lab folder,
00:28so called because we went ahead and added clarity using the high pass command in the previous exercise.
00:34All right, so the Smart Object should still be active here at the bottom of the Layers palette.
00:38I want you to go up to Filter menu, choose Noise and choose Median.
00:42A really great command for calming down noise inside of an image.
00:46You can't go with Reduce Noise, but for this specific image here and most of your images, Median is going to be good enough
00:51for you especially where color noise like this is concerned.
00:54So, it's just an easier command to work with.
00:56Go ahead and choose Median.
00:57I'm going to apply a radius value of 10 because I really want to wipe out that chromatic aberration as much as I can,
01:05as well as completely smooth over as much of the noise as I can.
01:10Now, you will see that Median introduces its own sort of weird puddles,
01:16little color puddles like we were seeing in the previous chapter into an image.
01:19So it introduces a degree of banding but we will get rid of that in just a moment.
01:23So, go ahead and click OK after applying a radius value of 10 and then it might take a moment to apply.
01:30The next step is to go ahead and apply this Median function here because we have just wiped out a ton of detail inside the image
01:37as you can see things have gotten a little bit murky where this image is concerned.
01:40It's rendered in candle wax or something.
01:43What we want to do is just calm down the color noise, just smooth over the A and B channels.
01:46So you are going to double click on this top slider right there, the one associated with median
01:50in order to bring up the Blending Options dialog box.
01:53If you get a progress bar by all means, just sit there and wait for it.
01:56What else can you do?
01:58Go get a couple of cups of coffee it looks like because we got two progress bars oh, we are so lucky.
02:03Now let's change the mode from Normal to Color right there and that will effect just the A and B channels,
02:09it won't effect the L channel at all, the lightness channel and notice what a great job it did, check that out.
02:15It really did a wonderful job of getting rid of that remaining chromatic aberration.
02:19Click OK in order to accept that modification.
02:21So I will just use the History palette to show you the difference.
02:23This was before we applied that command and this is after.
02:27Big, big difference, let's zoom in just to make sure you can see that.
02:30This is before because we've rendered down the videos a little bit.
02:33This is before and this is after, looking way, way better.
02:37Now, thing is, when you are sharpening an image and you are blurring it.
02:41You are piling, sharpening on top of blurring or you are mixing the filters with each other,
02:45the blur and the averaging function should come first and then the sharpening functions after that.
02:51So, we have got these filters stacked in a wrong order.
02:53We have got Sharpen and then High Pass and then Median.
02:56That's the order it works and that's the order Photoshop applies them.
02:59It is bottom to top.
03:00So, we need to take Median, grab it and drag it underneath Smart Sharpen.
03:04Now in Windows and Vista you get this little icon that you are dragging around here, you don't get that on the Mac.
03:09So go ahead and drag that down though.
03:11You should get that bar, that horizontal bar.
03:13You're going to have to wait for it to render all the Smart Filters.
03:15This is a pretty difficult job for Photoshop as it stands right now, takes it a fair amount of effort to switch filters around.
03:22But once it gets done, you are going to know it's a little bit of a different.
03:25So this is before and this is after.
03:28So, the details should be a little just ever so slightly stronger in the sharpened version of the image.
03:33And you know what, I just got through telling you a lie.
03:36It will be a little different, you will recognize a little bit of difference between the two images,
03:41but why you are going to see just a little bit of difference because Median is applied only to the A and B channels by virtue
03:47of the fact that I applied the Color Blending mode and Smart Sharpen is applied only to the lightness channel by virtue
03:52of the fact I applied the Luminosity Blend mode.
03:54The one guy that's making a difference, one guy that really wants to be
03:56on top is High Pass because it's got Soft Light applied to it.
04:00So, it actually is affecting all of the three channels at once to a limited extent though.
04:05So you are only going to see a minor difference.
04:07Now, we do still have some cruddiness associated with this image and it's happening in the sky, you may not be able to see it.
04:14Let's go and zoom in on the sky up here.
04:16You may not be able to see inside the video.
04:17But what we have got is a little bit of wandering in the yellows and we can see it even better if we start zooming out.
04:24You can see that there is some sort of yellow blockiness going on.
04:27I will show it to you in a little better way so that we can really see it,
04:31and I will show you how to account for it in the next exercise.
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Protecting the sky with a density mask
00:00All right, in this next exercise we are really taking the correction to the mat.
00:05Once again we are just trying to do the best correction conceivable at this point.
00:09We are going to remove a problem that's barely visible but it could turn into a worse problem once we print the image.
00:14I'm not sure if you can see. I'm begging your indulgence at this point of time.
00:18I'm not even sure you can see this problem in your video and by the way, I'm working
00:22in a progress document called Smartly filtered.psd found inside the 03 Typical Lab folder and this image is smartly filtered
00:28of course, we have got a collection of three Smart Filters in all.
00:31All right, what you may be able to make out on your screen, if not inside the video here, if you are working along with me,
00:36is a slight wavering between the white and the yellows inside of this image.
00:41This is a function of Medianed JPEG compression artifacts and it's really showing up.
00:46I'm going to press Ctrl+3 or Cmd+3 on the Mac.
00:49It's showing up worsen side of the B channel.
00:51Can you see it?
00:52Well, possibly not.
00:53So, let me dRAW it out for you.
00:55Let me make sure that you can really see it.
00:56I'm going to switch back to the RGB composite by pressing Ctrl or Cmd+Tilde.
01:01I'm going to go to the top of the adjustment layer stack and I'm going to Alt/option-click on the black white icon,
01:07choose Levels and I'm going to call this guy tester.
01:11This is a really great use for adjustment layers incidentally.
01:13It's to test problems inside of an image.
01:15We don't intend to keep this adjustment layer.
01:17We are going to turn it off.
01:18But we are just keeping it around.
01:19We are just creating it in order to test the problems as I say.
01:22So click OK and now I'm going to go over here to the B channel because that's
01:27where a problem really resides is inside the B channel and I'm going
01:30to change the first value to 100 and the second value to 155.
01:34So this is going to make our image look a mess, really I mean it's going to mess up the colors in the image as you can see
01:39over here in the Navigator palette, but it demonstrates the problems that we have in the sky.
01:43Can you see it now?
01:43If not, let's go to lightness just to make sure you can really see it.
01:47Now, I'm going to increase this black point value to let's say about 190.
01:50Now you should really see the problem showing up there in the sky and I will click OK.
01:55Now, that's not how we want the image to look but it does test out this problem that exists here.
02:00What do we about it?
02:00Well first, what created this problem in the first place ironically the Median command created the problem.
02:06The Median Filter did, notice, if I turn off Median down here at the Bottom Layers palette.
02:11Watch what happens inside this region here.
02:13It might take a moment to update.
02:15Notice that we have a lot of noise now inside of this area but we don't have that blockiness.
02:20Now, some people might say well, that's because you use Median but what you ought to have used in order to smooth
02:25over the noise, you ought to have used Gaussian Blur, that's actually not true.
02:29Let me show you.
02:29I'm going to go ahead and click on the Lab Smart Object there.
02:32I have got Median turned off.
02:33I'm going to go up to the Filter menu.
02:34I'm going to choose Blur and I'm going to choose Gaussian Blur.
02:37We will see that we are going to get goops associated with Gaussian Blur as well.
02:42They are just rounder instead of being squarish.
02:45Problem is anytime you are averaging pixels no matter what kind of command you use to do it,
02:49you run the risk of actually exaggerating certain kinds of noise inside of an image particularly here inside of Lab.
02:57So, I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of this.
02:59So what do we do, because we need median, we got to have median because otherwise we have got all kinds of color noise
03:04and chromatic aberrations that are showing up elsewhere in the image and it's the best command to take care of it.
03:08By the way reduce noise, that wonderful elegant Reduce Noise command, which is really a great command, has the same problems.
03:14It's going to make those kind of blocks show up as well.
03:16Check it out if you want to.
03:17Anyway, I'm going to turn Median back on just by pressing Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac and I'm going to leave tester there.
03:24For now, I'm not going to throw it away in other words, but I'm going to go ahead and turn it off for the moment.
03:28The reason is because I want to go ahead and load a density mask.
03:32So we are just going to sharpen the darkest portions of this image.
03:36So there is we are just going to filter the darkest portions of the image and we are not going to worry
03:39about these light areas, so that the light areas stay nice and flat.
03:42So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and just leave everything turned on except for the tester layer.
03:49Then go over to the Channels palette, and I want you to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on the lightness channel
03:55in order to load it up as a selection outline.
03:58So, Photoshop has now gone ahead and selected the lightest portions of the image.
04:01That would be a Luminance Mask if you are familiar with my masking series,
04:04very distinguished Luminance Mask from Density Masks.
04:07You know that this is a Luminance Mask.
04:09We are selecting the lightest portions of the image.
04:11I'm going to go to Select menu and to convert a Luminance Mask into a Density Mask, you choose inverse just like that,
04:17and then you select the darkest areas in the image.
04:20Now, go over to the Layers palette or right click on Smart Filters right there.
04:24Right click on the word Smart Filters and choose Add Filter Mask in order to reestablish a filter mask,
04:29but this time the one that actually does something inside of the image.
04:33I will go ahead and scoot over a little bit here.
04:35Now notice, if I turn on the tester layer that we don't have nearly the problems that we had before.
04:41So Shift+Click to turn that Mask off and then Shift+Click again to turn that Mask on.
04:46I'm Shift+Clicking on the Mask itself by the way on the Filter Mask and you can see that,
04:50that goes a long way towards solving our problems right there.
04:53Now, I'm going to go ahead and click inside the image to make it active and then I will turn off the tester layer,
04:58that's what is causing these problems right here and go ahead and zoom out from the image.
05:02You can see that we still have a nicely sharpened version of the image.
05:05Some of the chromatic aberration is restored but it's not too bad and we are just sharpening the darkest details.
05:10I'm just going to click on the eyeball in front of the Smart Filters there.
05:13This is what it looks like without any of the filters and this is what it looks like with the filters turned on.
05:18Alright, so done a really nice job of correcting everything about this image except for one thing,
05:26the image needs to not have this blob, this little sort of fingerprint
05:30on the window here that's showing up at the top of the image.
05:32Also, we need some cropping because you can see around the edges if you look closely we have a little bit
05:36of transparency showing through, this is because the image got distorted slightly when we applied the lens correction function.
05:42So, we're going to crop the image and make it look just picture perfect in the next exercise.
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Nondestructive cropping with Canvas Size
00:00All right gang of mine, in this exercise we are going
00:02to perform the last corrective adjustment that we need to apply to this image.
00:06It's not the very last thing we are going to do but this is the last correction.
00:09We are going to go ahead and crop the image, which is going to get rid of this smudge up here, on this kind of like fingerprint
00:15or whatever it is on the window through which I'm shooting.
00:18And it's also going to establish a nice sort of wide angled panoramic shot
00:23that better represents how I perceive the scene with my own little eyes?
00:27All right.
00:28So you can crop images in a variety of different ways in Photoshop.
00:32Now what's interesting, I'm going to dig into some theory just here for a moment.
00:36If you grab the Crop tool, which is the standard way to crop and you drag around the scene in order
00:41to establish sort of a panoramic shot, right here.
00:44It's going to want to snap to the edges, so it's a little bit clumsy and notice that when you get close the edge it's going
00:50to snap to it and we just want to be a few pixels in the snapping, it's much too harsh, but you can hide,
00:55you can set the cropped area to hide if you want to which will protect everything inside the image
00:59so that you are not cropping anything except the background layer.
01:03It would crop the background layer if there was a background layer but we don't have one.
01:06So it's going to save all the big layer information larger than the canvas, including the Filter Mask.
01:11All right, so I'm going to go ahead and escape out of the crop boundary.
01:15Now, the rectangular Marquee tool offers a few advantages, when you undo a crop, for example, if you apply a crop
01:22and then undo it, it remains intact, that doesn't happen with the Crop tool quite irritatingly, in my opinion.
01:28Anyways, so I use the Marquee tool a lot, but it tends to crop away pixels, there is no hide option if you were to choose Crop
01:34from the Image menu, you don't get the opportunity to hide things.
01:37Well, in the case of this image because it's so darn flexible because we set it up using Adjustment layers
01:42that can't be cropped really, and we have established a Smart Object which also cannot be cropped.
01:48We are going to retain everything except the Filter Mask;
01:50we would actually crop the Filter Mask where we do apply the Marquee tool.
01:54Well, I know exactly how much I want to take off the edges of this image, and how tall I want the image to be.
02:01And if I want to work that precisely the best tool to work with is the Canvas Size command here under the Image menu.
02:07So that's what I'm going to do.
02:08I'm going to choose Canvas Size command just like the Crop tool when you have it set to Hide,
02:12the Canvas Size command will not damage anything on a layer.
02:16It will not crop away pixels on layers except for the background layer.
02:20We don't have a background layer so we are protected, it won't crop away the mask either.
02:24So let's go ahead and choose Canvas Size.
02:27And what I want you to do is set it to Relative for starters and let's reduce the width of the image by -6.
02:33So we are clipping up three pixels on either side of the image, and you may recall that's too account for that little bit
02:38of transparency that we have in the left and right edges by virtue of the fact that the image has been slightly distorted
02:44by the Lens Correction function inside of this Smart Object.
02:48All right, so -6 will crop away those edges.
02:51Now Relative back off and you'll see, all right the width of the image is going to be 3866 pixels, now fine, whatever.
02:58I know the height wants to be 1760, I just know that from experimenting with the image and figuring it out.
03:03So let's say you know that and we'll just go ahead and crop uniformly around the edges.
03:07Now that doesn't give us much control over the positioning of the image inside
03:10of this crop boundary but we will take care of that in a moment.
03:12So 3866 where pixels are concerned we should be working with pixels, and 1760 pixels, click OK,
03:19Photoshop is going to warn you, hey, your canvas size is going to be smaller than the current one,
03:24some clipping will occur big, fat lie, not true.
03:28No clipping will occur, I want to make that clear, there is no Background layer, so clipping is impossible with this command.
03:34I wish it would tell you that because basically this Photoshop's way of telling you the Canvas Size command is not nearly as great
03:39as it is, it's a great command, click proceed just to ignore it because you are not doing any harm to image whatsoever,
03:45and I'm going to prove that to you in just a moment.
03:47All right, so we have to wait for the rendering of the Smart Filters.
03:50If you don't want to wait for you can click Cancel, and what's going to happen,
03:53I'm going to try to click Cancel to see if it takes advantage of it or not.
03:57If you click Cancel and actually it pays attention to you then what it's going to do, that's going to speed up the pace
04:02at which it does things, but then it won't show you the results of your Smart Filters on screen if you successfully cancel,
04:07but that's great if you are performing a lot of operations in a row.
04:10All right, now I can still see a little bit of the smudge at the top of the screen here,
04:14so I don't have the image properly positioned inside of its new boundary.
04:18So all I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to the Move tool and I'm going to press Shift+Up Arrow a few times
04:24until that smudge goes away, and notice if you keep an eye over here in the Filter Mask, it moves automatically,
04:30it is linked to the image, so it's moving along with the image automatically which is amazing
04:35because this is one of the biggest ironies in all of Photoshop.
04:38If it was a Layer Mask, it would not move along with the image but because it's a Filter Mask it's automatically linked.
04:44There is no way to link Layer Mask to a Smart Object layer.
04:47Complete craziness, it's just all these weird things associated with Smart Objects, I hope they fix them.
04:52Anyway, that should mostly take care off this, actually it's a little too high, I'll Shift+Down Arrow it,
04:57so it should lay right about there where the pose in this deck are concerned and that's what I'm looking for.
05:02Now it's going to prove to you that we haven't done any clipping whatsoever.
05:05I'll go up to the Image menu and I'll choose Reveal All, which is going to reveal all of the pixels
05:11that are really available inside of this image.
05:14Again, we are going to have to wait for it to render, again,
05:16I'm going to try to click Cancel, notice I successfully cancel that time.
05:19It did not render the Filters, I don't care.
05:20Look at that, is that not awesome?
05:24We have retained everything, the Filter Mask is still there, the image is still there,
05:27the Adjustment layer is still there, everything is still there.
05:29Canvas Size, it's a miracle worker, such a great command.
05:32Undo by pressing Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac and we have the cropped version of the image, right, ready to go.
05:40What you would do now by the way?
05:41I'm going to have you do it.
05:43You are going to go up to the File menu, if you haven't done this already, go to the File menu choose the Save As command
05:47and I'm going to save this image, you'd want to save it as a different name because otherwise you are going to save over mine.
05:53I'm going to call it Nondestructive composition, so that we know it's a completely nondestructive composition that we created.
06:01Make sure to save it in the native PSD format, make sure to save your layers, can't save in ICC Profile,
06:05go ahead and click Save in order to save that image to disk and you are now ready for the next exercise.
06:11In the next exercise we are going to flatten this image; we are going to covert it to RGB;
06:15we are going to see what we have managed to do; and I'm going to tell you why we are working that way.
06:19Final exercise in the chapter, coming right up.
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Convert to RGB, flatten, and save
00:00Alright people if you have been working along with me, you have successfully performed a textbook,
00:06nondestructive color correction and detail enhancement to this image and crop as well,
00:13without harming a single pixel in the original image.
00:15This is just the most nondestructive document possible, flexible effect, and we've gone ahead and saved it out as well,
00:22I saved it at the end of the previous exercise it is Nondestructive composition.psd found inside the 03 Typical
00:27Lab folder.
00:29However, that doesn't mean that all is perfectly well inside of the image, I mean,
00:35even though we are calling it Nondestructive I should put 'fingers up', you can't see what I'm doing
00:39but I should have 'fingers up' when I say Nondestructive because it's flexible and you haven't harmed the original image,
00:45it's still there but you have ripped apart, for example the Histogram.
00:49Take a look at the Histogram here inside of the Histogram palette, and this is the composite Histogram
00:53for the entire image with all of its modifications in place.
00:57So I was to turn off the Luminance fix layer for example that Histogram is going to change.
01:01Turn it back on it's going to change again.
01:02So it represents the composite histogram.
01:05I'll go ahead and expand the view here so that we can see the entire thing.
01:10I'd like to show you the All Channels View, but if I do that it's going to get grumpy on me because my screen is not very tall.
01:15So let me see if I can do it if the palette is floating, choose the All Channels view
01:19and it will show me every one of the channels inside of this image.
01:22I'm just going to go ahead and click on this warning, what that does actually is that it updates the Histogram
01:26so we have the most accurate picture possible.
01:29See all those gaps in the histogram, so we are seeing the image represented, the histogram is showing us the image from black
01:35over here on the left to white over here on the right
01:38and it's showing us all the luminance level that it can as bars in a column graph here.
01:43Anyway we are seeing these gaps.
01:44That means that we have nothing at that location, we have no pixels that are representing that luminance level.
01:50So we have a lot of potential for banding and some other problems going on.
01:54If this were an RGB image that would be the case, but because this isn't an RGB image
01:58and no matter what we've got to go through the translator, right?
02:01We are either having the image translated through the RGB screen to our eyes.
02:04If we are going to print the image we go to CMYK, because of that this is all going
02:08to get smoothed out during the translation process.
02:11Let me show you what I'm talking about.
02:12I'll go ahead and switch this back to Expanded View so it doesn't complain it being.
02:16And then I'll bring the Histogram palette back in to the cluster over here, and I'm going to go ahead and hide those palettes.
02:22We have saved the composition as PSD document, this is very important so we don't lose any of the stuff we've done.
02:27Now I'm going to go up to the Image menu and I'm going to choose Mode and I'm going to choose RGB color.
02:31If I was going to press with this image, I might choose CMYK, assuming that I'm done with the image,
02:36but let's say that what I want to with it is I want to e-mail to somebody.
02:39Somebody wants to see a picture of my backyard, I don't know what, but I want to e-mail this wonderful bucolic day here.
02:45So I'm going to switch it to RGB color because if I send somebody a Lab image they won't know what
02:49to do with it, so I'll go ahead and choose RGB.
02:51And it's going to ask me, "Hey!
02:52What do you want to do about those Smart Objects you've got there, buddy?"
02:55I'm going to rasterize them because we are really just going to flatten off this image.
02:59I'll go ahead and Rasterize it.
03:00What do you want to do with those Adjustment layers?
03:03Because I'm going to throw them away that's what it's telling you, if you click OK,
03:06I'm just going to get rid off them, goodbye!
03:08You don't want that, that should not be the default, the default should be merged, we want to merge them with the original
03:14because it can't translate the Adjustment layers from Lab to RGB it's what it's telling you.
03:18So go ahead and click Merge so that we get the real version of our image and we went to RGB and you can see that,
03:23if I Shift+Tab over to the Channels palette we've got a red, green and blue channels right there.
03:28Also take a look at our Histogram, I'm going to update it.
03:31That's a pretty darn smooth histogram right there people.
03:34Let's go ahead and drag that guy out so we can see it by itself,
03:36and I can expand it to show the All Channels View, look at those nice histograms.
03:41Now they are not perfect, they still have little jaggies at the top of them that tells you
03:45that some editing has occurred but it looks pretty dark and great.
03:50And it almost looks like this is the way I shot the image in the first place, and it's going to look like that in just a moment.
03:54Just a couple of more things that I need to do, one is, if I'm e-mailing this to a person,
03:59I need to make sure that they can open it very easily that it's compatible
04:02with whatever program they are using whether it'd be Photoshop or otherwise.
04:05So I'm going to go up actually to the Layer menu and I'm going to choose Flattened image, in order to flatten the image
04:12so that we have just one background layer, otherwise we end up with one merged layer.
04:17And then, I'm going to go on to the File menu and I'm going to choose the Save
04:20as command, or Ctrl+Shift+A, Cmd+Shift+A on the Mac.
04:24We are going to go with the JPEG file format which we can use with the Flattened RGB image and I'm going to go ahead
04:30and call this something like Bucolic backyard or something along those lines, and you can share this with your friends
04:37as well this way, and click on the Save button in order to save those modifications, might as well save it at Maximum quality,
04:44Baseline Optimized is a good idea, it's not going to be a very large file.
04:47So go ahead and click OK, in order to save the final version of that image with its beautiful histogram and everything.
04:53Alright, let's go ahead and tab away the palettes, and I'm going to press the F key a couple times to switch
04:59to the Full Screen mode, this is the final version of the image, recall, this is the one we started with.
05:04Just to give you a sense, I'll press Ctrl+L or Cmd+L on the Mac, that's its Histogram quite smooth
05:09but obviously not filling up all of the space very well, cancel out.
05:13And then, I'll go ahead and switch over to the final version, the corrected version of the image, so nice, just looks lovely,
05:20looks the way that I thought it should have looked in the first and if I press Ctrl+S or Cmd+S on the Mac you can see
05:26that we have a nicely fleshed out smooth Histogram, something you just cannot get if we had modified the image inside RGB,
05:32we would have a lot of problems with this Histogram.
05:35Thanks to the fact, we went to Lab and came back to RGB, it looks like we have never edited the image at all.
05:40It's invisible stealth editing I tell you.
05:42You're going to go ahead and cancel out, and you manage to accomplish it,
05:46very nicely done with the power and the aid and the assistance of Lab.
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4. Correcting Color Cast and Lighting
Images with bigger issues
00:00By now you have a pretty broad understanding of how to fix photographs in Lab, convert the image to Lab Color,
00:06adjust the brightness and contrast, elevate the A and B channels, sharpen the luminance and you have yourself a great image.
00:14See? I told you wasn't that hard.
00:16Well, yeah it is. Because there are images out there that defy or at least challenge the approaches I have shared with you so far.
00:24Images with intense or hard to identify color casts,
00:27images with blown highlights or filled-in shadows, images that are backlit or suffer from harsh contrast.
00:34Such are the problems we'll explore in this chapter. Now I can't guarantee that your photographs will behave exactly like mine.
00:40Every image offers it's own unique challenges but I will show you how to identify a color cast, how to adjust for it,
00:48how to brighten shadows, how to dim highlights and how to bring out every last ounce of detail that your image has to offer.
00:56We are going to squeeze that lemon and make some really, really great lemonade.
01:02You're so sweet, I leave to you to lay on the sugar.
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Fixing a color cast
00:00Before we set about correcting the color cast of our images, let us discuss how we recognize color cast,
00:05which I think most of us know, but just to make sure and then what are the best ways to address it.
00:10We are going to keep things theoretical here.
00:12I'm not showing you any images.
00:13I'm showing you diagrams in this exercise and then in the next exercise,
00:17we will actually take this theory and put it into practice.
00:20I'm looking at what is for all intents and purposes a reprise of the big Lab color wheel that we saw earlier,
00:27only this one is flattened which is why I call it Lab wheel (flat.tip) found inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder.
00:36Basically imagine this, imagine that we have an image with a red color cast.
00:42Now we would know that it is a red color cast because there would be an inaccurate preponderance of red inside the image.
00:50I don't mean that the image is predominantly red, that is not enough because you might have an image
00:54that just has tons of red and that is all it has.
00:57The image has a bunch of red and maybe some neutral colors here and there, but it doesn't have a hint
01:02of blue inside the entire image so that is okay.
01:04One would suppose that is the way you intended the image to look if that is the way it is set-up.
01:08It has got a red color cast only if what ought to be neutral colors,
01:12your grays for example, they are ending up looking a little red.
01:17That would be a red color cast and I will show you how to identify these casts in just a moment, but for now,
01:22how do you go about getting rid of that red color cast?
01:24Once you have identified it how do you go about getting rid of it?
01:26Well, it is tempting to try to somehow remove that red from the image, but what you really do is you add the color compliment,
01:35the guy that is across the graph from red and let me show you how we identify that.
01:40I will go ahead and grab my lasso tool by pressing the L key and I would Alt+click or Option+click on red,
01:46keep the Alt or Option key down and then just drag across the graph through the center to the other side
01:52and that is going to be your color compliment right there.
01:54Now it is not necessary that you figure out exactly where on this graph your color compliment is.
01:58This thing is just a visual tool to help you out, but let us say I identify this area
02:02as pretty much the opposites of your color compliment.
02:05Alright, so I will get my marquee tool and I will select that area.
02:09Again, it is a general area.
02:10It is not going to be absolute because I don't know that I have an absolutely red color cast at this point.
02:15It is an approximation, but I do know from looking at this graph that I'm going to add turquoise
02:22to the mix and a little less cobalt to the mix.
02:25So I'm going to go dramatically turquoise which, if I have a dramatic red cast, I'm going to go dramatically turquoise
02:33on the a axis and just ever so slightly less dramatically cobalt on the B Axis.
02:38So how in the heck do you do that?
02:40Well, you do it using either Levels or Curves.
02:43It is up to you and it depends on which command you need.
02:45If you need an awful lot of control, you want to go with Curves, if you don't need that much control you go
02:49with Levels, but let me show you how that works.
02:51I'm going to switch to this image right here and this is the image we really want to look at here.
02:56This is called Color moves.psd found inside of that 04 Cast_ lighting folder and we have got two areas inside of this diagram.
03:05One that is labeled The Colors Of Levels Moves so the Levels command that is to say
03:10and the other is The Colors Of Curves Moves, the Curves command.
03:14So what do I mean by moves and color and what the heck?
03:17Well, these are the colors you are going to get if you start moving the sliders
03:22around for example, inside the Levels dialog box.
03:24So if you take any of the slider triangles, the black point, the gamma value or the white point and you move them
03:30to the right, you are going to make the image darker.
03:33Now I know this area does by the way, it represents the light side of the graph, but if you start moving points
03:39in that direction you are going to make the image darker.
03:42If you start moving any of the points in this direction, you are going to make the image lighter
03:47and that is what's going on with a and b as well.
03:49If you take any of these points and start moving them over to the dark side over here, which represents turquoise actually
03:55in this graph, well then you are going to be adding this crimson tone to it and you are going to be defeating the turquoise.
04:03So in our case, since we want to defeat that red and we want to add turquoise to the mix, we would be moving any of the sliders
04:10as we could over to the right hand side and you will actually see this happening inside your image.
04:15You will see a preview, but I just want to give you a sense of where you are going to be going.
04:18It gets a little more complicated with Curves and then with b, the same thing.
04:22If you start moving any of these points that way to the left you are going to make the image more yellow,
04:26if you start moving any of the points to the right, you are going to start making the image more cobalt
04:30and that is what we wouldn't want to do, right?
04:31So in our case, since we are trying to defeat red, we would move the points and it maybe all
04:36of the points, it may just be one of the points.
04:38I might just be the black point over to the right and then I might just move the black point here over to the right
04:44as well inside the b channel just less so than I moved it in a because I need
04:47to emphasize turquoise more than cobalt to get rid off that red.
04:51Again, we will see it, this is a little confusing.
04:53This is just a diagram for you to go back to, once everything starts making a little more sense and you could keep it open
04:59as you are working if you want to, print it out whatever, up to you.
05:03Anyway, here is Curves.
05:05If we click just at a point and then we move that point, any point along in line and we start moving it down
05:11or to the right we are going to make the image darker.
05:14If we start moving it up or to the left, we are going to make it lighter and this assumes that you have your gradients,
05:20see these gradients bars along the sides, along the left side and the bottom of the graph.
05:26As long as they show up like this with black down in the lower left
05:29and white in the upper right then this is the behavior of the graph.
05:32If it shows up the other way around, then you get the opposite behavior.
05:35In the case of a, if you click to set a point and then move it down or to the right,
05:40you are going to make the image more turquoise.
05:42If you move it up or to the left you are going to make the image more crimson, more lavender.
05:47Then with b, if you move it down or to the right you are going to make more cobalt,
05:52up or to the left you are going to make it more yellow.
05:54So just some stuff to bear in mind.
05:55I don't expect you to absolutely remember every bit of minutiae here.
06:00We are going to put it in play together so you are going to get a sense of exactly how it works and the more you do it,
06:04the more you become experienced with it, the more sense it is going to make.
06:08In the next exercise, we will set about getting rid of the color cast of a robot.
06:13Stay tuned.
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Exaggerating a color cast
00:00We're going to start things off with a fairly straight forward image. We're going to correct this guy right here
00:04and the name of this guy is robotadd.psd
00:08found inside of the 04 cast lighting folder
00:12and we are going to address the color cast. Not only are we going to enhance the colors in general and the luminance levels,
00:19but we're going to correct this slight color cast that's associated with this guy and you look at them and you think well,
00:24he's got a little bit of a bluish cast.
00:27But I'm going to show you how to really test that,
00:30engage that cast and account for it.
00:33So two parts here, we're going to start by just doing a general correction and then we will correct for the cast in the next exercise.
00:40Let's bring back our palettes
00:42and you may notice here that I've got a photograph, a layer that's called photograph
00:46And then I've got this thing called folderal, which is a group of bars, black and white bars
00:51and that is horizontal bars,
00:53that punctuate the text here and then of course, text on top of them. So we don't want to correct those, they're just black and white elements,
00:59they're fine.
01:00We want to correct the photograph, so make sure it's active. But also, we need to change this guy to Lab and
01:05that's an easy thing to forget by the way. You can just end up going down to the black/white icon, choosing Levels
01:10and then starting to modify like I can click on the Auto button and then ah, holy crud, what in the heck happened? And then I notice
01:16oh, I'm working in the RGB mode.
01:18Well, that was silly, so cancel out of that.
01:21What I need to do instead of course,
01:22go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose Lab Color.
01:26Now Photoshop is going to bug me and over time you'll get a sense of how you react to these error messages.
01:32It's going to say that we've got a lot of layers inside of this image and changing modes can affect the appearance of layers.
01:39Well, not really.
01:40When you're going from RGB to LAb you're not really going to change the appearance of your layers unless
01:45you have some wacky blend mode set up
01:47and we know how many wacky blend modes set up.
01:49So I'm going to say Don't Merge. You've got to click on Don't Merge, if you want to keep your layers. If you click on Merge, you're going to
01:55merge everything together and make a mess of it. So you want to say Don't Merge or you can press the D key.
02:00That works as well.
02:02Now then, groovy.
02:03We're ready to go.
02:04I'm going to go ahead and press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac. We're going to do this all with the Levels
02:09command this time around.
02:10So go ahead and choose Levels and I'll call this new levels adjustment layer
02:14contrast and cast,
02:15because that's what we're correcting for.
02:19Then I'm in the Lightness channel, that's good. I'll click on Auto, much better correction this time,
02:24just corrects the Lightness channel, nothing else.
02:26It goes a little too far with it in my opinion so I'm going to back off the black point
02:29to 20 and remember now, even though the black points located here on the left side of the graph
02:35when we move over it, when we move over to the right, that we darken the image. So when we move in the opposite direction,
02:43the white point's over here on the right side of the graph- but when we move the slider triangles over to the left,
02:49that's when we start lightening the image.
02:51So that's what that little diagram in the previous exercise was all about.
02:55We'll be coming back to it, you'll see.
02:57Anyway, let's take this guy to 20 and this guy up to let's say 225, probably, it's going to work out nicely
03:05and then the gamma value I think should just be 0.9
03:10and notice that that is moving
03:12the Gamma slider triangle over to the right thereby darkening the image. So by reducing that Gamma value we darken the midtones.
03:20Now let's go ahead and just increase the saturation because this is a low saturation robot right now. I really want him to
03:27have some pizzazz here, cause it's a low color shot in the first place. So I really want to emphasize the colors
03:32and we're going to go nuts, of course.
03:34First here, I'll just show you
03:36the whole logic behind that diagram once again.
03:38This black point represents turquoise over here in the left side of the graph, but it's my moving it to the right
03:44that we end up introducing turquoise to the image. So that's why
03:47we saw turquoise on the right side of the diagram
03:50and crimson on the left side of the diagram.
03:52So if I start moving this guy over to the left,
03:55we start introducing way too much crimson. This is crazy crimson; we want to back off that of course.
04:03We're going for symmetrical adjustments at this point. Let's take this value to 175 and this to 80 and how do I know that's symmetrical?
04:10Because zero plus 80 is 80,
04:12255 minus 80 is 175. That's how.
04:14I can also just do the old Shift+Up and Down arrow thing, that works.
04:18Now we've got to offset our changes to the a channel
04:22by introducing changes to the b channel
04:25and of course, if I take that cobalt point and move it to right I introduce cobalt to the image. Any of these values going to the right,
04:32any of these markers that is, these slider triangles go into the right will introduce cobalt.
04:37Any of them going to the left will either get rid of cobalt in this case or introduce yellow. Same diff, that's actually
04:44the exact same operation, getting rid of cobalt
04:46and adding yellow is the exact same thing.
04:49Even though it may look a little different on screen.
04:51So anyway, I'm going to take this guy down to 175, I'm going to take this guy up to 80.
04:56I have now introduced symmetrical adjustments to my image. You can see the a and b channel are the same,
05:02a little different stuff going on in the lightness channel, excellent, click OK.
05:06You are done for now. We have enhanced the contrast and the saturation of the image.
05:12In the next exercise I'm going to show you how to identify exactly what
05:16kind of color cast we have going on and then we will see how to address it.
05:21Stay tuned.
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Quantifying and correcting a color cast
00:00In this exercise we are going to talk about how to identify and correct the blue color cast,
00:05what's obviously a blue color cast associated with this image but we really want to lock it down and figure out what kind
00:11of Blue is going on and how we get rid of it, in the best way possible,
00:14without getting rid of all the wonderful colors inside the image.
00:18Now if this were an RGB image, we would most likely use the Variations command, just because it is the simplest approach.
00:23Let me show you how that works and in doing so I'll show you a few other things
00:26that are interesting to note about switching between modes here.
00:30If I click on the photograph item right there, the photograph layer and I go up to the Image menu and I choose Adjustments
00:37and I try to choose Variations, it's not available because you can't apply Variations to a Lab image.
00:42So what you need to do instead, I'll go ahead and escape out of there, you need to convert the image to RGB but if I go
00:47up to the Image menu, choose Mode and then choose RGB Color, Photoshop comes up with this Merge command,
00:52where it's going to tell me, hey, I'm going to get rid of your Adjustment Layer buddy, unless you merge.
00:56But if I say Merge, it's going to merge the entire composition, not just the Adjustment Layer.
01:02And if I say OK, it won't merge anything, it'll just throw the Adjustment Layer away.
01:07I need another button but I don't have it, so what you have to do is cancel out.
01:11You go here to the Adjustment Layer, go to the Layer menu, and you choose Merge Down, or you press Ctrl+E, Cmd+E on the Mac,
01:20merges that adjustment layer into places now, static adjustment then you go
01:24up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose RGB color.
01:28It quacks at you about how you are going to change the appearance of your Layers.
01:32You say Don't Merge, because we don't want to do that at this point.
01:35Then you would go to Image menu and choose Adjustments and choose Variations, and all of your efforts are rewarded
01:42with these tiny, dinky little, itsy-bitsy thumbnails here.
01:46And at this point you go, my image is too Blue, so that would be, gosh what, it's not more blue,
01:52I want less Blue, well less Blue is more Yellow.
01:55So you just, like I was telling you before, you don't subtract the Blue from the image, you add Yellow to the image.
02:00So you click on More Yellow, and presumably that will take care of your problem, but you don't really know
02:05because these thumbnails are so dinky and you have to sit there and fool around with this Fine/Coarse Slider,
02:10and you can't really preview the affects of your changes here inside the image window,
02:13you have to wait until after you click OK.
02:15Well I'm going to click Cancel, obviously and I'm going to go back to where I was.
02:20I'm going to back step a couple of steps here.
02:22Ctrl+Alt+C, or Cmd+Option+C a couple of times.
02:25By the way I have saved my image in progress here as Android in Lab.psd.
02:29If you are working along with me, you want to open it up inside the 04cast_lighting folder.
02:35We are back in the Lab Mode now.
02:37Now I can once again, eyeball in here appears to have a little bit of a Blue cast,
02:41meaning that items that should be neutral are showing up as blue.
02:45But if I go ahead and grab the Eye Dropper tool, or I can press the I key of course to get
02:49to it, I can identify exactly what that cast is.
02:52So I would make sure that my Color palette is available and that it's set to Lab Sliders, as it is.
02:58And then I would make sure my sample size is set to something bigger than Point sample, that will sample just a single pixel,
03:04the pixel you click on, presumably you want more than that.
03:07So I'm going to go with let's say a 5/5, or even an 11/11 average for this image,
03:12because there's a lot of big areas of similarly colored pixels.
03:15So let's go with 11/11 average.
03:17But just know that you have changed that for later because that will stick and affect the Eye Dropper in the future.
03:23Then I'll just click in it's chest, let's say, and you can see that we have got some A and B values now,
03:27we don't care about the Lightness value, we just care about A and B. A that's showing up as a little bit Turquoise in that area,
03:35so a -5 right here, and a little bit Cobalt as well as indicated by a -24, in fact that's quite Cobalt.
03:43Meanwhile though we have a competing neutral surface in the background, which is this cement wall, and if I click in it,
03:50it's a little bit Cobalt as well, that tells me there's too much Cobalt in this image and we need to go Yellow.
03:56And then it's pretty darn neutral for A, -2, that's hardly worth worrying about.
04:01So what should we do?
04:02Well, let's go back to that diagram, let me see if I can get to it properly, here it is.
04:06I'm going to tab away by palettes for a moment.
04:08Switch to the Full Screen mode.
04:10And we know now that we need to get rid of the Cobalt inside of the image,
04:14get rid of a little bit of the Cobalt, and that means adding Yellow to the image.
04:17So then that means taking some slider or other, one of these three sliders over to the left.
04:23And the way we can do the biggest modification is to take the right slider because the white point represents Yellow,
04:31and we can move it to the left to send it to a greater degree of Yellow.
04:35And if want to Offset the negative value that we have associated with A, so we want to introduce a little more crimson,
04:41we would take this white slider and send it to the left into Crimson territory.
04:46So we are moving our slider in the direction of Crimson and more to the point Yellow for this image.
04:51Let's go back to Robot in progress and bring back our stuff that we need here.
04:57And I'm going to go ahead and double click on this Levels adjustment layer that we have because we are just going
05:04to modify it and then I'll switch over to the B channel, because he's too Cobalt, so he needs more Yellow and then I'm going
05:11to take this Yellow value, I could take the black value down to Yellow, but if I do that notice that the colors get murkier,
05:18so I don't have that high degree of saturation that I had a moment ago.
05:21I'm removing saturation by taking out the Cobalt.
05:24Don't want that, I want to keep that high saturation there.
05:26Instead we are going to go to the White point value and I'm going to reduce it
05:29by pressing Shift+Down Arrow, I will reduce it to 165 there.
05:33And now notice my value is updating on the fly for me and it's showing me that this is going to -6.
05:39Let me just make sure its tracking the right portion of the image, I'll go ahead and click in his chest
05:42and now we can see its -11 and -5 for B and A in that order.
05:49Notice as I keep reducing this value from the keyboard I'm pressing the Down Arrow key, this value keeps updating for me
05:55and so at this point, when I take it down to 158, then it's absolutely neutral.
05:58But look what I done to the wall in the background, I have made it too yellow, if I click in the wall,
06:02now it's leaped up to 22, so it's no longer neutral at all.
06:06So I have got to take this value back up and when I take it back to about 165, we get an even mix,
06:11our background wall is a little bit Yellow as you can see it's 10 Yellow, pretty darn Yellow actually, and then his chest is -11 B,
06:20so that means we have got some Cobalt in his chest.
06:22So we have basically this neutral surface showing up as blue and this neutral surface showing
06:26up as yellow, which is a compromise, essentially.
06:29But also you have to bear in mind that it's a compromise we want, it's a desirable compromise,
06:34because we have elevated the colors so far, right?
06:36We have made such high saturation colors in first place.
06:39If we didn't want the Cobalts and the Yellows, then we would the reduce the Saturation values by spreading these guys apart now,
06:45but I want those high saturations values and this is pretty endemic of the scene I would say.
06:51The robot is being informed by the blue colors of the sky
06:53and then we just have some warmish colors going out with this man and that's totally fine.
06:58Now let's go to the A channel, and let's just reduce this guy, just a couple of clicks here.
07:03Let's click inside the chest again first to make sure that we have got that chest color identified.
07:07And then I'll press the Down Arrow like three times in a row, until A goes zero and that introduces what looks
07:13to be a little bit too much magenta in the scene so I'll press the Up Arrow key once and only once to take the value up to 173
07:19and you can see a difference on screen if you are looking closely.
07:22This was before when it's too magenta, this is a little bit less magenta, it's a subtle modification,
07:28but it's a kind of subtle modification that makes a meaningful difference to the image
07:32and that we could not see inside the variations dialog box, forget that.
07:36Actually I'm going to go one farther, yeah, that's better, all right, so 174 that's what I want.
07:41And then I'll click OK and that is my modification people, that works out very nicely,
07:46this is the originally robot, it barely has any color at all, poor guy.
07:51And this is the enhanced and the color cast corrected version of the robot.
07:56Just one more thing that I want to do to this guy.
07:57In the exercise we are going to take care of the camera shake, look at how his eyes are wiggling back and forth.
08:04Look at those teeth, they are just not in focus, we are going to correct that using the Emboss command coming right up.
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Sharpening an image with the Emboss command
00:00We have corrected for the slightly cobalt color cast of the original robot image in addition to correcting his contrast
00:08and elevating the Saturation values and I'm working in an updated version of the document.
00:14It's called Cast compromise because we have had to come up with something of a compromise between the bluishness of the robot
00:22and the yellowishness of the background wall.
00:25This Cast compromise.psd file, it's found inside the 04cast_lighting folder.
00:30Now, then we need to address the issue of the camera shake meaning that because this was a telephoto shot,
00:36I took it across the street from this house that has this robot outside of it.
00:40I need more light because it has to go all through all the lenses and so the shutter remained opened a little longer
00:46than it should have, given that I was shooting, this is a hand held shot.
00:50So I move the camera ever so slightly that it appears to be a horizontal movement.
00:55That's called Camera Shake and we can correct Camera Shake in a couple of different ways.
00:59You can either correct it using the Smart Sharpen Filter set to Motion Blur or what I prefer to do especially in this case,
01:05we are going to apply the Emboss Filter, would sharp really nicely actually.
01:08So I'm going to click on the photograph layer to make it active.
01:12Naturally we want this to be a nondestructive modification, so we are going to go ahead and convert this guy to a Smart Object
01:18by going up to the Filter menu and choosing Convert for Smart Filters and it becomes a Smart Object automatically there.
01:26Then I'm going to go up to the Filter menu, choose Stylize and choose Emboss.
01:32Now this isn't going to appear to be the command we want to use but it makes the image looks like it's etched
01:36in relief, in carbonite or something along those lines.
01:40That's what I like to say.
01:41It looks like because like when Han Solo in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back.
01:46That's what it looks like, but have faith, it's going to work out beautifully of course.
01:49Think about sharpening in High Pass and how we drop out the neutral colors,
01:53the grays and that's what we are going to do here as well.
01:55So stick with me.
01:57Let's first get the right angle going.
02:00As I was thinking this is a strictly horizontal camera shake, so I'm going to set the angle to 180 degrees.
02:06The Height Value is analogous to the Radius value when we are sharpening and a height value of three is actually going to work
02:12out nicely for this image and an amount of a 100% is going to work out fine too.
02:17The great thing about applying this filter nondestructively as a Smart Filter is that we can come back to it.
02:22I should say parametrically because we can come back to these numerical parameters here.
02:27So I'm going to click OK in order to apply that modification.
02:30Let's get rid of that darn Filter mask because it takes a lot of room and I'm Mr. Tidy
02:35and then I'm going over to the sliders right there.
02:38Double click because obviously this is not good.
02:41This is not fit for human consumption and let's change the Mode from Normal, check this out,
02:47I'm going to change it from Normal to Overlay and just like that zap.
02:51It does a good job of fixing the image.
02:53It looks like -- it's kind of hyper saturated at this point.
02:55We will address that in just a moment.
02:57I'm going to go ahead and click OK because you can see right there that looks fine and
03:01yet we somehow elevated our Saturation values.
03:03I'm going to go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification and to take care of this problem,
03:08this weird problem that's occurring because it's a bug, I'm going to double click on the word Emboss to bring
03:13up the Emboss dialog box and notice now everything settles down.
03:16I can just go ahead and maybe raise the Height value a pixel and then send it back down to pixel and click OK,
03:22just perform some sort of meaningless modification to the image and then we get the effect we are looking for.
03:27All right, but this is what the image looks like without that Smart Filter applied.
03:31This is what it looks like with the Smart Filter applied.
03:34Watch the teeth this is before and this is after.
03:37See how the teeth tightened up here.
03:39Also watch the eyes.
03:40This is before, this is after.
03:42The detail actually tightens up which is really nice, it's still a fake, just as all sharpening effects are but it's a good fake.
03:48It works out pretty nicely, from a greater distance, this is before and this is after.
03:53Looks just ducky.
03:54Let's go and tab away the palettes and press the F key a few times in order to get rid of the menu Bar as well those Zoom-out
04:01to take in some of the text not all of the text, as there is little more text in this document than this
04:05but see if I can bring back my History palette for just a moment here.
04:09Let's go to History, I will go back to Robot ad which is the original version of this image, okay cool yo.
04:15This is the original before version of the Robot.
04:18This is the newly enhanced after version.
04:21He not only looks color corrected, contrast corrected, he no longer has that color cast well he has got a compromise cast now.
04:28He is also much sharper, thanks to these nondestructive modifications that we have applied
04:33with the help of the Lab Mode here inside Photoshop.
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Introducing a more complicated color cast
00:00Now, for something more complicated.
00:02We have this low saturation, fairly dark scene and it's got a heck of what seems to be a purplish color cast,
00:10we will see that's not exactly right in just a moment.
00:13We want to turn it into something more resembling this.
00:17Now, this may at first glance appear a little bit too yellowish potentially or on your monitor depending
00:22on the calibration it may look a little bit too greenish and I will show you how to care of that as well
00:27but the yellowishness is inherent in the scene, essentially.
00:30We have got a lot of incandescent lighting sources going on, we also have a lot of natural light coming in late in the day.
00:36So, it's going to be very warm.
00:39You could see this wall over here is pretty neutral on the shade but the wall that are getting light
00:43on them are little bit yellowishness and that's just the way things were inside of this scene and you can evaluate
00:48that not only by remembering how you shot the scene but also just by lifting a few colors and getting a sense what's going on.
00:54So, the question becomes then what is the overall color cast of this scene
00:58and there is not a really a single color cast going on, we have got sort of different Levels of casting going on depending
01:04after looking at the highlights or the mid-tones or the shadows.
01:08Let's go ahead and grab the Eye Dropper and by the way the name of this image is the crowdexits.jpeg,
01:13it's found inside the 04cast_lighting folder.
01:17I'm going to press the I key to get the Eye Dropper and I'm going to Shift+Tab up these palettes over here
01:21so we can see the color palette and I'm going to click inside of this area of this pole and that's not really giving as much
01:28of a sense of what's going on in the colors, we have some pretty neutral color going on in this pole even though
01:34that the scene in general looks very sort of purplish.
01:37So, let's click down in here in this area and you will see as we move around that when we get into the heavily colored areas
01:44like this area right here, we have a fairly negative B value and then not quite so positive A value.
01:52So, what in the world is that color?
01:54It looks again like a drab purple but let's go ahead and skip ahead a couple of images to this guy,
02:01remember the labwheelflat.tiff and it should be one of these colors down in this region when we think.
02:07I'm going to click over here and sort of drag it around and notice what we have got is a fairly negative B value
02:14with a less positive A value right in this area, right around this side on the right side of the blue line right there
02:22and if we move on the left side of the blue line, it's the more negative B value associated with a positive A value,
02:29but right in here we are not going to find the same values by the way; we are just trying to find equal proportions,
02:33it's right around this range where we are going to find those same proportions and that means we have got a blue color cast,
02:39that cast is blue and so if we go directly across from blue we are going to have a lot of yellow that we have
02:45to add to the scene and a little bit of turquoise.
02:48So, great deal of yellow, some positive B and some negative A and what that means is when we come to the Curves dialog box
02:56because this is sufficiently complicated modification that we are going to need to move the Curves points,
03:02that means our A curve is going to kind of bend like this into the turquoise territory.
03:09So it's going to favor turquoise ever so slightly and then B, it's going to bend outward into the B territory,
03:16so it's going to be stretching generally in the B direction or that is to say the upper left direction into the yellows
03:24and it's going to generally just dip down into the turquoise territory down in the lower right corner of the curves graph.
03:31Then we are going to do a bunch of stuff with lightness as well in order to fix that terrible level of contrast
03:36that we have going on and we are going to do that to this image right here in the very next exercise.
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Drawing a custom contrast curve
00:00As you may recall the purpose of this project is to take this image right here with the bluish we now know
00:06to be a bluish color cast and we want to transform it into this one.
00:11So, something that has more of an interior warm incandescent sort of feel to it and there is certain degree of neutrality as well,
00:19this is more or less the neutral scene, it did have this sort of magenta
00:23or whatever carpet you call it, sort of a rose color carpet down here.
00:26So, what do we do in order to apply that correction?
00:29Well, in this exercise we are going to start things off by increasing the contrast of the scene,
00:34the brightness and contrast just to get that done.
00:36I could try to use the Brightness and Contrast command, I might actually have a fair degree of success with that actually
00:41but instead I'm going to use curves just because I want to get as much control over this scene as possible
00:47and I want to arm you with as many techniques as I can here.
00:50So, as I was saying the name of this image is The crowd exits.jpeg found inside of the 04cast_lighting folder
00:59and this is the photograph, this is natural blurring by the way.
01:01I just had the shutter speed open for a prolonged period of time.
01:04Well I had the camera Leica D-Lux 3 mounted on the railing and the crowd was in motion leaving a provision
01:13for collegiate hockey game, it's actually quite exciting and what we need to do to this image as the first step of course is go
01:20up to the Image menu choose Mode and choose Lab Color, a very easy step to forget but a very important one as well.
01:26Convert it to the Lab Color mode then let's bring back our palettes, in the Layers palette I'm going to press
01:31and hold the Alt key or the Option key in the Mac and I'm going to choose Curves and this is going to be Contrast in Cast again
01:38and I'm going to click OK in order to bring up the Curves dialog box.
01:44You may recall that motions toward the upper left corner are going to lighten the image
01:48and motions toward the bottom right corner are going to darken the image, so if I grab this point right here and I drag it up
01:53and to the left that's a lightener, if I drag it down into the right that's a darkener and doesn't matter which points as long
01:59as they are going in that direction that's the way the image is going to go as well.
02:03So, I don't really want this point because I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing so far just to an arbitrary point
02:08in there, let's Backspace in order to get rid of it.
02:11I'm going to start things off actually by just darkening the blacks because right now
02:17if I click inside the black here you can see that it's a little bit light,
02:21we have got an L value of 4 over here in the Color palette.
02:24So, let's go ahead and take that first point, that black point that's down in the lower left hand corner,
02:29make sure it's in the lower left, you would have to click this double down arrow button right here and make sure
02:35that we are looking at the amount of light in order to get the same results as I'm getting which is the way
02:40to go in my opinion, by far the best way to go.
02:42Now, I'm going to press the Right Arrow key a few times until I change that input value to 4, should do me pretty well,
02:48now I click inside the back of this dude's jacket, whether he's a dude or woman I'm not sure and we have got an L value of 0,
02:56I guess dude is gender non specific, isn't it?
02:59I have heard girls call each other dude all the time.
03:01I'm thinking that's the way it is.
03:03Now at this point I want to identify and basically sort of stick one of the darker colors right here something in the railing
03:11for example on the left side of the railing and maybe even darker than that, maybe on the far left side of the railing right
03:17about there but anyway in order to lift that guy I'm going to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+click on a point there inside the image
03:24and then I'm going to move this down, I'm actually going
03:26to anchor it a little darker, I'm going to anchor it down here at 15, 15.
03:31So, I need to press the arrow keys as required in order to get that value locked down on 15, 15.
03:36So that's going to arch the curve up, notice that.
03:39We really don't want anything that's simple, we are going to want it to arch up
03:42and down in order to get the scene the way it needs to be.
03:45But I'm going to create a point just a little arbitrarily down here in the lower left region of the graph between the two points
03:52that I have so far and I'm going to nudge it, notice as I am nudging it I want actually the input value to be something
04:00like 10 and then I'm going to send the output value if I can downward to 5 like so.
04:07So, I'm pressing the Down Arrow key to move that output value down and that's going
04:12to give me some nice rich dark shadows right there ramping into that region but notice as I'm doing
04:17that is I'm ramping this down, I'm sending the rest of the curve upward
04:21because it's having an opposite reciprocal reaction there.
04:25So, I'm launching this area up and so I'm going to have to kind of grab it and pull it back down again,
04:31I like this area right here on the side of the railing seems fairly indicative to me, it needs to come down.
04:35So, I will Ctrl+Click, Cmd+Click on the Mac in order to lift that and notice the input value here is set to 36,
04:43I want it to be just at about 35 I think and then 51 for output that's pretty good.
04:49Now, the scene stills looks overly light and the way I'm going to correct for that because we have some blown highlights
04:54in this image, I'm going to ahead and click OK actually for a moment here in order to accept the scene so far, it's too bright,
05:03but part of the reason is because we have these blown highlights way back there
05:07in the background that are just turning solid white on this.
05:09I was telling you that one of the great things that Lab offers and this goes to the lighting portion by the way of this chapter,
05:16one of the great things that Lab offers is the ability to define imaginary colors and by virtue
05:23of that we can basically infuse this white with a little bit of color action or at least a little bit of shading
05:29so that we are not blowing the white detail back there and we can do that using this curves modification that we have going.
05:35So I'm going to press Ctrl+D, Cmd+D on the Mac to deselect that region.
05:38Double click, lets' make sure we can see as much of this as possible because it's hard to scroll
05:42around inside the Curves dialog box in the PC, on the Mac it's easy enough but the PC, it misbehaves.
05:47Anyway I'm going to double click on that adjustment layer thumbnail, it will bring up the Curves dialog box and I'm going
05:53to click on that point, the upper right point there and I am going to down arrow it and I notice as I move this point
06:00down which is the same as moving it to the lower right region of the image either down
06:04or to the right is going to darken up the scene.
06:07In this case we are just darkening the highlights, see that and that's affecting all the colors as well
06:11but it's really affecting those highlights more than anything, I'm going to move this back up to 96 in order to just ever
06:19so slightly recover that highlight information.
06:22We could then turn around it and infuse it color if we wanted to, we want to keep it neutral we are actually going to infuse it
06:27with a little bit of color coming up and then we are going to try to make is neutral after that.
06:31But anyway this gives us a chance to recover some of that information and to bring the scene down a little bit.
06:37Now it does seem a little hot, a little light at this point but once we start infusing it
06:42with a little bit of color it's going to turn out very nice.
06:45This of course would involve a little bit of trial and error on your part.
06:49Very likely you would make some kind of change here in the Lightness channel, then you'd go to A and B. play
06:54around with them and then come back to Lightness and so on and of course as long as you stick
06:58with adjustment layers you have the ability to come back to your numerical parameters as much
07:03as you want, thanks to these parametric adjustments.
07:05Anyway, this is all by way of saying we have now corrected the contrast of the image, pretty darn effectively as you will see.
07:12In the next exercise we are going to begin to account for the color cast.
07:16We are going to start with saturation, move to color cast, stay tuned.
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Performing a gross color cast compensation
00:00In this exercise we are going to set about increasing the Saturation levels
00:04and with an analytical balance out this bluish color cast as well.
00:08The name of this image is 'Lighter but still bluish' because as you saw in the previous exercise we have evaluated that, what appears
00:15to be a purplish color cast is in fact a little more blue than it is violet, for example.
00:20This latest version of the image, Lighter but bluish.psd, is found inside the 04cast_lighting folder.
00:27I'm now going to over to my Curves adjustment layer here and edit it by double clicking on its thumbnail.
00:32There is the Lightness channel. Looking good. Let's go over to A and you may recall that in order
00:37to defeat this bluish color cast, we need to add a little bit of turquoise which means going down into the right in the A channel
00:45and we also want to add a little bit of yellow by going up and to the left with the B channel.
00:50So, let's see how that works.
00:51I'm going to go ahead and click on this black point down here and I'm going to press Shift and Right Arrow a few times
00:59in order to move that point over to the right like so, to about -48 that might be good for now and you can see
01:05that we are really shifting things over in the turquoise territory.
01:08As long as the line is down into the right from the middle point there, which it is, then we are going turquoise.
01:14If it was on the other side, we would be going into the crimson territory.
01:17Now, I want to take this point right here and I'm going to press Shift+Left Arrow in order to move it back over to the right
01:25but I don't want to go so far over to the right that I cross the line past that mid-point because then I'm going
01:30to be introducing crimson into the image and I don't want that.
01:34I want the line to stay on the lower right side of that center point and it is right now.
01:38Now that we have the Output value at 127, and then the Input value is what we move to 57.
01:45That's good, let's just place to sink it for now.
01:47This is better than it was, not great still and notice what we are doing to the highlights actually we are now infusing them
01:52with color just like I was telling you. We're bringing out this imaginary color.
01:55It's getting mapped into RGB as sort of a faint greenish turquoise.
02:01Alright, now let's go to B and this time we want the line to be on the upper left side
02:08up into the left somehow of that center point.
02:11So I'm going to get this black point value once again and let's go ahead and Shift+Arrow the Input value over to something
02:18like I don't know 77-78, -78 for now and then Ctrl+Tab to get to the white point and then let's press Shift+Left Arrow
02:28until we get the line on the upper left side of the center point there and that happens at 67 but I want to go even farther
02:36because we need more yellow than we need turquoise.
02:39Because this is bluish as opposed to purplish, this color cast.
02:42So its complement is nearer to yellow than it is to turquoise.
02:46So, another Shift+Left Arrow to get the Input value to 57 compared with an Output value of 127.
02:53All right, that's actually not bad, it's terrible over here in the highlights that are out the window.
02:59We will solve that problem later.
03:01But it's not bad on the interior of the scene at all.
03:03We do have a few problems here and they are like the purplish weirdness right there, this kind of lavender sort
03:08of I don't know line that's going to this column right there, that's the problem that I will have to take care of later
03:13and of course we just could stand to bring out the colors better than we have brought them out so far.
03:18But we did take care of the overall color cast and the overall saturation, so I'm going to click OK in order to accept
03:26that change, just to give you sense of what kind of damage we did to this image, positive damage of course.
03:31This is before and this is after, definitely better,
03:35better Saturation values as well, not best, not what the scene should be.
03:39We are going to fine tune our color cast that is our color cast correction
03:44by adding a few additional points and moving them around in the next exercise.
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Fine-tuning a color cast compensation
00:00All right, now that we have applied our gross color cast compensation, let's fine-tune that compensation
00:06so that it's exactly what we need it to be or as close to the original scene as possible.
00:11I'm working inside of a progress document here called Gross compensation.psd
00:16and it's found inside the 04_cast_lighting folder.
00:19Let's go ahead and once again double click on that Curves adjustment layer and I'm going to switch over to the B channel,
00:26that's where we are going to start things off because yellow is really where the action is happening,
00:30mostly we have got to fine tune the yellow information here because we are dealing with an incandescent light source,
00:36light coming in from above so it's very warm and we have got these little bits of purple going on,
00:42that's the color that's really informing the scene the most.
00:45So, it needs a little bit of additional work.
00:48So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click right there in the center of the graph that is the horizontal center
00:54of the graph so that we get an Input, we are lifting an Input value of 0 and it's setting the Output to 22 and what I want
01:02to do is I just want to elevate the yellows inside this area right here, notice if I drag inside this column,
01:09you can see the little bouncing balls right there on that point.
01:12In fact if I wanted to I will Backspace, what I could have done is just Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click in the center of that column
01:18to lift that point and then I'm going to elevate it as they say, I'm going to make sure the Input value is 0
01:22and I'm going to elevate the Output value to about 24.
01:25Notice that, that gives us a little bit of additional yellow action.
01:28It pops the yellows inside of these columns.
01:31So, part of this is making this look like a deliberate modification, so it's not just kind of flaccid yellow,
01:36I really want it to pop, I want it to be fairly vivid, even though this is a neutral surface.
01:41And so we are making our environment very clear here and our lighting as well.
01:45Now I'm going to Ctrl+Tab to that white point value there and I'm going to press the right arrow key a couple
01:50of times in order to move that Input value to 59.
01:53So, we are mapping 59 to 127 at this point and what we are doing is, we are dragging the highlights down into the right this time
02:02in order to compensate for the amount of yellow that we have added by making the highlights just ever so slightly more cobalt
02:11and that's going to help with things like this guy's white jersey.
02:13It's going to bring that back into neutrality and then I will Ctrl+Tab to the black point and just check it out and actually
02:21when I look at the shadows inside of this image I'm thinking they are pretty much okay, they are neither too yellow
02:26or too blue/cobalt there, looking fairly neutral where the B axes is concerned.
02:32So, let's get out of the B axis we are done.
02:34Let's go over to A and see if we might do a couple of things with that.
02:37I'm once again going to lock down the middle point right here and so I'm just clicking right there
02:44at that horizontal middle point, it's a vertical line of course but its in the middle horizontally and that sets the Input level
02:51to 0 and I'm then going to take the Output level up by pressing the up arrow key a couple of times in order to bring
02:58out that carpet, notice it's looking a little sort of low saturation at this point and if we press the
03:04up arrow key a couple of times, its going to pop a little bit better and then I'm going
03:09to Ctrl+Tab up to the upper right hand point.
03:12Now, we can start moving this guy around, this white point, I can start moving it around in order to adjust for the crimson inside
03:22of the scene because it feels like the scene is getting a little green.
03:25So, I can bring back some of the crimson color, some of the lavender by dragging this point
03:30over to the right and this actually looks pretty darn good.
03:32Now, if you are feeling like your scene is still little too green which you might,
03:37you could Ctrl+Shift+Tab back to the middle point there.
03:40On my screen it looks a little bit too green inside of this area, on a properly calibrated screen it should look good,
03:46I'm working on this PC screen that's wandering just a little bit but it should look pretty good on your screen if it's calibrated,
03:52but you never know some of these decisions are subjective as well.
03:55If you want to defeat some of the green inside the columns you would raise this center value up and that's going
04:01to make the columns more and more crimson and so it's going to defeat that turquoise.
04:07Now, I'm going to send that back down to -7 that's what I wanted and then I'm going to Shift+Ctrl+Tab to the first point here,
04:13I think we could still do better where the carpet is concerned
04:16and we are emphasizing the greens inside the shadow detail a little too much like these banisters for example.
04:22So, I'm going to press Shift+Right Arrow, actually a couple of times until I get the Input value to -33.
04:29So I'm going to fool around with the right and left arrow keys until I get that value to -33, which is outputting the -128
04:37and then I think we have some fairly balanced colors going on.
04:40The only thing that worries me a little bit is this guy's jacket, this orange jacket.
04:44It's just so hot by comparison to everything else in the scene.
04:47We have other little orange items that are very hot and this little yellow cap as well.
04:51But this guy is such a prominent part of the scene; he's right dead center.
04:55So I'm going to Ctrl+Click on him, Cmd+Click in the Mac in order to lift him.
04:59There is his point right, that's the point I got for Ctrl or Cmd+Clicking and then I'm just going to press the
05:05down arrow key a couple of times in order to reduce that orange slightly and you will see the orange reduce
05:10on the fly every time you press the down arrow key, it's very, very sensitive, that's it, looks pretty good to me.
05:17I'm going to click OK in order to accept that modification.
05:21This is what the scene looked like before we fine tuned it, so not terribly different but enough different
05:27that this is certainly better, definitely warms up the scene and just to give you a sense
05:32of what he had before this is our terrible original color cast in bad contrast and everything
05:36and this is the much improved version of the scene so far.
05:40We still have a few items to take care of like this yellowness back here in the highlights and this weird purplish,
05:45lavender stuff, that's going on inside the column.
05:48We will begin to address those issues in the next exercise.
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Restoring neutral highlights
00:00We are now looking at the corrected version of the image.
00:04We have applied all the curves corrections that we were going to apply and the name of the image
00:08as it exists thus far is Fine compensation.psd found inside the 04cast_lighting folder.
00:14But we have a few problems to take care of, we have got these very colorful highlights back in the background they want
00:19to be neutral and then we have got this weird lavender stuff going on in the column.
00:23We are going to take care of the colorful highlights in this exercise and then the lavender stuff in the next exercise
00:29and we are going to correct for both of these problems using relatively simple masks.
00:33So, let's go ahead, we need a Density mask actually to protect these highlights
00:39because we need that area to be protected with black.
00:42So, we are going to load Luminance Mask and then convert it into a Density Mask as follows.
00:47Go to the Channels palette and I want you to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on the Lightness channel.
00:52That selects the highlights inside of the image, the highlights and the lightness tones in that represents a Luminance Mask.
00:58Go to Layers palette, make sure this adjustment layer is selected, Contrasting Cast and then I want you
01:03to go this little Add Layer Mask button and I want you to Alt+Click or Option+Click on it in order to invert the mask
01:10on the fly, your inverting the mask as you apply it and this is what the mask looks like, check it out.
01:15So, this is a Density Mask made on the fly from the Lightness channel.
01:19Now, the problem is we are not only protecting the highlights back here but a lot of mid tones as well,
01:24so we need to increase the contrast of this mask.
01:26We are going to do that by going up to the Image menu choosing Adjustments and choosing Levels.
01:32Now you might wonder why you are applying a static adjustment after all of this talk about parametric modifications
01:37and non-destructive edits and all of the other jazz, why are you going static on me all of a sudden, Deke?
01:42And the answer is I have no choice.
01:44You cannot apply an Adjustment layer to a mask; you got to go static.
01:48It's just the way it works.
01:49So, I'm going to bring up the Levels dialog box and I'm going to reduce this white point value to like 80
01:56so that we are just turning a ton of colors white, you may recall when you move any of the slider triangles
02:03over the left you make the image lighter and so we are revealing a ton of stuff inside of the Adjustment layer now,
02:11so that a lot of the image is going to get corrected which is what we want, we just want to protect the shadows.
02:15Now, the shadows are darkened up so I'm going to take this black point value up to 40 in order to make them jet black,
02:21then we have some nice transitions in between, this is good.
02:23So 40 for the black point, 80 for the white point, Gamma leave it alone, click OK.
02:29Now, then Alt+Click or Option+Click on that Layer Mask and you can see that you have now done a great job
02:34of protecting the highlights and all this middle area of color remains unchanged
02:40but the problem is we now have these huge discrepancies.
02:42The colors are fine.
02:44I will go ahead and Shift+Click on this mask to show the before version.
02:47This is before.
02:48This is after.
02:48So the colors are better but the contrast and the brightness Levels in general are not better and so what we really want
02:55to do is we want to mask the A and B modifications but not the lightness modification.
03:00So, we need to break this adjustment into two parts and I was telling you in earlier chapters what a good idea it is
03:07to use one adjustment layer for lightness modifications and another adjustment layer for your A and B modifications
03:12and this is why because if you ever get into the situation when you want to modify one independently of another and you didn't do
03:18that upfront then you got to pick it apart and I'm going to show you how to do that right now, since we are in that pickle.
03:24First thing you do is go ahead and grab that guy, you press Ctrl+J,
03:27things are going get much worse for a moment don't worry about that.
03:29Ctrl+J or Cmd+J on the Mac and actually you know what we should do, let's go ahead and undo that.
03:34We should press Ctrl+Alt+J or Cmd+Option+J on the Mac in order to bring
03:38up the New Layer dialog box and I will call this new guy contrast.
03:42So, we are duplicating the layer by jumping it.
03:44Ctrl+Alt+J, Cmd+Option+J on the Mac.
03:47Now, I want you to grab that Layer Mask, throw it in the trash.
03:50It will ask you if you want to delete it, yes or I wouldn't have done that.
03:54So go ahead and click on Delete and then double click
03:56on this little thumbnail right there in order to bring up the Curves dialog box.
03:59Lightness is fine.
04:01This is going to be our contrast adjustment.
04:03So, we are going to keep the lightness modification unmasked however we are going to get rid of A and B. So we are going
04:09to just grab these points right here and we can't just reset, we can't just do an Alt+Click and reset because that's going
04:15to reset the entire modification including that painstaking lightness modification we applied there.
04:21So, what you are better off doing is just kind of manually modifying things.
04:24Just click here, Backspace, click on this guy, Backspace, click on this one, reset it and then go over to B
04:32and click on this guy, Backspace, drag this one over to 127, 127, this guy over to -128,
04:41-128 to reset the A and B modifications, click OK.
04:46Well, before I click OK, I just want you to see we are only modifying the lightness, where this curve is concerned click OK.
04:54Now, that doesn't entirely take care of our problem because we still have this guy, so we have got a curve on top of the curve
05:01and we want to rename this layer of course so it's just a cast, that's all it is, not contrasting a cast
05:08and then we will double click on the thumbnail and we will reset this fellow right here
05:14by dragging it's points away or backspacing them or what have you.
05:19Then dragging the far corner points back into their respective corners of course and click OK
05:25and now we have reinstated the good, smooth- Notice the smooth contour, the smooth transitions associated
05:31with this contrast adjustment and at the same time we are masking out the bad color and the highlights.
05:37So, this is what the bad colors look like.
05:40If I Shift+Clicked on the mask right there, you can see the bad highlights
05:45in the background, the colorized highlights that I don't want.
05:48Shift+Click again to re-invoke that mask.
05:52Everything looks better and we still have the darker, slightly imaginary colors to work with as well.
05:58So, we have recovered those highlights quite nicely.
06:00In the next exercise we are going to take care of that lavender stuff right there, this is going to completely manual adjustment,
06:03we are not going to be using a corrective adjustment layer this time, we are just going to apply some solid color to it,
06:06it still works out beautifully as you will see if you stick with me.
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Masking away aberrant hues
00:00In this exercise we're going to take care of these weird sort of lavender highlights that are showing up in this column. I'll go ahead and
00:07zoom in a little closer on that, you can see what I am talking about. We've got this
00:10yellow stuff going on, some white highlights over here that are actually little less than white because we have calmed
00:16down the hotspots.
00:17But we still have this lavender action that seems pretty out of keeping with the rest of the colors and it shows up
00:22in a few other places. Inside this window here.
00:26Over in these columns notice that? In the upper left-hand corner of the document we have got some weird color action
00:31and some other stuff down here as well.
00:34So, let's resolve it anywhere, wherever it shows up.
00:38But first you need to make sure you are working in the right document. So if you have been working right along with me, great,
00:43stick with it, if you want to catch up I am working inside of the document called Neutral highlights.psd because
00:48we've neutralized the highlights on top of all of our other modifications.
00:52This documents of course found inside the 04 cast_lighting folder.
00:56Go ahead and click on the cast layer or the contrast layer, either of them will work.
01:02Rather than trying to meticulously like figure out what color cast this is
01:07and going back to our chart and evaluating it and then trying to create a curve that's going to address it.
01:11Why don't we just overwrite the colors? Let's just colorize them,
01:13get them done,
01:15do it the easy way and it works out beautifully as well.
01:17So, first though we need to define a selection, we want to select these little sort of lavender areas. We are going to do that using
01:23the best color selection tool there is inside of Photoshop,
01:26under the Select menu, the Color Range command and if you don't know about this command, please check out Chapter 6 of
01:32my Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks Series, which tells you all about
01:36one of the most sophisticated selection functions inside of Photoshop and very easy to use as well.
01:41Right now we are seeing a masked version of the image. I'm going to switch the Selection Preview to None so that we can see
01:45the full color version of the image,
01:47then I am going to click
01:48right about here inside the wall. Notice this location?
01:52It's more or less in line with that railing right there all the way down
01:55and then I'm going to switch back to the Grayscale mode so we can see what's going on. I want to make sure that I'm not revealing
02:02these areas here in the highlights
02:04because I don't want to start colorizing them.
02:06I do want to get o
02:07a few more of these lavenders going on so I'm going to Shift+Click right about at this location inside of the image
02:13and that adds another selection point essentially then I'm going to make sure the Fuzziness value is cranked up to 70.
02:19So moderately high,
02:20and that should take care of it actually, everything else should resolve itself pretty nicely inside this image.
02:25It's a little rough looking, but that's okay.
02:28The mask that is, is rough looking. I will click OK in order to accept my modifications
02:33and then I'm going to press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, click the black/white icon and choose this guy right there Solid Color.
02:41I will of course be invited to name this new layer, I'll call it yellow
02:45and then I will click OK.
02:47Then I am just going to lift the yellow, I could move the Eyedropper out in to the larger image window and click
02:53on one of these representatives yellows there
02:55or I could just tell you what to dial in. Here are the values I want,
02:58an H value of 40,
03:00a saturation, which is about amber by the way, sort of a yellowish orange.
03:04A saturation value, very low saturation, so it doesn't turn into a bright
03:08yellowish orange of 20% and then a brightness of 80 should do us pretty nicely and there we have it.
03:14Kind of looks weird but it's going to work out nicely, click OK
03:17in order to accept that color.
03:19And then we just want this color to affect the A and B channels, not the Lightness channel.
03:26So, we want to apply this mode right here, Color,
03:30because luminosity represents the Lightness channel, color represents A and B
03:33and then we are going to go ahead and replace the color inside that column with the new color. Now if we feel like
03:38we're replacing too many colors
03:40inside the image and I do feel like we are doing that. This is before,
03:44this is after, then we can paint away some of this garbage that's going on here. I'll go ahead and press the B key for the Brush tool
03:51and I'm actually going to press the Tab key to see what kind of colors we've got going on.
03:55Let's press D-X
03:57in order to make sure that the foreground is black. So default and then X to reverse default colors
04:03and then just make sure your mode is set to Normal, make sure you got a soft brush, a big one as well, opacity a 100% presumably,
04:09then you can paint some of the sort of details back in here
04:12in order to get rid of the color that sort of staining into the carpet and so on.
04:16You shouldn't have to work too hard at this. It should be pretty easy to get rid of that stuff. So just paint over some of the people,
04:21leave the walls alone, maybe this power thing right there that kind of goes away,
04:25we want the highlights to remain the way they were.
04:28It's just some of these areas in here that we wanted to protect. Now I am not painting, I am just showing them to you.
04:33OK, now go back to your Marquee tool
04:37and let's go ahead and reduce the Opacity of this layer to 50% by pressing the 5 key
04:41and you can see the Opacity is 50% here in the Layers palette and this is much better
04:46in my estimation, it looks pretty darn good. So, this is before we added the layers. See those lavenders inside the column?
04:53How bright and vivid and ridiculous they are, and this is after.
04:57We have sort of toned them down a little bit, they still have a little bit of color left in them
05:00but they look more or less in keeping with the scene around them.
05:04In the next and final exercise of this project we are going to go ahead and sharpen the scene, of course it needs
05:09sharpening and we will crop it, add some text, you'll see,
05:13it's going to look great.
05:14Stick with me.
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Sharpen, save, convert to RGB, and crop
00:00In this exercise we are going to take this nearly final version of the image and we are going to sharpen it and we are also going
00:06to crop it, so that we can take care of some of the compositional issues, like we have got this pole running almost right
00:12through the center of the image, that is terrible.
00:14This Power Zone logo over there, that can go.
00:16Anyway, I really want to focus on the people and the action and that kind of thing.
00:19So here is what we are going to do.
00:21First of all, I have saved my image in progress, as Near final correction.psd inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder
00:27and we are going to work through these corrections fairly quickly because we have seen many of them before.
00:32I want you to go to the background layer and make sure it is active and then we will convert it to a Smart Object by going
00:37up to the Filter menu choosing Convert for Smart Filters then, you will go ahead and rename it something like,
00:44I don't know like Lab SO or something, just so we know it is a Lab Smart Object.
00:48Then go to the Filter menu, choose Sharpen and choose Smart Sharpen and the settings that I want you
00:55to enter are these right here, an Amount of 200% and a Radius of 3 pixels and remove set
01:02to Lens Blur, that is all fine and dandy, click OK.
01:05Now this is going to bring out all kinds of noise as well as the detail inside the image
01:10and if you start zooming in you will see what I'm talking about.
01:13There is a fair amount of noise action, look at that pole, very noisy.
01:17We are not going to do too much about the Luminance noise unless we really go in there and try to massage the image.
01:21It is not really worth doing that.
01:23I like having the Luminance noise action.
01:25What I do want to get rid of is the color noise.
01:28So let us start by tiding things up, by getting rid off that Filter Mask, we don't need it and then double click
01:33on little Settings icon there for Smart Sharpen to bring up the Blend Options dialog box, change Mode to Luminosity,
01:42you always do that if you are working with Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen
01:46and then you click OK in order to accept that modification.
01:50You can see, this is before, look closely right
01:54in this region right there you can see some color action going on, some color noise.
01:57This is after, it all goes away and we are just left with luminance noise,
02:01which is fine because that is helping impart this sense of sharpness inside the image.
02:06Now you would go ahead and save this final version of the image by going up to the File menu, choosing the Save As command
02:12because we have now performed all of our corrections inside Lab, so All Lab corrections I will call this document,
02:19you might want to call yours something else so you don't save over mine, totally up to you.
02:23Hey, that is All ab corrections!
02:26Oh! That would be so awesome if you could solve all of your ab problems with Photoshop.
02:31If you could carve these just excellent abs.
02:33Unfortunately, these are All Lab corrections.
02:36Now click Save in order to save those modifications.
02:39Then I want to crop the image.
02:41Well, the crop I want to perform is a Radical Crop and so there is not really any point trying to pull it off nondestructively
02:48because I'm going to rotate the image and I'm going to potentially damage a bunch of masks and all this other stuff.
02:53So let us just go ahead at this point and convert the image to RGB.
02:56Let us go back to RGB, which is typically what you want to do when you are finalizing the image, doing the final touches.
03:01Go to Image mode, RGB Color, you will be asked if you want to Rasterize, yes you do,
03:07the Smart Object because we are going flat now and then you want to Merge, not OK, you want to Merge all of your adjustment layers
03:13so that you are creating what is extensively a flat file.
03:15It is actually a one layer file so it is not entirely flat and then I'm going to grab my Crop tool,
03:20and I have already set up some modifications here, I have set up some width and height values that I want to work with,
03:27because I'm looking for a real panoramic shot essentially, and these values will give me the panoramic shot I'm looking for.
03:35Again, these are just trial and error settings so that you and I can get the same thing if you are working along with me.
03:40So 4224 pixels for width and 1798 pixels for height and I'm going to drag
03:45from this little guy way back there below Power Zone because we are definitely getting rid of Power Zone,
03:51from his upper what would that be, his upper left shoulder, upper right for us and we are going
03:55to drag over to here basically, beyond these people.
04:02Let me just make sure I have got him in the right place.
04:04He looks good and I'm going to move this center point up in to the upper right of the crop like so and then I'm going
04:10to move my cursor outside the crop and I'm dragging down like this in order to position the crop boundary where I want it to be
04:19and that might be a little lower than what I'm looking for.
04:22So I will drag this guy up just a little bit.
04:24Notice, I'm trying to make sure that we are offsetting the central column right there.
04:30So something along these lines should work out pretty well for me.
04:33Then once I have done that I will make sure that Cropped Area is set to hide, so because I do have a layer,
04:37so I might as well keep that extra layer information and then I will press the Enter key
04:42or the Return key on the Mac in order to accept that crop.
04:46There is the cropped version of the image.
04:47I think it looks pretty nice.
04:48I will go ahead and Tab away my toolbox so that you can see we are just keeping the real good action inside of the shot.
04:55We are throwing the pole over to the right a little bit, we still got the orange jacket dude, that is nice and his friend,
05:01a green jacket dude there, they are very nice.
05:04Also, got a double jersey dude right there.
05:07All those people are essential.
05:09I'm just going to skip a head here.
05:10Finally, I scaled the image a little bit, did bit a little bit of additional cropping action
05:15and threw in this text there and also, this exclamation point.
05:19You can check out how this is all put together if you take a look at this document called Cropped RGB crowd.psd
05:25that is found inside the 04 Cast lighting folder and The Crowds Roar For Frozen Four.
05:31It's hard to say, a little bit of a tongue twister there and it is not actually all
05:35that accurate because they are really going home.
05:36There are not roaring.
05:38They were whooping it up every once a while because they are one team, hit one, couple of teams really.
05:42The only thing I want to tell you though, you can do whatever you want with this document,
05:45you can throw in the trash for all, I don't care, but here is the deal.
05:47If you are going to save it, make sure to go up to the File menu and do a Save As, so that you save it to a separate file.
05:55So you don't save over your Lab file with your RGB file.
05:58You want to save this as a separate one.
06:00So there you have it, a corrected image thanks to all kinds of different operations that we applied.
06:05But here is the key, we identified what the exact Color Cast was and then we acted on it quite precisely
06:13in the Lab mode using Curves here inside Photoshop.
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Applying a Shadows/Highlights Smart Filter
00:00In this exercise we are going to switch focus from images whose problems have more to do with color cast than they do with
00:06lighting to an image whose problems have more to do lighting than color cast.
00:10The image we will be working on is called Ice cream face.jpeg
00:13found inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder and this is a photograph of my youngest, Sammy, with ice cream on his face
00:20and a little bit of ice cream cone on his nose. I am just warning you in advance here,
00:24for those of you who are grossed out by images of people with food on their face,
00:28we have got an image with a people with a food on his face.
00:31Just want you to know that up front so that you are not surprised later on
00:35and you write us a big letter.
00:36We are going to fix this image and typically, because the problems with this image have to do somewhat with color.
00:43Of course, the colors are drab and
00:44the image has a little bit of a bluish color cast, but also,
00:48more to the point,
00:49we have problem with the luminance levels. Now if you take a look at the histogram, you can see that we have a nice
00:53distribution of luminance levels, that is to say
00:56we have got a lot of midtones, which is good.
00:58We've got a lot of shadows,
01:00maybe too many shadows actually, that is a pretty spiky shadow number up there.
01:04Although we don't have much in the way of clipped shadow, so that's good
01:08and then we have a weak number of highlights without too much in a way of clipped highlights,
01:15but really this is a good looking histogram. It is just a distribution of those luminance levels that is not very good.
01:20Notice that the shirt is really filling in down here, except where it is covered by ice cream.
01:26So we are not really seeing the thread pattern and the fabric and the folds and the contours and the shadows,
01:32the good shadows versus the just filled in shadows.
01:35Also, more troubling really,
01:37is that Sammy's irises are so very filled in. He has dark eyes, he has brown eyes,
01:42but they're not so dark that you can't even make out the pupils.
01:45So we want luminance variety inside of that eye to really bring it out.
01:49And of course,
01:50basically all of our highlights are really located here in the sky which is a little bit of a waste
01:55and then inside of his face just an enormous number of mid-tones, but they are not doing too much.
02:00We don't have as much volumetric detail as I would like to see.
02:04So his face comes off as being a little flat and the typical command for fixing this kind of problem, for elevating the shadows,
02:10brightening the shadows and dimming the highlights, this command up here in to the Image menu,
02:15Adjustments and then you go down here to Shadow/Highlight
02:18and it will brighten the shadows and dim the highlights. That's the good news about it. There's a couple of weird things about it.
02:22First of all, why am I applying it as a static command here from the Adjustments menu? Why am I not going over to
02:28the black/white icon and adding an adjustment layer?
02:31That is because if you go over here to the black/white icon, you'll see
02:35no indication that Shadow/Highlight exists.
02:38It's not a typical color adjustment function like Levels and Curves and the rest of them.
02:43Instead, it's an edge comparison function, which puts it squarely in the Filter camp. It has a lot more to do with Smart Sharpen
02:52and with a very close cousin, High Pass here, than it does anything else because it is actually discovering edges as
03:00it's brightening the shadows and dimming the highlights.
03:02So if you want to apply that command nondestructively, what you do is you convert the image into a Smart Object. You go up to
03:10the Filter menu, so just pretend that Shadow/Highlight is under the Filter menu, go up to the Filter menu and choose
03:17Convert for Smart Filters.
03:18Bearing in mind that this is an RGB image incidentally. I just want you to be aware of that. It is not Lab yet
03:24and then we'll just go ahead and call this guy RGB SO or something along those lines.
03:29So we know it's RGB.
03:30Then go on to the Image menu, choose Adjustments and notice you have got two commands that are secretly filters,
03:36one is Variations. You could apply Variations if you wanted to, as long as we are in the RGB mode.
03:40It doesn't work in Lab.
03:41And then you have got Shadow/Highlight that works in either mode.
03:44All right, let us go ahead and choose this Shadow/Highlight command
03:48and you can see that it does what it promised to do. It does brighten those shadows quite a bit actually with this default value of 50%.
03:57By default, the first time you choose the command you are only going to see two numerical options,
04:01Shadows and Highlights.
04:02All right, so we have got 50% shadows,
04:05that's a lot of shadow brightening going on
04:07and then if we wanted to I can also dim down the highlights with this guy. Notice it is going to dim the highlights, but as I do this
04:14I'm just flattening the heck out of the contours inside of the face.
04:17So I am actually fairly ruining the image and that is the problem with Shadow/Highlight.
04:22Right out of the box, it doesn't do that great of a job.
04:25So there are two ways to make it do a much better job. One is to turn on the Show More Options check box, which we are going to do
04:32in the next exercise and play around with the much, much larger number of options that are presented to us.
04:38See that, tons of options now available inside this dialog box,
04:42so we'll fool around with those in the next exercise and an even better way to make this command function properly,
04:49or that is better, I would say properly though because so far it is functioning horribly, is to convert the image from
04:54RGB to Lab and we'll do that in the exercise after this one.
04:59Stay tuned.
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Tweaking Shadows/Highlights in Lab
00:00In the previous exercise, I showed you how you can use the Shadow/Highlights Filter
00:05applied to a Smart Object in order to nondestructively brighten the shadows and dim the highlights inside of an image.
00:11As we have done so far to this image here, which is called Ice cream face.jpeg,
00:15found inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder.
00:18In this exercise, I am going to show you the best way to apply the command
00:22to this specific image anyway
00:24and how to use these numerical options right here and then in the next exercise, I will show you how much better things get
00:30when we switch from RGB to Lab.
00:32In our case, we want to adjust some of these Shadows values. Right now,
00:37you can see we can increase the brightness of the shadows by increasing the Amount
00:42or reduce the brightness of the shadows by decreasing the Amount.
00:46A larger issue though right now
00:48is that we're trying to incorporate too many luminance levels
00:52into the shadow equation.
00:54And that's what this Tonal Width value does.
00:56At 50%, it is saying that the darkest 50% of the colors inside of the image are going to be counted as shadows.
01:03Now there is a gradual drop-off there, there is some fuzziness that is to say.
01:07So it's not an either/or proposition
01:09but currently we are incorporating too many dark colors.
01:12So let us go ahead and Shift+Down arrow that value a couple of times and you notice now we are restricting the number of shadows
01:18that are getting brightened.
01:19I'm going to go ahead and crank this value up just a little bit.
01:22Now, look at this Radius value right there.
01:24As I was telling you in a previous exercise, the Shadow/Highlights command is closely related to Smart Sharpen and High Pass.
01:31In that, it is detecting edges, it is going through and detecting areas of rapid contrast
01:35in order to figure out where the shadows and highlights are located and how to best brighten them.
01:40So you can change the distribution of the shading, how things are getting filled in or opened up
01:45by adjusting this Radius value. Notice if I increase the Radius value, watch the irises.
01:50As I increase the Radius value, the irises are getting darker.
01:53The good news is that we are losing halos around the collar.
01:57Check this out; this is a low Radius value.
02:00You can see some fairly pronounced halos around that collar right there,
02:03also around the neck,
02:05there is a bright edge right there above the collar, notice that.
02:08That starts going away and getting more and more diffused as we raise this Radius value.
02:14So if you can, you want that keep that Radius value high,
02:17but in our case we can't to that because if we do, we lose the irises because the Radius basically is too large
02:23to accommodate the iris here inside Sammy's little eyeball.
02:27So we have got to reduce that Radius value until we can see those irises brightening up
02:32and we want a Radius value of about 30 actually, the default value of 30 works pretty good for this image.
02:37So we have got Total Width 30
02:38and now I am going to take this Amount value and I am going to raise it pretty high,
02:42as we'll see up to 90%.
02:45So an extreme Shadows modification here.
02:48Now we don't need anything nearly as extreme for Highlights.
02:51Let us go ahead and reduce that Tonal Width value a little bit.
02:53Notice in doing so, that we are recovering some of the sculptural detail inside of the face.
02:58The face isn't nearly as flat as it was when we started out this exercise
03:03and if I were to take it even farther down we are going to recover more of that,
03:06but we are also going to allow the sky to get to brighten the background so I am going to take Tonal Width up to 40%.
03:13I am also going to take the Radius value up.
03:15Notice that we are not really seeing too much happen as we expand that Radius value.
03:19That means that we have the room to raise that Radius value and we should raise it so that we don't get
03:24any more halos than we need.
03:26So Radius value of about 90 for this image looks pretty good.
03:32I am going to take the Amount value down to 30%,
03:34like so.
03:35The next option is down here in the Adjustments region.
03:38This Color Correction option is designed to account for the fact that Shadow/Highlights very naturally,
03:43gets rid of saturation values inside of the image.
03:47So we are reducing the saturation, we are graying up the image. As you can see, it gives us this strange other worldly appearance.
03:54They give you this, basically, what is essentially a saturation correction function right there
03:59and if you raise that value to a 100% for example, you can see that when you do raise some of the saturation levels,
04:04it just happens to be totally weird looking, not the least bit realistic.
04:08So keep this Color Correction value at zero.
04:11Don't change the color at all.
04:13There are much better ways to modify saturation as we have seen inside the Lab mode so we will take advantage
04:18of those much better ways.
04:20Then we have this Midtone Contrast function that allows us to recover some of the sculptural detail inside of our midtones.
04:26We definitely need that to happen in Sammy's face right here. So I am going to go ahead and raise this value
04:31to about 35, ends up looking pretty good
04:34and we get a halfway decent effect out of it.
04:37I'm going to go ahead and click on the OK button
04:39in order to accept this modification. We don't need to worry about the clipping, so just go ahead and click on OK.
04:45Just to give you a sense, of course, we are working on an RGB Smart Object as you may recall.
04:50I am going to go ahead and throw away that Filter Mask, we don't need it
04:53and now we can check out the before and after. This is before, this is how the image looked originally when we opened it in the previous exercise.
05:00And this is the way looks now.
05:02Thanks to the Shadow/Highlight command. We certainly have opened up the shadows inside of the image and we've dimmed down the highlights,
05:07but it doesn't look right, does it?
05:09We've a lot of weird gray areas,
05:12almost has a lunar landscape feel to it, it is just off. It just doesn't feel like a natural photograph.
05:18We are going to begin to solve that problem
05:20when we switch to the Lab mode inside the next exercise.
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Rendering Shadows/Highlights in Lab
00:00Just to recap our progress so far, I went ahead and opened an RGB image, I converted it to a Smart Object and then I went
00:06up to the Image menu, chose Adjustments, chose Shadow/Highlight, which is secretly a filter which is why I'm able to apply it
00:14as a nondestructive Smart Filter to the Smart Object.
00:17The result is something of an improvement to the image.
00:20Let us look at the original image for a moment again.
00:22This is the image without the filter and you can see we have got a lot of filled in, very dark, ultra-dark shadows down here
00:29on the shirt as well as below the lip and inside the nostrils.
00:33We don't really want to see at the nostrils, but still we do want to see into those irises a little bit.
00:38So by applying Shadow/Highlights we are able to brighten the colors inside of the shadow region
00:44and deepen the colors inside of the highlights.
00:47So we get a little more uniform distribution of luminance Levels inside the image
00:52and you can see the resulting histogram favors the mid-tones over the shadows and the highlights, but at what expense?
01:00We end up getting these weird serial grays inside of both the shadows down here and inside the highlights
01:08and throughout various ranges of the mid-tones, throughout the contours and the mid-tones.
01:14It reminds me of another command.
01:16Now if you are following along with me, I have saved my progress, so far as RGB Sam object.psd inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder
01:24and as I say Shadows/Highlights, it's behavior where it's turning the mid-tone gray reminds me of another filter
01:30that we have seen so far under the Other menu.
01:33I'm going to go ahead and apply it to the Smart Object because it is not going to harm the thing and it is High Pass.
01:38So let us go ahead and apply the High Pass command for a second here and I'm going to apply an ultra high Radius.
01:42If you go with a lower Radius, you are going to do more damage, turn more mid-tones gray but if I keep that Radius value high,
01:48like at 100 pixels then I'm only going to have a few grays showing up, but still it is very harmful to the image.
01:54So I go ahead and click OK let's say.
01:56To drop out those grays I would change the Blend mode to one of the Contrast mode such as Overlay.
02:02So I will go ahead and double click on this little slider icon here inside the Layers palette,
02:07wait the usual interminable amount of time for the Blending Options dialog box
02:10to come up, change Mode from Normal to Overlay.
02:14There, Bob's your uncle, we go ahead and drop out those grays, we keep the highlights and shadows from the High Pass effect
02:20and we burn them in to the underlying original image.
02:24So I will click OK in order to accept that modification there.
02:27This is before, without High Pass, the image that we just saw a moment ago and this is
02:32after if I press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac.
02:35So you can see we are not adding any more grays between the two effects, we are just making the shadows
02:40and highlights along the edges more prominent thanks to High Pass set to Overlay.
02:44See my figure, what goes for High Pass might go just as well for Shadows/Highlights.
02:49So let us try it out, let us go ahead and turn off High Pass once again.
02:53Go down to Shadows/Highlights.
02:54I don't want you to throw High Pass away.
02:56I want to keep it because we will use it later, but right now turn it off.
02:58Go down to Shadows/Highlights, double click on the Blending Icon, you are going to get an alert message that tells you
03:03that you are only going to preview the effect of the current Smart Filter down the list.
03:08So you are not going to see how it mixes with High Pass, whether High Pass is visible or not, that is a weird thing.
03:13So I recommend you let this alert come up every time.
03:16In other words don't turn on this check box.
03:18Just go ahead and click OK, just so that you know this is coming every time you do it in the future.
03:23All right, so again, what goes for High Pass must goes it seems for Shadow/Highlight, only, it seems wrong.
03:31If I choose Overlay, now these aren't really highlights that we were seeing inside the irises or inside of the shirt.
03:37They are mid-tones.
03:39So if I choose Overlay, they are going to drop out.
03:41So the grays drop out when you apply Overlay.
03:43It is a different kind of effect.
03:45Those grays that were dropped out from the High Pass effect thanks to Overlay were grays that we wanted to drop out.
03:51Here, it is an either or thing.
03:54Some of the grays we want to get rid of, some of the grays we want to keep, is part of the problem.
03:58So anyway, Overlay doesn't do us any good.
04:01None of these guys do us any good.
04:02None of these contrast effects, even the most vigorous of the effects Linear Light just makes a total mess of the image here.
04:09So then I think, well all right, so Normal must be applying Shadows/Highlights to the red channel, the green channel
04:16and the blue channel and that is part of our problem, right.
04:19So that is why we are getting some of these grays.
04:21If we just applied it to the luminosity of the image and we kept the underlying color,
04:26the color from the original image, I bet that would help.
04:29So let us choose Luminosity.
04:30It doesn't do a darn thing.
04:33The reason is Shadows/Highlights is already programmed to only affect the Luminosity of the image so long
04:39as that Color Correction value that we left set to zero, inside Shadows/Highlights,
04:43so long as it is zero, the colors are not getting changed.
04:46Blend modes don't do us any good, cancel.
04:48What does do us good?
04:50Well, what has been the topic of this entire series?
04:53That is what is going to do us some good.
04:55We go up to the Image menu, you choose Mode and you choose Lab color, that is going to fix the effect and as soon
05:02as choose Lab Color Photoshop is going to ask you in its fairly irritating way whether you want
05:07to Rasterize the effect and it is going to suggest you Rasterize it.
05:10That is wrong, don't Rasterize, please don't Rasterize, otherwise you will get rid off your effect
05:16and you will just convert this effect right here to Lab.
05:18It won't look any different.
05:19However, by converting the image to Lab and then applying Shadows/Highlights look what a different effect you get.
05:25This was before with those weird serial irises and those weird grays going on inside of the shirt and the neck and the jowls
05:34down here, if a five year old can have jowls and this is after and I'm pressing Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z on the Mac in order
05:42to do the aftereffect and there it is, much improved.
05:46Now not totally improved because we still have some low color values.
05:49We need some improved saturation going on here, but things look much better than they did a moment ago, much more natural.
05:54Just to give you a sense so that you are not thinking, "Well, it is not that different than the original image."
05:59Let us go ahead and turn off the Smart Filters tag.
06:01There is the original image.
06:03There is the image with Shadows/Highlights applied here inside the Lab mode.
06:07So really just that one little trick of changing in over the Lab mode and again,
06:12it is only being applied to the lightness channel.
06:15It is not being applied to a or b and if you want to check that out for yourself,
06:20all you got to do it is double click on the little slider icon right there.
06:24Again, you will get the warning, again click OK, wait for the dialog box to come
06:28up because really what choice do you have there and then change the Mode from Normal to Luminosity, doesn't do any good,
06:35so you will never have to do it again because these Blend modes are not helping you out.
06:40Just go ahead and Cancel.
06:41But no, it is a really small trick to have a pretty big, long lesson about it.
06:45The only trick we saw here was convert the image to Lab and if you want to try that out on your own images what you would do,
06:51is you would open up an RGB image, convert it to a Smart Object, go ahead and apply Shadows/Highlights,
06:56try out some different settings, see what looks good.
07:00Suffer in frustration because it is not going to look quite the way you wanted to,
07:04go ahead and click OK to accept the change, don't worry about the Blend mode.
07:08Go up to the Image menu, choose Mode, choose Lab Color then say don't Rasterize and then watch
07:14in wonder as Photoshop makes the effect better.
07:17If you still need to do a little bit of work on Shadows/Highlights all you have to do is double click
07:21on the words down here, adjust the settings a little bit and you are get to go and I can do that as well.
07:25I will have to get that dialog box again because I have High Pass act on top of the Shadows/Highlights,
07:30but at this point I can say, you know what, I want the shadows to be even brighter, so I will raise the Amount value to 100%
07:35and I will reduce the Radius down to 20 pixels in order to emphasis the irises a little more
07:41and I can make some other modifications, but really, for my money, the original effect looked totally great.
07:47In the next exercise we are going to repair the colors inside the image which obviously need a little help,
07:53then we will sharpen the image and we will be done, join me.
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Correcting color cast and contrast
00:00All right kiddos, we are in the midst of correcting yet another image in the Lab mode, go figure that one.
00:07This time the image has a lot of filled in shadows, some overly bright highlights, a lot of narrow to well mid-tones
00:14and we have managed to fix that image to an extent, not all the way,
00:18just corrected to an extent using the Shadows/Highlights Smart Filter applied to a Smart Object here inside the Lab mode
00:24and the name of this image if you would like to open it up, my progress so far is saved
00:29as an image called Lab Sam object.psd found inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder.
00:35Now one way to approve the colors in this image which now need improvement, I should say,
00:39so far we have sort of fixed the brightness and contrast of the image, I have a little more work to do.
00:45But the colors definitely need improvement the saturation and the Color Cast and one way to try to fix that is to double click
00:52on the Shadows/Highlights Filter here, you will get this warning telling you that you are only going to see the effects
00:57of Shadows/Highlights not High Pass fine, click OK.
01:00Then I can grab this Color Correction slider and I can send it all the way up to a 100.
01:04Notice what it does.
01:05That is Color Correction?
01:06Pardon me, no, that is not color correction.
01:09That is stupid.
01:10That is just ridiculous.
01:11It turns the eyes blue and the lips pink, that is color correction?
01:15No, no, not in application, especially Photoshop.
01:19Cancel. So here is what you do and by the way, remember I was telling you
01:24that Shadows/Highlights exclusively affects the Lightness channel when you are working on a Lab image.
01:29That is true so long as you don't monkey with that Color Correction value.
01:33As long as you would, set to zero.
01:34So please do, by all means, please do.
01:36Then what I would like you to do is press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, click the Black-White icon,
01:41choose the Curves command, that is going to the best job here because this is semi-complicated Color Cast effects,
01:46it is not super complicated, but does take a little bit of effort.
01:49Let us go ahead and call this guy a & b because that is all we are fixing, we are not going to adjust the Lightness channel.
01:54Go and click OK because it is just easier to that with brightness contrast where this image is concerned.
01:58So I'm going to switch the Channel over to a and let us make our standard everyday average symmetrical color adjustments
02:05like we like to, just makes life so much easier.
02:08So I'm going to go ahead and select this point as I have, by pressing Ctrl+Tab then I'm going
02:13to press Shift+right arrow several times in a row till I change the input value to -68.
02:18I'm moving that point to the right.
02:20So I'm turning the image turquoise.
02:22Now I will Ctrl+Tab to the other point, the upper right hand point, I will press Shift+Left arrow 1, 2, 3, 4,
02:295,6 times in a row to change that value to 67 so we have a symmetrical modification,
02:34the curve is going directly the curve as such as it is.
02:37It is a straight line right now, but it is going right through the center of the graph therefore,
02:41it is a symmetrical adjustment even though it seems to favor the reds, the crimsons at this point.
02:46That is okay.
02:47All right, let us go ahead and switch over to b and same thing.
02:50Now currently, the upper right hand point is selected.
02:53I'm going to press Ctrl+Tab until the lower left hand point is selected then I'm going to press Shift+right arrow,
03:01what would that be, six times in a row to add a bunch of cobalt to the image, Ctrl+Tab up to the upper right hand point
03:07and then Shift+Left arrow six times as well in order to add some yellow to the image.
03:11Now at this point I'm noticing and I think you are too, that he is a Fremen like in Dune he has got blue eyes,
03:17the whites of his eyes are blue so we need to somehow adjust with that.
03:20We need to try to neutralize the colors in the eyes.
03:23Now I don't know if you have noticed this yet.
03:24I have failed to mention it thus far.
03:26I will no longer fail to mention it, notice the gray eye dropper right there which is allows you to just select it then click
03:33on the color and make that color neutral is not available in Lab, you can't use it.
03:39So, so much for automating the neutrality of a color in Lab that is the way that is but anyway, here is what you do,
03:45you drag over the eyes and you watch the bouncing ball, watch the bouncing ball over here
03:49in the graph you drag over the eye and there is the bouncing ball.
03:52So then I will just Ctrl+Click at this point Cmd+Click in a Mac in order to establish this point
03:57and this represents eye highlight, basically the Fremen blue right there.
04:01Now I will press Shift+Up arrow a couple of times actually to get that output value up there and I want to take it,
04:08well actually, -4 is pretty good, -3 is even better.
04:10Basically, if you want to follow exactly along with me I'm going to input value of -13 and output of -3 and that is pretty good
04:19where the yellow-blues are concerned I think and we definitely are highlighting the yellows
04:23in this image and overly warming him, but I like it.
04:26I think it looks great.
04:27Then I'm going to switch to the a channel by pressing Ctrl+2, Cmd+2 on the Mac
04:32and I feel like we have now overwhelmed the crimsons in the image.
04:36I want that ruddy flesh.
04:38I want to emphasize that.
04:39So I'm going to make sure that upper right hand point is selected and then I'm going
04:43to press the left arrow key three times in a row in order to exaggerate the crimson colors in his face
04:50and so that makes him look him like he is a little windburnt and stuff, but he just looks little boy fresh to me.
04:55I think he actually looks really great.
04:56So I'm going to click OK.
04:58If you felt like you would over-saturate the colors, you would want to back off of everybody or click OK
05:04because I'm only effecting color saturation, right.
05:06I didn't change the Lightness channel.
05:08I can just back off the opacity value.
05:10I can just go ahead and say well, let us see what looks better.
05:12Maybe about there is more same in terms of the colors.
05:16Maybe that is more representative with the real scene as my eyes saw it.
05:19I don't care about that.
05:20I like it this way.
05:21I don't want a photograph that represents what I actually saw.
05:24I want a photograph that's powerful and has a ton of impact and looks great and is really graphic.
05:29So that looks good to me.
05:30All right now, I'm going to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and I'm going to click the Black-White icon
05:35and I'm going to choose Brightness/Contrast and we will just call it contrast.
05:39It doesn't have enough contrast, we are going to boost the contrast, click OK because really this brightness is just fine.
05:43You can monkey with that if you want to, but I suggest no monkey.
05:46Tab to contrast, Shift+Up arrow, 123.
05:49That looks good.
05:50This is a great command.
05:51It does a really svelte job especially in Lab in Photoshop CS3.
05:55You have to be using Photoshop CS3.
05:57Photoshop CS2 and earlier, this is a terrible command, they rewrote it.
06:01Also, when you are working in Lab this command affects the Lightness channel only.
06:06It automatically doesn't effect a and b so just go and click OK and there is just one more thing I want to do folks
06:11and that is I want to sharpen the image and we are going to that in the next exercise.
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Completing a low-frequency portrait with High Pass
00:00All right gang, welcome to the last exercise in the fourth chapter of this series. We have managed to do, I think,
00:08and I didn't invest all that much in this particular image, but for my money
00:11we have performed a fantastic color modification here, color contrast and so on.
00:16We started with this image right here.
00:20So dark, pretty lifeless, I would go far as to say,
00:24we went ahead and applied Shadows/Highlights and we applied it inside the Lab mode so we did a fairly good job of brightening
00:30the shadows and darkening the highlights and so on and keeping the contours of the face, but not an utterly fantastic job
00:36because we still have a lot of weird grays going on inside the shirt, in the flesh tones and so on.
00:41We got rid off those though as soon as we added these adjustments layers right here.
00:45Notice, no more grays inside the shirt. It's just a nice, bright, olive green, looks really good and then we've got some
00:53great detail inside of the irises, we are looking good inside the flesh tones. He is a little windburnt, a little
00:58possibly, overly red in the cheeks and the chin and along the ears, but I think it looks awesome and he's got this
01:04little scab on his head, you can see that fell off. And this is my Sammy incidentally. And I am calling this image
01:10progress so far Freshly windburnt boy.psd, found inside the 04 Cast_lighting folder.
01:15We are going to finalize the effect by sharpening it.
01:19This is a low frequency image for those of you who may have seen my Photoshop CS3 Sharpening Images series.
01:27You know that for high frequency images, when I am sharpening high frequency images I use Smart Sharpen. When I am sharpening
01:33low frequency images such as portrait shots I use High Pass and lo and behold, we were fiddling around with High Pass earlier.
01:42So I will just go ahead and turn on that High Pass effect right there.
01:45It's already set to the Overlay blend mode, so it's going to blend in nicely. Sort of.
01:51The only problem is I have the Radius value set to 100. We don't want that. So double click on the
01:55High Pass effect right there. Notice this time you don't get an alert message. You still get a big delay of course,
02:00because it's a Smart Filter, but you don't get an alert message because you're going to be able to preview the effects of High Pass and
02:06Shadow/Highlights mixed together because High Pass is on top.
02:09If it were on bottom, it would complain. All right, let's reduce the Radius value to 6 pixels
02:14and then click OK.
02:16Now, actually that does a pretty darn good job. That looks like a nice sharpening effect at this point, but I want more
02:22sharpening so I am going to over and double click on this little blending slider icon thing and that will bring up
02:28the Blending Options dialog box and then let's switch the Mode from Overlay to Linear Light, which is the most vigorous of these contrast modes
02:37and it's going to give us the highest impact effect.
02:40Now, that's a little bit over the top so I'll change the Opacity value to 80 instead of 100% and then I'll click OK.
02:46Well, that's still almost twice as much sharpening as you get out of Overlay,
02:50right up there and that's it, gang. The next thing I would do, because I am really happy with this effect, the next thing
02:56I would do is I would go up to the File menu, I'd choose Save As, but of course, right? We need to save our changes
03:02and I'll go ahead and save this as something along the lines of sharply shaded Sam or something along those lines and then
03:10click the Save button in order to save off my layered Lab image.
03:15Then having done that, I would probably go up to the Image menu,
03:18I would go to Mode and I would go to RGB Color because let's say I want to send this off to somebody or I might want to
03:24print it to an Inkjet printer something along those lines. RGB typically works better in that case. So I choose RGB. I would say Rasterize.
03:31I would say Merge because now I am just getting rid off everything. I'm just collapsing the image into a single layer image right there.
03:38After- actually I would go ahead and flatten it. Notice it's still a single layer image. So you go up to the Layer menu,
03:44I always forget this step, go to Flatten Image.
03:46Then once it's a background layer then you can go to File,
03:49choose Save As and save it to the JPEG format. Then I would go ahead and scale it and we are doing this so that we can see
03:55the before and after here. We are going to go ahead and scale this image. So I will choose the Image Size command
04:00and I am going to change the width of the image to 1024 pixels because this is a 1024 x 768 monitor
04:09and I will go ahead and Tab away my palettes, switch the Full Screen mode
04:12and let's go ahead and zoom in to 100% zoom ratio.
04:15All right, then so here is the final version of the image. Here is the original, just to give you a sense of how far we've come here.
04:22So before and after.
04:24I would say this is a much better version of the image. Check out the collar detail down here. So before, it's totally filled in,
04:31after,
04:33bright, beautiful tons of texture going on as well. We have a lot of great texture in the neck, a lot of good action
04:39here inside the face. A lot of this peach fuzz here showing up. So before again, just you basically can't see any
04:45of the detail inside of the face going on here. This is almost, after we're done, it almost looks like an HDR image,
04:52a High Dynamic Range Image because we have so much detail going on and the final thing, I think the thing that really sells it
04:58is the fact that we can see into these irises. So again, before, irises totally filled in,
05:04don't have that kind of sparkle that they do once we've completed this effect by combining Shadow/Highlight with the Lab mode
05:11and of course, some saturation and contrast effects applied with a combination of Curves and Brightness/Contrast
05:18adjustment layers here inside Photoshop.
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5. Selective Color Modifications
Changing some colors, leaving others as is
00:00The last thing I want to show you is less corrective and more selective. We have all seen catalogues online or in print that
00:07show a model in an outfit. And even though it's just one shot, the outfit changes colors. To show that it's available in,
00:14I don't know, gosling green or flowering rye or dying monkey.
00:19All real colors by the way.
00:21And you have probably seen how you can change the color of just a single part of an image, just the reds the yellows for example,
00:28using the Hue/Saturation command.
00:30Only thing is there is a much better way in Lab.
00:33Nothing against Hue/Saturation. When it works, it works, but when it doesn't work, the following exercises show you what to do.
00:40We'll start by changing color of the car, without any masking whatsoever.
00:44Then we'll see how to change the color of a blue shirt and tie set against a blue background, using a mask created by
00:51Cross Pollinating Lab and RGB. And we are going to achieve such control, the results are going to look so good, you will be tickled pink.
01:00Carnation pink, pink Cadillac pink,
01:03dying monkey pink.
01:05Enjoy!
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Rotating hues in RGB with Hue/Saturation
00:00Alright gang let's start off with something relatively simple anyway, and we will move to something a little more complicated,
00:05where selective color modifications are concerned.
00:08Here I'm looking at a photograph of a classic pink Cadillac from photographer Bill Philpott of iStockPhoto.com
00:16and you can see that I have already converted it to the Lab format.
00:19The name of this image incidentally is Pink cadillac.psd found inside the 05selective folder.
00:25And we are working in Lab, I have gone ahead and converted this image to a Smart Object and we have a couple
00:31of Smart Filters applied, Shadows/Highlights and High Pass.
00:33Because this is a low frequency shot and if you don't think this is a portrait shot, I've got news for you.
00:38This is a portrait shot.
00:39Whoever shot this thing loves that car.
00:42So I'm going to go ahead and turn off Smart Filters for a moment,
00:45just so we can get a sense what the original image look like.
00:47And then I will press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to turn them back on.
00:50So you get a sense of -- we have got more of a high definition feel to the car now.
00:54A lot more detail going on here.
00:56Let's say we get it in our collective head whether it's just because we decided it should be this way or and Director
01:03or whatever your client told us that this car needs to be yellow not pink.
01:08And of course we can switch it to any number of other colors as well.
01:11Blue, green, purple, what have you, but yellow's going to look the best,
01:15since its one of the hardest transformations to pull off here.
01:18So, that's our mandate, make the car yellow.
01:21Well, old school, if we are working in RGB we go with Hue/Saturation, which isn't the worst solution on earth.
01:28It's just not as good as Lab and you will see Lab is actually better when used properly.
01:33So let's go back to RGB with this image here.
01:35I'm going to go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose RGB Color.
01:39And I will just go ahead and Rasterize the image, because this is just a test.
01:42And then, I'm going to go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments and choose Hue/Saturation.
01:49You can rotate the Hue value in order to rotate all of the colors inside of your scene.
01:55Now that gives us a yellow, Hue value of 49 does gives us a yellow but its kind of a washed out yellow.
02:00So, then we might pump up the Saturation and then we might back up the Hue to warm it up a little bit, that kind of thing.
02:07But, there is a fairly obvious problem I think with our modifications so far.
02:10That is that, it kind of changed the grass and the sky as well.
02:13Just ever so slightly.
02:14We now have a ridiculous violet sky for example.
02:18Go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+Click and what was formerly the Cancel button to reset the options in the dialogue box.
02:23And then you would go up to the Edit menu and say, Reds, presumably, and we really want to change the pinks.
02:29But they should fall somewhere in the red or magenta spectrum.
02:32Either one, it doesn't really matter because what are we going to do then is click inside of the hood
02:37to identify that is one of the colors we want to change.
02:39And I would actually Shift+Drag over the hood and maybe Shift+Drag over this area of the car as well.
02:45Don't -- I'm not dragging down here, don't drag around here, because we are going to pick up of the reflected grass.
02:50And you don't want that.
02:51Once you have done that, then you can rotate those Hue values again.
02:54Look at that, that's a green car.
02:56Let's go and make it sort of yellowish since we're trying to moderately stay on task here.
03:01La-di-da there you go.
03:02But actually I think this fairly wretched.
03:04Because you zoom in on it and you get these really bizarre transitions where we are going
03:09from the yellow mid tones into these purple shadows.
03:13Which begs the question of course, why are the shadows purple?
03:16What are they picking up?
03:18Where are they getting the purple from, the grass?
03:20No, nothing.
03:21There is nothing that purple in this scene, there is no way those shadows will be picking a purple.
03:26So, this is okey-dokey, if you just had to get the job out really fast.
03:30Why not? But if this was the thing that really mattered, when you wanted to do a good job, this I would not call a good job.
03:36So go ahead and cancel out of there.
03:38And I'm just going to note these values, 45, 45.
03:41Let's say, just to keep it easy.
03:42Cancel out for a second.
03:43Because I'm now going to press Ctrl+Alt+z or Cmd+Option+Z on the Mac in order
03:48to restore the original Lab version of the image with its Smart Filters.
03:53And let's just go ahead and try Hue/Saturation here as an adjustment layer inside the Lab mode,
03:58just so that we can see if it behaves any better, because it does behave differently by the way.
04:01I want to hit an Alt or Option and choose the command and I'm going to call it Hue Twirl
04:06because we are twirling the Hue around and I will click OK.
04:09And we know we want to go the Reds, so we know we want to click on the hood and then shift drag
04:14across the hood and shift drag over in this region.
04:16And we want this value to be 45-45.
04:19Those two values just like that.
04:21Well, that's interesting, right, its worse interesting.
04:24We still have that same problem we had before where these slightly different yellows this time,
04:28they are more orangey are picking up some strange violet shadows.
04:33But then over here -- actually in a way we were doing a better job of keeping the grass reflections.
04:38But it looks wholly bizarre, I think, it doesn't look like what this car should look like.
04:43Not that I have a picture of a yellow Cadillac sitting in front of me, but just somehow this doesn't resonate as being credible.
04:50So tell you what, let's just cancel out man.
04:52Let's not do that, instead, let's do something different.
04:55And I will tell you, exactly what that something is, beginning in the next exercise.
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Modifying colors in Lab with Curves
00:00All right gang, the goal remains the same, we are going to take this pink Cadillac,
00:04which goes by the final name Pink cadillac.psd found inside the 05_selected folder and we are going to turn it yellow.
00:11But we are going to accomplish this amazing feat inside the Lab mode using the Curves command,
00:16which gives us the most control over the process.
00:19Now, it's a much different, much stranger technique.
00:22It's not as easy to pull off as it is with Hue/Saturation.
00:25For one thing we can't limit our modifications to adjust the reds with the pinks of the car.
00:30So, we are going to change the entire scene.
00:32Secondly, the way that we go about making our modifications inside Curves is quite a bit different
00:38than it is with Hue/Saturation.
00:39We can't just revolve the Hue for example.
00:42So, before we go into the Curves command, I want you to see this, I want you to remember this anyway.
00:46This diagram came to us in Chapter4 you may recall.
00:49And it's called Color moves.psd found inside the 04_Cast_lighting folder.
00:54Look specifically at these A and B charts down here, toward the lower right region of the image.
01:00If we want to make the image more crimson, we are going to create points and drag them up or to the left.
01:07If we want to infuse the image with more turquoise and more green,
01:10we will create some points and drag them down or to the right.
01:13Meanwhile in the b channel, we are going to make points and drag them up into the left to make the image more yellow
01:19down into the right to make the image more cobalt or blue.
01:22Things change however, if you reverse the angle of the graph.
01:25So, if I take this black point here and send it all the way to the top and then I take the white point and send it all the way
01:30to the bottom, so that the angle of the curve is the opposite of the way it is now.
01:36Then the graph lifts horizontally only.
01:39So, the crimsons become up in this region, upper right and the turquoise, greens goes lower left.
01:46That makes it a little confusing.
01:48I mean why don't they flip this direction, why doesn't crimson go down south
01:52to the lower right region and turquoise goes up that direction.
01:54The reason is, when you flip the curve, so it goes in the opposite direction, you are flipping the histogram horizontally
02:02and only horizontally, because you are just flipping the outputs, not the input values.
02:06You will see us do that in just a moment and if we make the angle of this graph like this, then yellow is going to be
02:11in the upper right region and cobalt blue is going to be in the lower left region.
02:15Alright. Just want you to be able to track that, just kind of remember it, you are going to see it in action.
02:19Let's switch back to Reasonable Screen mode here and bring back our palettes.
02:24And here is what I want you to do.
02:26I want you to Alt+Click or Option+Click on a black/white icon and choose Curves as I say, it gives us the most control
02:32and we are going to call this guy hue shifter or something along those lines and click OK.
02:37We are not going to make any modifications to the Lightness channel, because if we did
02:41and then we started blending the colors with the original image then we would lose some
02:46of our lightness modifications where we need to make some.
02:48So, I would make the lightness modifications again, we are to make and I'm happy with the brightness and contrast right now.
02:53But we are ready to do it.
02:54I would use a separate command.
02:55I want to limit my changes here to just A and B. We will start with b because after all we want
03:00to make the car more yellow and yellow is in the b channel.
03:03I'm going to grab this white point right here and as long as we keep the angle of the graph like this starting down left
03:10and going up right, then the yellows are up in this region, and the cobalt/blues are again in this region.
03:17So I'm going to grab that white point, press Shift+Left arrow, a handful of times, until I change this input value to 74.
03:25How do I know, it should be 74?
03:27Trial and error.
03:28Once you understand, where the colors are located, then you are free to experiment,
03:32it just takes a little bit of experience to start getting used to it.
03:35But anyway, I'm going to press Ctrl+Tab to switch to the black point and I'm going to press Shift+Up arrow a handful
03:41of times until I change the output value to 30.
03:45You can see because my modifications are all going up left, so I am moving both the black and the white points, up into the left,
03:53making the car more and more yellow, along with the rest the scene, of course is going yellow as well.
03:58One of the problems here is that I'm confusing the car with too much orange.
04:03So, it's less yellow and more orange at this point.
04:05Sort of a golden ride I would say.
04:08I need to get rid of some of the redness or some of the crimson inside of the image.
04:13So I'm going to go the A channel and I'm going to reverse the A channel.
04:17I'm going to grab the black point down here and I am going to move it all the way top and that's going
04:21to make the image a little bit more crimson than it was before.
04:25And I'm going to grab that upper right point, the white point and move it all the way downright,
04:29so that are reversing the colors in the image.
04:31Part of the reason I'm doing this is so that I can show you what I was talking about.
04:34Once you have the graph going at the opposite angle like so, now crimson is this away, it's upper right
04:42and the opposite color turquoise is down left.
04:45That way, whatever you want to call it.
04:47All right, so let's grab this point right here.
04:49Actually I'm happy with the location of the white point.
04:52What was formerly the white point.
04:53I'm going to go to what was formally the black point over here and I'm going
04:56to press Shift+Right arrow because we have made the image too green.
05:00We have definitely defeated that crimson, that red, that was going on that orange that was going on in the hood of the car.
05:05But now we have set it all the way green, that's too far.
05:07So, now we need to go back to crimson, which is now located in this area of the graph.
05:12I will press Shift+Right arrow in order to warm up that car.
05:18Right here is about a value I want, -48 for input, 127 for output and of course,
05:24the white point down here in the lower right corner of the graph.
05:27Beautiful, go ahead and click OK now, it doesn't look like it's such an awesome change,
05:31but that's because Curves affects the entire images not just affecting the pinks inside of the car.
05:38We need to make it affect the pinks, by adjusting the Luminance Exclusion Slider Bars
05:44and we are going to do that in the very next exercise.
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Blending colors with Underlying Layer
00:00At this stage I might argue that we have done a little bit too effective of a job of colorizing the car.
00:06Certainly we have managed to swap the paint job from pink to yellow, but we have also switched
00:12out the environment from earth to the center of a volcano.
00:16So, that the car is sitting here in this grassland of magma and that's no good.
00:21We just want to keep the yellow.
00:23And we're going to do that using the Luminance Exclusion Slider Bars.
00:27Those slider bars at the bottom of the Layer Style dialog box, that we have look at before.
00:30But this time instead of using, here I will go ahead and double click here for a moment, so you can see what I'm talking about.
00:35Instead of using the This Layer slider, we are going to rely on the Underlying Layer slider which allows us to force layers
00:41through based on there color and there luminance Levels and so on.
00:45But before we could actually take a look at how to use this option, we need to more closely inspect our image.
00:51So, cancel out of that dialog box for a moment.
00:53I have gone ahead and save my progress so far.
00:55It's this document here, Yellow planet.psd found inside of the 05_selective folder
01:01and I'm going to turn off hue shifter for a moment.
01:04What we want to do is we want to attack the pinks.
01:06We want to affect the pinks, that is, and we want to protect all the other colors.
01:11We are going to protect the other colors using their own inherent luminance Levels on a channel by channel basis.
01:17So, we need to check out those channels.
01:19So, here is what we are going to do.
01:20Press Ctrl or Cmd+1 or you can switch over to Channels palette, if you want to just click
01:24on the Lightness channel to check out its luminance Levels.
01:26Now they are all over the map.
01:27We are not going to be able to use these luminance Levels to isolate just the body of the car.
01:32So, let's switch over to the a channel, Ctrl or Cmd+2.
01:35It's colorized which makes it very difficult to analyze from a masking perspective.
01:41So, what I want you to do is press Ctrl or Cmd+K to bring up to Preferences dialog box.
01:46Switch to interface and turn Show Channels in Color off.
01:49So, if you had turned it on, turn it off, click OK.
01:52Now you can see the actual luminance Levels and you can see that the body of the car is light and the areas
01:58that we want to protect are dark comparatively.
02:01That's good, that kind of difference is really going to help this out.
02:04Then we go to the b channel, not so good.
02:06We got highlights that we want to protect.
02:08We have got shadows that we want to protect.
02:10We got mid tones that we want to reveal but we also have mid tones that we want to hide.
02:14It's probably the a channel that's going to our best bet, good to know.
02:18Go back to the full color composite by clicking on Lab, go to the Layers palette and turn on hue shifter,
02:24double click on an empty area outside the word hue shifter here but not on the thumbnail.
02:28Double click out here to bring up the big old Layer Style dialog box and where colorization is concerned,
02:35you are frequently better off using this Underlying Layer slider so that you can force through the colors that you want to protect
02:41because after all those underlying colors, they have a lot more variety associated with them then this Colorization layer
02:47which is really just warm colors, just yellows and reds and so on.
02:50So when I can not get too far with the Lightness channel, we already saw that it's luminance Levels are all over the place.
02:55Let's go to a, we know a is going to work for us because we just saw it.
02:58It's the dark colors that we want to protect which correspond to the turquoise
03:03as opposed to the crimson which are the light colors.
03:05So, drag this black slider over to the right like so and at a point you will start revealing colors like that,
03:12now what you doing is you are saying if a pixel has a luminance level of 133
03:16or darker in the a channel, then Photoshop is going to force it through.
03:20Photoshop is going to protect it from the Adjustment layer.
03:23If it has a luminance level of 133 or lighter then the Adjustment layer is going to win out.
03:28When I want however in order to get the best result here, I'm going to take this up to as high as 165,
03:36press the Alt or Option key because that pretty much wipes out the effect and drag the left half off the triangle
03:42over to the right until we take it down to 125 and notice that gives us a nice soft transition and the paint job looks really,
03:50really great and that's all we need to do there.
03:53We don't need to work with b or Lightness, just the a channel does the work that we needed to do.
03:57Now one another thing I discover that I think is pretty interesting here,
04:01I just started fooling around with these checkboxes for channels,
04:04they allow you to just basically turn the effect off inside of a certain channel.
04:08I noticed when I turned off the a channel, the paint job looks even better.
04:12So, just applying the b channel not the a channel of our curves modifications.
04:18So, I just drop the a channel out of there.
04:20In other words, the a channel was great for determining what portion of the car we wanted to colorized,
04:25where the b channel really delivers all of the yellow we need.
04:28You can make those decisions after the fact and it's entirely parametric.
04:32Meaning if I click OK, then I can double click in this blank area again to bring back
04:36up the Layer Style dialog box and my modifications are live.
04:40I can change my mind, I can go back to the ridiculous world that I had before by resetting this slighter triangle
04:46and turning a back on, everything is still there.
04:49All right gang, that is the finished version of the effect and you just have to see here.
04:53Let's go ahead and fill the screen with the image and tab away the palettes
04:56and I'm going go ahead and center the image a little bit here.
04:58Let's go ahead and drag it down.
05:00All right, now just for the sake of comparison this, of course as you know this is the Lab corrected version of the image.
05:06Thanks to the Curves command along with the Underlying Layers slider triangle
05:11and this is the Hue/Saturation corrected version in the RGB mode.
05:16You can see how the RGB mode isn't really as good as the Lab corrected version right there.
05:23Just an amazingly better effect.
05:25So bad, but easy with Hue/Saturation.
05:28A little more complicated and all that much more work, but little more complicated to figure out, but a much,
05:33much better affect and I got to show you one more thing here.
05:36I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on some of these details.
05:39Notice right here around the headlights, how it brilliantly sculpts here into the bumper just like it should.
05:45This is what the car looks like before we changed its colors and this is after.
05:51So, it exactly grabs those pinks that we want to grab and even this reflection in the bumper right there.
05:57This is before and this is after.
05:59Those kinds of details still get pulled out and get pulled out brilliantly and realistically here, thanks to Lab.
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Changing colors in wardrobe shots
00:00Alright good people, in this final project of the series we are going
00:04to attempt something pretty complex, something that takes a little bit of work.
00:08Specifically we are going to change the color of this man's wardrobe independently of the rest of the image.
00:13Why that's difficult is because much of the rest of the image is virtually the same hue as the shirt.
00:20Let me show you what I mean.
00:21I'm working inside this image called Blue shirt man.jpg inside the 05_selected folder comes to us
00:27from photographer Eduardo Jose Bernardino of istockphoto.com and were you to approach this image normally.
00:35It's an RGB image at this point.
00:36You would probably go up to the Image menu and choose Adjustments and choose Hue/Saturation.
00:42Alternatively you could apply a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer if you like.
00:46I'm just going to go ahead and apply a static adjustment, switch the Edit function from Master to Blues like so
00:53and then you would identify to make sure you have got the right color selected.
00:57You would click some place inside the shirt and then Shift drag across the shirt, taking care not to Shift drag elsewhere.
01:03We do not want to shift drag in his face or in the background and I'm not dragging at this point, I'm just gesturing.
01:09All right, we will go ahead and rotate the hues and Photoshop does a pretty darn good job inside certain ranges of hues.
01:17Notice that the shirt switches to purple pretty nicely or this kind of crimson color at this point, good old crimson.
01:23But if we try to switch it to something like a violet, the shirt color goes pretty darn flat and then other colors are just hard
01:29to nail down or it actually works up pretty nicely.
01:32But yellow, we are not going to get yellow very well.
01:35It's going to either look a little bit amber or a little bit chartreuse.
01:40If we want just straight on yellow, we are going to have to increase the saturation which as you can see if I zoom in here
01:45that we are getting some fairly jagged transitions between the neighboring pixels there, so that's kind of bad thing.
01:53Also we have got this blue line that's tracing along his neck and that's it,
01:57the big changes, we are really rotating those hues around.
02:01Theoretically what you can do is use these little slider doodads in order to curtail the colors that you are affecting.
02:08So, I could try to just bring these guys together a little bit and then I will send this guy over here.
02:14Let's see if we can bring him over, so I can grab them, there we go.
02:17Then we will move them tighter to see if we can rule out the background.
02:20But notice there's not really a value.
02:22Like it's just a single little dinky value that I can hit that rules
02:26out the background without ruling out the shirt as well.
02:29So, the shirt and the background share the same hues.
02:32Because that's what Hue/Saturation is doing.
02:34It's allowing you to edit within a certain hue range.
02:37That's all it pays attention to, iss just hue.
02:39We can do better in Lab.
02:41We could do better in just about any environment than what we are getting right here.
02:45I will go and cancel out. So the moral of the story is when Hue/Saturation works for this purpose it works great.
02:51When it does not work, it really doesn't work.
02:53All right, so let's switch over to Lab mode.
02:55This is a guy, another version of the image.
02:58It's called Available in these designer colors.psd and it has got a ton of layers associated with it.
03:03It's still found inside the 05_selected folder.
03:06Notice I have added an Adjustment layer down here.
03:08We are going to be doing this together, but I added this Adjustment layer
03:10that normalizes his skin a little bit, so that he's not quite that pale.
03:15That's a little bit radioactive and by toning it down he looks a little more normal,
03:21I would say little bit less creepy and all that jazz.
03:23Just something closer to how we all want to look, those of us who are very pale.
03:27I'm just as pale as this guy.
03:28So, I have got a bunch of groups of Adjustment layers now that are going to switch him to different colors and I'm going
03:34to bring out my Layer Comps palette just so that we can see these different colors in action.
03:38Let's go ahead and move them over, just to give them more room to see.
03:41So, there is my Blue shirt version, that's how he was brought to us.
03:44That's the original version of the image.
03:46Here is Brown shirt incidentally which I think looks pretty nice and that's the one we will be working
03:52to create together as this Brown shirt version.
03:54Here is Orange shirt, just to show you it's possible that you can get some very bright colors if you want to.
04:00So, if you want to send them into quasi-disco room you certainly can.
04:04Here is red shirt, it's interesting because not only does it have a wide variety of hues associated with it,
04:10it also turns his tie a totally different color.
04:13So, your modifications inside the Lab mode don't always produce the same results that they do inside RGB.
04:18My tweaks are the same to the tie as they are to the shirt.
04:20It's just that the tie is different enough that it ends up turning into this sort of yellowish orange color.
04:25Here is the Green version of shirt, which I think is also quite fetching.
04:28It looks pretty darn nice actually and then I decide that wasn't good enough.
04:32What about bright green, so this is the leprechaun flavor of the shirt, isn't that nice.
04:37All right, but anyway they are all interesting, you know not every single one
04:40of them has the same degree of credibility associated with it.
04:43I think leprechaun starting to leave the mortal realm here.
04:47But this is what we are going to go for, his Brown shirt.
04:49But if you want to see how any of the others are put together, all you have to do is switch
04:54to a different layer comp, like you could say, "Gosh!
04:56What's going on with orange shirt?
04:57I like orange shirt," so go and switch to orange shirt and you would, here let's clasp the Color palette for a moment.
05:03I'm going to twirl open Orange shirt, so that we can see what's going on and drag it open a little and you can see
05:09that there is a couple of Adjustment layers here one of which actually changes the shirt color.
05:13I will turn this one off.
05:14This one changes the shirt color to orange.
05:16But then I decided some of those colors were getting a little out of control, that they are getting too bright
05:21and we were having transitional problems right there.
05:23Not as bad as we saw with that yellow shirt example with Hue/Saturation, but still doesn't look quite right.
05:29So, I settled those colors down with a Levels adjustment layer right there and you can see that just tones it down ever
05:36so slightly, makes things a little more realistic.
05:39All right, once again, just to make sure you know where we are going.
05:42We are going for brown shirt.
05:44I just think it has a certain nice look to it.
05:46Also we are kind of revealing more of the metallic sort of color tie,
05:49it has got a little bit of blue still left in it and I think that's kind of nice.
05:54Hey! If you are interested in creating such a shirt yourself, why then join me in the next exercise.
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Blending the Red and b channels
00:00Hey, I see you are back.
00:02Very encouraging, I mean saying you are tenacious which is what I love about you and your reward is going
00:07to be a special masking technique that's only found inside this series, nowhere else,
00:13at least nowhere else inside the lynda.com Online Training Library.
00:16What we are going to be doing is we are going to be merging an RGB channel with the Lab channel in order
00:22to create the best base Alpha channel that we could possibly get where this particular image is concerned.
00:28So the particular image concerned is Blue shirt man.jpg found inside of the 05_selective folder and we
00:35and need to create a mask in order to distinguish his shirt from the background because no other methods are left to us.
00:41We are going to be using the Curves command inside the Lab mode in order to effect our color shift and Curves, by itself,
00:47doesn't provide any masking control that we saw that even though Hue/Saturation does provide limited masking controls,
00:52they are just not going to work for our purposes.
00:54All right, so here's what I want you to do.
00:56For starters, and those of you who have worked with me in my Photoshop CS3 Channels and Mask series,
01:02also part of the lynda.com Online Training Library, know that when you are creating a mask,
01:06you start by examining the channels that are available to you.
01:09So this is an RGB image and actually we have Red, Green, and Blue channels, so let's check them out.
01:13Here's the Red channel, now there is a high degree of contrast.
01:17Bear in mind, while we are making a mask, we want a lot of contrast.
01:20What we are really looking for is the opposite of this; we want a white shirt against the black background but we can change
01:26that as easily as just by pressing Ctrl+I or Cmd+I in the Mac in order to invert the colors.
01:31So we have a white shirt against a dark background that's great.
01:34But you can see now that we don't really have as much contrast as we really need
01:37and of course, you wouldn't want to change the Red channel.
01:39That's going to fairly mess up the composite RGB image.
01:43Yeah, let's not do that.
01:44But this is a good starting point.
01:47Green, not so good.
01:48We have a little bit of contrast between the shirt and the guy's flesh in the background but we are losing it.
01:54We have a lot of shared gray values going on.
01:57Then Blue is just no good at all for our purposes because that's where his shirt and the background are the best match.
02:03And then, of course, he looks quite gruesome in the Blue channel.
02:06I have to say it's not just him, we all look our worst in the Blue channel, but older we get too that's the great thing
02:13about it; aging really happens in the Blue channel.
02:17In a perfect world, we wouldn't have Blue, then we wouldn't age.
02:21That's my theory because look at me.
02:22It looks great in the Red channel.
02:24Let's go back to RGB.
02:26So we want the Red channel to be available to us but we need the Lab mode to be available to us as well
02:31in order to perform this little technique here.
02:33So let's go ahead and duplicate them and then convert into Lab.
02:36Go up to the Image menu, choose the Duplicate command, and let's just go ahead and call this guy Living large in Lab
02:42so that we can find him very easily later inside the 05_selective folder and I'll click OK.
02:47We'll go ahead and zoom in, move him over to the right a little bit and of course, convert him into Lab.
02:52That's very important.
02:53Go to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose Lab Color.
02:57Now we have Lightness, a, and b channels.
02:59So let's check them out.
02:59There's a Lightness channel, a good looking channel but not enough contrast.
03:04It looks a lot like a Green channel, in fact.
03:06Here's the a channel.
03:08If you have thought he looked bad in the Blue channel, check him out in the a channel.
03:13You know what, he is not a spring-fall kind of person; the turquoises and the crimsons don't work for him.
03:20I don't know if those are spring-fall colors but whatever colors they are, they are not his colors.
03:26Very, very gruesome indeed but if we go to b, hey he is still looking bad but we've got some contrast going on.
03:33We've got a little bit of contrast between the shirt and the background and his flesh.
03:36Actually, his flesh is going really light.
03:39I have a hanker in here, that if we somehow mix the best of the b channel with the best
03:43of the Red channel, we are going to get somewhere.
03:45So let's try that out, let's test out that theory.
03:47Let's go up to Lab once again, go back to the composite image.
03:50Then I want you to go to the Image menu and choose the Calculations command.
03:54Now, Calculations allows you to blend two channels, two channels that are already inside of the image in order
04:00to create a new Alpha channel, a base Alpha channel that you will eventually develop into a mask.
04:05You can not only blend channels inside the same image but you can blend channels inside different images,
04:11different open images as long as they contain the same exact number of pixels wide and tall.
04:15So go to Calculations and you'll see up here for Source 1, notice right now,
04:20it's trying to multiply the two Lightness channels by each other.
04:24So pretend that they are different layers; Source 1 is on top and Source 2 is on bottom, set to Multiply at 100%.
04:30Well we want to start with Red because it's our really great channel.
04:33So go up to the Source 1 pop-up menu and choose Blue shirt man.
04:37If you have Available in these designer colors open as well,
04:40you'll also see it because it's also the same physical dimensions.
04:43Well, let's go to Blue shirt man here and we want Red and we want the Background layer.
04:46These are flat files so background is all you are going to see.
04:49Then for Source 2, Living large in Lab that's what we want, we want Background and we want to change it to the b channel.
04:55Right now we are multiplying, which I don't know, it could work if there were no other blend modes
05:00on earth, this could service reasonably well.
05:03Let's check out a couple of other things.
05:05First set it to Normal and this allows you to see the Red channel by itself just so that
05:09that we can be reminded of the channels that we have to work with.
05:11Setting it to Normal 100% allows us to just see Source 1.
05:14If we set things to Normal 0% then we are just going to see Source 2 because we are seeing
05:19through Source 1 so this is the b channel right there.
05:22All right, so interesting.
05:23Let's change Opacity back to 100% and let's try out some other modes.
05:28Like Overlay.
05:29Let's go ahead and kind of burn the two channels into each other and that is better than what we saw a moment ago with Multiply.
05:37If we wanted a stronger effect, we could go with something like Linear Light but it doesn't work out very well for this image.
05:43What we really need is to lighten the effect more than we are seeing here so let's try Screen, the opposite of Multiply.
05:50So we are getting a very, very light image and that's interesting but we are losing our darks.
05:55Now there's an even lighter mode than Screen called Linear Dodge (Add) and tell you about Add in just a second
06:01but if you choose that, it's really going to blow out the colors.
06:04This is actually a good degree of contrast between highlights and shadows but we need to save the shadows to more darken them up
06:09and to bring the highlights back into the Normal realm because right now it looks
06:14like he has got his face about three inches from the sun.
06:18So I want a control that gives me this kind of brightness but it allows me to darken things up and add,
06:24notice that Add in parenthesis that's because it's really dRAWing from this guy right there, Add.
06:28If you switch to Add, you are going to get exactly the same effect but you are going to get a couple of different options.
06:33Offset allows you to brighten or darken the image by a certain amount of luminance level.
06:38So if I start pressing Shift+Down arrow, you are going to notice that we are reducing the brightness
06:43of the entire image at this point by 60 luminance Levels.
06:47That's still bringing some of the colors back into the visible range because these colors,
06:51these whites are so blown out, they are way beyond white.
06:54If I kept reducing this value, we could really get those whites down to something more reasonable but if we did that,
07:02we would start bringing in too many grays as well.
07:05So what I suggest we do is take the Offset value down to -70, let's say.
07:10In that way, we have some decent blacks, we got some good whites,
07:13we have a few midtones in between them that we can rub them out pretty easily.
07:17But here, I just want you to see this.
07:18This is a difference just so you know we've made some progress.
07:21This is a difference between just having the Red channel which was as close as we were with the single channel.
07:28Notice the difference between that and Add according to our current setting.
07:32So we are really getting rid of a lot of those bright colors especially in the background.
07:37We are brightening up this section of the color but that's okay.
07:40It's worth to hit, and now I'm going to click OK in order to accept that modification.
07:44So this is going to become our base, I'll go ahead and rename this channel right here, base.
07:49It's going to be the base for mask.
07:51We are going to actually turn that into a mask, we are going to elevate the contrast with the Levels command
07:57and then do a little bit of brush work, you'll see it's very quick and easy.
08:00We are going to be doing all that in the next exercise.
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Developing a base mask
00:00In this exercise, we are going to be taking our base Alpha channel and developing it into a bone fide mask.
00:05I've got ahead and save my progress so far as a document called Living large in Lab.tif found inside the 05_selective folder.
00:13If you are opening that image up right now, you'd have to switch to the Channels palette and click on the base Alpha channel.
00:20Now if this is going to serve as a mask, it only has to have a higher degree of contrast but when you are working with the mask,
00:27white represents the selected area and black represents the deselected area.
00:31So this image as it stands so far, is the reverse of what we want.
00:35Well, we can both elevate the contrast and reverse the colors inside the Levels dialog box in one operation.
00:43So let's go ahead and do that.
00:44I'm going to go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments and choose Levels.
00:48I have to apply a static color adjustment because Adjustment layers are not available to us in the Channels palette.
00:54I'm going to go ahead and focus right now in just elevating the contrast of the image so I'm not going
01:00to worry about blacks and whites at this point.
01:02So for starters, let's go ahead and exaggerate the white point.
01:05I'm going to drag this white point slider triangle over to the left and as you know that's going to make the image lighter.
01:13Something like about 115 works pretty well.
01:16So we are taking any pixels that have a luminance level of 115 or brighter and turning them white.
01:20You wouldn't want to do that with this standard continuous toned photograph because you'd be blowing out all kinds of highlights
01:26but when you are working with the mask, you want to blow out all kinds of highlights so this is good.
01:31Now we need to turn around and bolster the shadows.
01:33So I'm going to drag this black point, this black slider triangle over to the right until I get
01:39to about 35, actually it works out pretty well.
01:42Now I don't want to go all the way black like that because I could end up creating overly jagged transitions.
01:48So I just want to be a little conservative here, 35 works out nicely.
01:52Then I'm going to not click OK because I also want to invert the colors.
01:57Here's a little trick you may or may not know about.
01:59If you also want to invert the colors in Levels dialog box as you are modifying them,
02:04then you can reverse the two Output Levels slider triangles.
02:08Notice that if you drag white all the way over to the left, and then black all the way over to the right, and notice,
02:14I started that out with a little half motion there.
02:17I drag black half way over there because if I drag it all the way over then I've got two slider triangles on top
02:21of each other and I can't tell which is which.
02:24So I just drag it most of the way they are, just so that I have made some progress.
02:28Then I drag this guy all the way over to the left and then this guy over to the right.
02:32You could also just switch out the values if you wanted to.
02:34Now we've also inverted this gentleman.
02:37I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification.
02:40All right, now we want to do a little bit of brushwork.
02:43Again, those of you who are familiar with my Channels and Mask series, you know that when we are brushing inside of a mask,
02:49we don't just start brushing, we don't just start painting things like that.
02:53That would fairly ruin the mask.
02:54Instead what we do, go and undo that modification and I'll reduce the size of my brush a little bit, we switch to the Overlay mode.
03:02That's one way to do it anyway, the easiest way really.
03:05So I'll switch to the Overlay mode here and I'll make sure my color is white for starters that's good and then let's go ahead
03:12and zoom in on the image, on the collar because that's what needs to be whiter.
03:15Then I'll jut go ahead and paint and notice that Photoshop, because of the Overlay mode, is respecting the black,
03:22it's protecting the blacks and just painting the highlights and midtones sort of proportionally to how light they are.
03:29So I might lighten this up a little bit down in shoulder,
03:32don't go too far though because this shoulder area really wants to be darkened.
03:35If you want to darken an area, just press the x key to make the foreground color black,
03:40leave the brush at the Overlay and now just paint in black.
03:43And notice, this time, Photoshop is very kindly protecting the highlights inside of the image.
03:49And that's nice then x again, reduce the size of the brush, paint that back.
03:54So we are just started going through back and forth and painting away the whites or painting in the whites really
03:59and then pressing the x key and painting away those blacks.
04:03Just do it just along edges is all we care about at this point, into that neck might be nice.
04:08And otherwise, we can take care of the other issues using the Lasso tool.
04:11Just make sure you got what you need to get and you've got a good margin to select inside of.
04:17Now I'll go ahead and grab the Lasso tool here and I am going to Shift+Tab away my palettes for a moment.
04:23Another good thing to do actually.
04:25I'll get the Magic Wand tool and the Magic Wand tool is not a great tool but nor is it a horrible tool for some purposes.
04:32For some purposes it's really great and the purpose I am about to show you, it works out tremendously well.
04:36Make sure the Tolerance is set to 0, so it's only going to select one color,
04:40Anti-alias should be off, Contiguous on, Sample All Layers off.
04:45So the options are just so as you see them there.
04:47It's a little different than the defaults.
04:48Then click inside of a shirt and you'll see which colors are exactly white and which color still need a little bit of work.
04:58So we've got some colors there, they need to work up there and around in this area as well.
05:04That's fine.
05:05I'm going to go ahead now and get my Lasso tool and I'm going to press the F key again to switch to the full-screen mode.
05:12With the Lasso tool, I'm going to Shift+drag as we want to add to the selection, I'm Shift+dragging around these areas in order
05:19to select these colors that needed to selected and added to the mix.
05:24Then I'm going to select these colors as well because I'm going to go back and do a little more brush work in just a moment.
05:30I'll grab these guys- so these are all Shift+drags, by the way, with Lasso tool- and Shift+drag around there.
05:35Now press Alt+Backspace because foreground color is white at this point.
05:39Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete in order to fill that zone with white.
05:43Now press Cmd+D or Ctrl+D to de-select the image.
05:47Let's go back to the Brush tool.
05:49In some of those areas just we are working for memory, some of those areas that needed to be a little whiter,
05:54I'm just going to sort of go at them a little bit even sometimes just clicking in an area does pretty nicely.
06:00I think that should be it this time, let's skip that area.
06:03Press the W key for the one, click again and that's good enough, we still have a few little sort of garbage-y pixels here
06:10and there that we could take care of if we wanted to.
06:12Why don't we in this area, actually?
06:14Press Ctrl+B, B for the Brush, paint along there to get rid of those garbage-y pixels.
06:19Well, not so bad.
06:21I could deal with this, this works out okay.
06:23All right, now let's do the same for the black pixels clicking the black area to see what still needs to go away.
06:29If we zoom out, we can see that we've got most of the black pixels at this point, at least I do.
06:34So I'm going to Shift+drag around this area with the Lasso tool like so, like you see me doing.
06:40The reason it's helpful to be working in the full-screen mode is we have a lot
06:44of this sort of gray pasteboard stuff on the outside.
06:47Shift+drag around that area to select it, the background color is currently black so you just have to press the Backspace
06:52or Delete key in order to fill it with black.
06:56Now let's zoom in pretty tight and I'm going to Shift+drag around these areas to select them,
07:03the remaining areas that we need to get rid of, maybe Shift+drag around this as well and then press the Backspace key again
07:09to make sure all that stuff is filled with black.
07:11This is a nice mask, people, I like it.
07:14Just one little area here if you want to be persnickety.
07:17This needs to be brushed, so press Ctrl+D, Cmd+D on the Mac to make sure nothing is selected because,
07:22otherwise, the stuff you want to modify is deselected.
07:24Press the x key for black and then just kind of get that area paint and we are all good.
07:29Nice -- that's not nice, look at that.
07:32What's going on there?
07:33Who thought that was nice?
07:34B for the Brush tool, press the x key to switch the foreground color to white
07:38and let's just click in those areas to firm up those details.
07:41Alright, I think that's good, we should be done by now, I would think.
07:46All right, there's a selected shirt that -- actually it's a shirt mask that we have now created.
07:51Let's go back to the Lab mode.
07:54We've got a mask right ready to go.
07:56We don't have to call it base anywhere, we could go ahead and call it shirt
07:59if we want to and go back to the Lab composite View.
08:03In the next exercise, we are going to use that mask to change the shirt to a different color.
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Colorizing an isolated area
00:00In this exercise, we are going to take the Shirt mask that we created over the course of the last couple of exercises
00:05and we are going to use it to change the colors inside of the shirt here in the Lab mode.
00:10I have gone ahead and saved out my progress so far as a file called Mask complete.tif found inside of the 05_selected folder.
00:18I want you to go to your Channels palette, press and hold the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and click with the Ctrl
00:26or Command key down on the shirt thumbnail here at the bottom of the Channels palette to load that mask as a selection.
00:33We have now the selected the shirt.
00:35Now, go over to the Layers palette, I want you to press the Alt or Option key,
00:38click and hold on the black/white icon and choose the Curves command.
00:43We will go ahead and name this guy shirt color or something along those lines
00:47and then I will click OK in order to bring up the Curves dialog box.
00:50Now, you may recall when we are working inside the a and b channels, let's go to a here, you can drag points up and to left
00:59to make the colors more crimson, more lavender as we are seeing them here, down and to the right, I should say down
01:05or to the right will invoke turquoise or green.
01:09So, we already started with blue, we are just adding turquoise or green to the mix.
01:13All right, so I'm not sure exactly where I want to go with this, we will just move it up a little bit because we are going
01:17for a brown, which is the low saturation version of an orange.
01:23So, one would accept we are going to warm things up, we are going to go toward the warmer colors which would be crimson in the case
01:28of the a channel and then of course in the case of the b channel, we go this direction with the curve,
01:33either up or to the left for yellow and then of course it would be down or to the right for blue/cobalt.
01:40Well, that's the last direction we want to go because this image is so predominantly blue here and especially inside the shirt.
01:46But I'm not sure what we are doing is really getting us what we want either.
01:49So, let's go ahead and delete that point and I'm going to reverse this graph.
01:54I'm going to drag the black point all the way to the top and that's going
01:57to make what were formerly the blues inside the image quite yellow.
02:01So, that has the desired effect all right, but we are also losing the histogram entirely.
02:05We are sending the entire channel to white.
02:08We don't want that.
02:09So, let's recover some of the range of luminance Levels inside the b channel
02:15by dragging the white point down to the bottom of the graph.
02:20If we feel like that goes too far, then let's just go ahead and raise it.
02:23I will press Shift+Up arrow a handful of times until we raise that value.
02:27Actually I want the output value to be -64.
02:30So, we have an input of 127, output of -64 and if we feel like we are going too close to yellows,
02:37I could drag this down a little bit in order to lose of the yellow and go back down to sort of a brownish color.
02:43But check this out for a second, let's go ahead and raise that back up and I will go to the a channel and we've already seen
02:49that I have added a lot of a, I have added a lot of crimson to this image.
02:54But I'm not getting orange.
02:56How would I get that bright orange shirt?
02:58Remember that?
02:58How do I go about getting that because nothing I do to the a and b channels that's going to get me there.
03:04Well, that's because recall that, the Lightness channel really affects the colors that you are going to get.
03:09If you can take your mind away back to Chapter1 when we looked at that big color wheel,
03:15you may recall how as we went toward the center of the color wheel where the colors are darker,
03:19we actually got a lot of different colors as well and the really bright colors were toward the outside of the wheel
03:27which means that they would have to be very bright.
03:28That's why only the tie is showing up in sort of yellow right now.
03:32So, let's go to the Lightness channel and let's try this, I am just going to set a color here and start dragging it up
03:40and notice now we are starting to get that orange shirt here inside the Lightness channel.
03:45So, it really depends on making the colors inside of that shirt very, very bright and yet if we go ahead
03:53and sync these darks a little bit, you can see that we still have a hack of an orange and that it's a pretty dark orange as well.
03:59So, it's not like we are completely losing all that luminance variety, we are just brightening things up a lot
04:06and thanks to the fact that Lab offers us all those imaginary colors that are inside the blacks and the whites,
04:13we are still retaining a lot of color differentiation.
04:15We are not blowing out any colors at this point; we are not absolutely clipping any colors.
04:21Alright, but I want brown as I said, so let's not worry about these guys, let's go ahead and get rid of these points.
04:26I will just go ahead and delete this point here and then click on this one and delete it as well
04:30by selecting the point, pressing Backspace or Delete.
04:34Now, let's go back to the a channel and let's tone things down just a little bit.
04:40I think I'm going to go ahead and anchor a point here and about this location here, I'm just experimenting, oh!
04:47That looks nice, I'm just kind of dragging this point around.
04:50I'm going to anchor it, so that it's an output value, -15 as well as an input value of -15.
04:57So, -15 is going to -15, that's a lockdown point right there.
05:01And then I will click another higher point, a little higher in the graph because we want to take some
05:05of these colors right there, see when I drag inside this region of the collar, I'm bouncing the ball around this area.
05:11Why don't we just Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click right there at that location and then I will go ahead
05:17and lift this point a little bit, I'm going to -- actually I'll take the input value over to 29 by pressing Shift+Right arrow
05:24in my case, you may need to press something different.
05:27But I'm trying to get that input value to 29 and then I'm going to take the output value up to 23.
05:33So, I'm slightly darkening the reds of this location and that's making the shirt too kind of yellowish brown.
05:41So, what I want to do is back off of the yellows now.
05:43The sort of distribution of reds inside of this image is just fine, I'm going to go and it's actually,
05:49notice we are greening things up a little bit.
05:51We are actually taking those blues and spinning them more toward green because if anything we are going
05:56down into the right here into turquoise country.
06:00But it gives us the results we want, so that's what counts.
06:02Then I'm going to b and I'm going to take this black point value right there and I'm going
06:08to press Shift+Down arrow a few times and then actually down arrow a couple of more times
06:13after a point to get the output value down to 84.
06:16So, we are going for a 128 as input to 84 as output and then if I Ctrl+Tab to the other point,
06:22you can see that it's still input 127, output 64.
06:25That produces this nice brown, sort of a tannish brown color.
06:31There is a lot of other colors you can choose, you could go green if you want to,
06:35you could go a variety of different colors, you can checkout that other image.
06:38That one called available in these designer colors, that's one has got tons of different curves modifications
06:44that you can plant through on your own if you like.
06:46Alright, I will go ahead and click OK and you may discover other ones, you can create purples, you can create yellows,
06:52you can do all kinds of stuff if you are patient enough, you spend enough time.
06:56All right, so there's that.
06:57That's looking pretty darn good, however, I've got a couple of issues.
07:01One is, I notice that the tie is looking a little greenish gold.
07:05I want to drop it to a little more of a blueish kind of gold color, to give it more or a silver feel.
07:12I also- I'm feeling like we are getting too much posterization, too harsh transitions going on inside some
07:18of these dark mid tones and they are looking hyper saturated as well.
07:23They don't look right at all or shadow detail.
07:25This isn't looking the way it needs to.
07:27We are going to take care of those problems in future exercise, stay tuned.
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Revealing complementary highlights
00:00In this exercise we are going to tone down the color of the tie here,
00:03so it's not this ultra-golden color, sort of a greenish gold at this point.
00:08We are going to tone it down by introducing some complementary color,
00:11so it starts looking little more neutral, little more silvery actually.
00:15And then we are also going to take care of these reddish shadows so that they look more natural as well.
00:21I have gone ahead and saved out my progress as a document called The brown shirt.psd.
00:26I'm not implying he is the brown shirt, he is just wearing a brown shirt of course,
00:30and it's found inside the 05 Selective folder.
00:33All right, I'm going to expand my palette a little so that I could double-click.
00:37What I want to do is I want to drop out some of the colors in this Adjustment layer using the Luminance Exclusion sliders,
00:45notably that Underlying Layer Slider that allows me to force through colors,
00:49and I can get to it by double-clicking in an empty area of the layer.
00:52If you can't see any empty area of your layer, if it looks like this, then you go up to the Layer palette menu
00:59and you choose Blending Options, so called because it brings up the blending option section of the Layer Style dialog box.
01:05There is the Underlying Layer Slider right there, go ahead and reduce this white value, I will drag this white value down
01:13and you can see that as I do over to the -- I'm dragging it actually over to the left,
01:17that I'm forcing through the lightest colors inside of the original blue shirt image there,
01:23so that we are forcing these highlights through the adjustment layer version of the tie.
01:30That's obviously going too far, it's also so very, very jaggy; let's reduce the jaggies by Alt dragging
01:36or Option dragging the right half of this slider over to the right side, the full right side,
01:41notice that I'm going all the way up to 255.
01:44And then I'm going to take the left side of that slider triangle down to about 83.
01:51I thought it worked out pretty nicely.
01:53Now, in this case we are not really exposing any blue, any complementary color in the tie,
01:57we are just going to neutralizing the highlights.
02:00If I want to expose some blue I'm going to have to do a little more work, I will go over to the a channel
02:05which is the complement to the blues after all and that's going to give me a little tighter control
02:11because if I start revealing the blues in the b channel I'm going to reveal colors very, very quickly.
02:15This is going to give me a little more subtle control because it's the off axis.
02:19So I will switch over to a. The colors are bound to be in the turquoise area
02:23because it can't possibly be over in the crimson area.
02:27There was no red to work with here inside of the shirt.
02:29So I'm going to drag this guy over.
02:31Notice as I do at a point I'm going to start revealing blues once again as I drag the black slider triangle
02:37over to the right then I will Alt+drag the left half back to 0 and I will go ahead and drag the right half
02:44and I will hit the Alt+drag at this point because they are already separated, I will drag the right half up to 150.
02:50Now we are introducing a little bit of complementary color; it's kind of little bit of bluish,
02:54gives it that highly-reflective sort of satin feel and that's good.
02:59Now, click OK in order to accept that change.
03:01The next step is to go ahead and downplay the red of the shadows here.
03:05So they don't look like super colored shadows, they look like natural shadows.
03:09They go along with the rest of the color in the fabric and we are going to invoke that modification in the next exercise.
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Repairing strangely colored shadows
00:00In this exercise our job is to the address the reddish shadows inside of this image,
00:05and perhaps you are familiar with this phenomenon from your own images.
00:08It's not always necessarily an art effect of manipulating the colors.
00:13Sometimes its inherent in the image when you shoot it in the first place, or when you scan it as well
00:18as some scanners have this tendency to give you for example bluish shadows, or purplish shadows.
00:26Well this is something that you can address in Lab using the following technique.
00:31So it just happens that we are seeing this apply to an image that has some heavily modified
00:35in the first place but that's not always that case.
00:39All right, so here's what you do.
00:40First you make sure you are working in the same image, I'm working in.
00:43I have gone ahead and saved off my progress as Reddish shadows.psd found inside the 05_selective folder.
00:50And the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to basically isolate these shadowed areas using the Color Range command,
01:00just the easiest thing to do because sometimes that your deep shadow that have colors in them,
01:04sometimes that your mid shadows, your quarter tones and that kind of thing.
01:07So regardless of where they are at, Color Range can find them.
01:10I'm going to go up to the Select menu, choose Color Range and once the command appears on screen, I'm going to click inside
01:18of this area, these reddish shadows right here.
01:22And I'm going to just Shift+Click in a few other areas of the image.
01:27And maybe move down there and Shift+Click right there, or Shift+Drag across it perhaps.
01:33And lets make sure that we are getting some of these red shadows as well.
01:37Now that's going to add a lot to the selection but that's OK.
01:41Notice we get a little bit green in these dark, dark shadows back here.
01:45So those are already that way, I just want to show you before we apply our adjustment layer, that we're about to apply.
01:51These guys were already a little bit greenish.
01:53But that's okay, better to go this route than the overly red route.
01:57Because the rest is assured actually this brown that we have is a little bit more in the green side, than it is on the red side.
02:05Alright, having done that we have now got a decent selection, set the Fuzziness to about 50 that works well,
02:10and click OK in order to create that selection outline, that's interfering with our ability to tell what's going on right now.
02:17That'll go away in just a moment.
02:18Press and hold the Alt key or the Option key in the Mac, click the black and white icon and choose the Levels command.
02:25And then I'm going to go ahead and call this one Desat A+ and the reason I'm calling it that is
02:31that when it desaturates the reds, the reds are going to be located on the right side of the A channel.
02:37So bright colors in the A channel translate to Crimsons or Lavenders, or Red or whatever you want to call it.
02:43So that's where we are going to desaturate the + side of the A channel and actually I should do
02:48with a lower case A because that's the way Photoshop does it.
02:51And then I'll click OK, in order to create this new layer.
02:55We are going to go ahead and switch over to the A channel and now if I were to move this white slider triangle,
03:03right here over to the left, you may recall that colorized version of the version,
03:08when in that document called Color Moves back in the 04 Cast_lighting folder that moving any of these slider triangles
03:16over to the left side of the A channel gives us crimson and actually creates more crimsons inside the image.
03:23So we don't want that, what we want to do is move down to Output Levels instead and take those Crimson Colors,
03:29take those colors that are too red, and just drag the life out of them a little.
03:34Notice that I'm leeching that crimson out which leaves green in its wake if you go too far of course.
03:41Instead what I want to do is just take it down a little bit.
03:44Alt+Shift+Down arrow to take the value from 255 down to 245 and I'm thinking that's not quite enough so I'll take it
03:50down a few more clicks to 240 or something like 242.
03:55And let's see if that works for us.
03:56So let's go and zoom out a little bit so that we can take in the resulting image,
04:00at the zoom ratio, so we don't get those weird water patterns.
04:04And that looks pretty darn good to me, so I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification.
04:10So this is before the red shadows.
04:13Notice how much red is being contributed by the shadow detail inside the shirt
04:19and this is after those red shadows are neutralized.
04:23Remember this technique for any of your images that have bizarre, colorized shadows.
04:30Just go ahead and select those shadows with the Color Range command inside the Lab Mode of course,
04:35and then follow it up by desaturating whatever portion of the A or B channel, like if I had bluish
04:42or purplish shadows I would go to the B channel.
04:45I would take the black value, which represents Blue/Cobalt, and I would raise it in order to make those blues more yellow.
04:54In order to take the wind out of the blues a little bit.
04:58So that's how you work.
04:59Anyway, it does a beautiful job.
05:00I'm going to click Cancel because I don't really want to change that Layer.
05:03Go ahead and zoom-in, just so we see it even closer.
05:06This is before; this is after nice, now we have a consistent, brownish shirt here to work with.
05:14In the next exercise we are going to tan up the skin tones a little bit.
05:18I just want to touch on a little more skin tone information and to tan them up and darken him down a little bit,
05:23make him look like just normal, standard, everyday average human being while retaining the bright whites of the eyes and the teeth
05:31and you will find that how as soon as you click that next link button.
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Tanning and deepening skin tones
00:00Alright, the final step, the step we are going to perform in this last exercise here is to tan up the skin a little bit,
00:06darken the environment, give them more of a healthy glow.
00:09We are also going to add a little bit of yellow to the skin which gives him a tan feel as long as you don't go too far
00:14with yellow which sort of gives people a jaundiced feel.
00:18But you can use this yellow to take out that pink which sometimes shows up in pale people's skin.
00:25Alright, so the first thing to do, make sure you've got the right document open or if you have been following along with me, great,
00:31if not, I have saved the progress file that's called In need of tan.psd, found inside the 05 Selective folder.
00:38I'm going to click on the background layer.
00:39I'd like you too as well.
00:40We are going to add another Adjustment layer, Alt+Click or Option+Click in the black/white icon and choose Curves.
00:47So now of course this means we are heaping Adjustment layer on top of the Adjustment layer, that's really generally speaking
00:52for what we are trying to pull off here, okay, because after all so far we have been only affecting the a and b channels.
00:58And this is going to be a subtle a, b adjustment here.
01:01We haven't been affecting the Lightness channel at all and that's where most of our work is going to get done.
01:06All right, so let's name this guy tan and then click OK.
01:09And I'm going to start here in the b channel, and I'm going to click on the black point right there which represents of course,
01:18it represents the cobalt, the blues inside the image, and I'm going to press Shift+Up Arrow in order to raise that Output value
01:26to 118 which adds a little bit of yellow to the guy in space here.
01:31As I say that little bit of yellow can tan up the skin without making him appear jaundiced,
01:36and just to make sure that we are not going too yellow, let's put back some red, let's give him a little bit of ruddy feel as well.
01:42I'm going to go the a channel, make sure that black point is selected, and this direction up or to the left is crimson,
01:49so I'm going to press the Up Arrow key three times in a row in order to raise that Output value to -125.
01:57So that just gives him a little bit more ruddiness, just reestablishes the ruddy feel of his face.
02:02Now, he is still very, very bright and we are going to calm down the brightness in the Lightness channel.
02:07So that's where we are going to apply our most significant modifications.
02:11And I want you to lift the color from right about here on the other side of shadow,
02:15so in the mid tone area right there Ctrl+Click, and that's going to set a point some place close to the middle.
02:21I want that Input value to be exactly 50 and I want the Output value to be more like 40.
02:28So we are mapping the Input of 50 to an Output of 40, that's darkening up those mid tones quite nicely.
02:33We need to darken the highlights as well.
02:37So I'm going to go ahead and scroll up to the forehead.
02:39We've got a lot of the sort of sweaty highlights going on up here, I mean, just glow,
02:44it's not really sweating, it's just got a little bit of a glow there.
02:46I'm going to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on a point right about there in order to lift this point inside of the curve
02:54and I've got an Input of 85, that's exactly what I want.
02:58Let's press Shift+Down Arrow in order to reduce the Output value to 77.
03:03So that's what we want, Input 85, Output 77, however, you get there, that's goodness, that's a real tanning goodness there.
03:10Now, bear in mind, we are not trying to make him George Hamilton tan,
03:13we are just trying to make him look like he gets out every once in a while.
03:16Now click OK in order to accept that modification; let's zoom back out.
03:20Actually, the image looks a heck of a lot better so this is before, he is too bright and this is after.
03:26Very, very nice.
03:29So let's go ahead and compare our images, compare the changes that we have made.
03:33This is the original image right there and this is the modified version with a nice brown shirt and some tanned skin,
03:41a darker environment in general, and the last thing that we need to do.
03:46Did I say this was the last exercise?
03:48It's not. This was the second last exercise in this series.
03:51In the final exercise we need to bring back the white to the eyes, notice how the eyes have gotten a little darker,
03:57this is before and this is after, so we are darkening up the whites of the eyes,
04:00we are darkening up the teeth every since slightly as well.
04:03We want to bring back those good highlights, eyes and teeth, my god, it shows a good highlight,
04:08and we are going to do that as I say in the last exercise.
Collapse this transcript
Exposing bright eyes and teeth
00:00Welcome to the last exercise of the series for real.
00:04In this exercise we are going to bring back the whites of the eyes and the highlights inside of the teeth and it's just going
00:09to look great, it's certainly easy to do too.
00:12I've gone ahead and saved my progress so far as He's so tan.psd inside the 05 Selected folder, he is not really all of that tan,
00:19he just has more of a healthy glow, but you get the idea.
00:22Alright, let's go ahead and what we really need is a Density Mask, something that's going to protect the eyes,
00:27so the eyes are going to turn black inside the mask, so are the teeth and that's going to protect the eyes
00:32from this tan modification right there, it's a tan modification, it's darkening the eyes and teeth as well as all the other stuff.
00:39So we want to turn off the Adjustment layer because we need to get those really light eyes and teeth.
00:45All right, so now go to the Channels palette, the Channels palette is always showing you the composite image.
00:49Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click on the Lightness channel right there, go back to Layers, turn on the Tan Layer right there,
00:57make sure it's active as well and click on that little Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the palette.
01:03And that's going to go ahead and protect the light portions of him
01:06and not protect the dark portions, that's the opposite of what we want.
01:10So we need to change this channel.
01:12So here's what we are going to do, we are going to Alt+Click or Option+Click on that Layer Mask right there.
01:17So we are seeing just the mask by itself.
01:19Now I want you to go to the Image menu, choose Adjustments and choose Levels;
01:24and in order to protect the eyes here's what we are going to do.
01:27We are going to actually increase the blacks like really significantly up to 185, so we just have a little bit of eye
01:34and teeth highlight left, some of the skin tones as well are pretty light and then we'll reduce the white value down to 215
01:43in order to make sure that those eyes and the teeth are absolutely white at this point, so that looks pretty good to me.
01:48And then we are going to do that trick where we reverse things, because we want a Density Mask,
01:52right, we want to protect the eyes and the teeth.
01:54So we are going swap out the Output values with each other.
01:57This time I'll just do it numerically, 255 instead of 0 for the first one, 0 instead of 255 for the last one, awesome!
02:05Alright, and if we feel like I don't know, I feel like, maybe I'm going a little too far with it, I would raise it up,
02:10notice now if you modify these values, this white point is now a black point
02:14because I reversed them; white is now getting mapped to black.
02:18So I'm changing the blacks with white points, it's a little confusing, and then I'm changing the whites
02:22with the black point because I'm in opposite world.
02:26All right, now click OK, so I like these values better 195, 225 work out better, click OK.
02:32Now what do you do, while you zoom in and you grab your lasso tool because this is like just a quick
02:37and dirty mask, it's going to work out beautifully though.
02:40And just go ahead and sort of lasso this eye a little bit and then Shift+Lasso this eye like so, and then Shift+Lasso the mouth
02:50like this, here, just the teeth, don't go down there into the lips we don't need that.
02:55And that's some good selecting, pretty easy, and then go up to the Select menu and choose Inverse in order to deselect the eyes
03:03and the mouth, and white is the foreground color, so press Alt+Backspace
03:07or Option+Delete to fill that selection with white, nice!
03:11Up to most elaborate mask on earth that's going to do as well.
03:13Now, Alt+Click or Option+Click on that mask in order to bring back the full color image and now let's zoom in
03:19and see what we've wrought, this is what it looks like. I'm going to Shift+Click on the mask incidentally.
03:24This is what the image looked like when we were darkening the eyes and the teeth.
03:29If I Shift+Click again, this is revealing the eyes and the teeth.
03:33If you don't want to reveal look at those little highlights I'm starting to reveal under the eye, check that out,
03:37see I'm highlighting those highlights right there.
03:39Why? Then just go ahead and grab yourself the Brush tool, make sure that you have a hard brush.
03:45So I'm going to click here and increase the hardness to a 100% like so, make sure the Mode is set to Normal because we just want
03:51to paint, I'm going to reduce the size of my brush and I'm painting with white, white is my foreground color,
03:56and if I paint with white I'm going to go ahead and un-protect those areas,
03:59reveal them so that they get toned down by the Adjustment layer.
04:02So just the eyes, let's see this under the other eye as well, just to make sure that we are not making too much light,
04:08and the teeth too so he's got some nice bright eyes and teeth, that's very important to a man of his stature of course.
04:14So this is just- so you know how far we've come in this last final project in the last final exercise.
04:21This is the before version, the original version of the image; this is the after version colorized and just basically modified
04:30in general so that we have these deep rich colors also some nice healthy skin here inside the ultra-powerful Lab mode.
Collapse this transcript
Conclusion
See ya
00:00I am known for my in-depth video series, but this,
00:03this is one of the shortest things I have ever done, I feel a little guilty in fact.
00:08but then it occurred to me that shortness of this series is in fact a testament to the efficiency of Lab.
00:15This is a color space that realizes you have better things to do with your time. It looks to you and it thinks,
00:20there's a busy professional.
00:22What can I do to help?
00:24Lab acknowledges,
00:25Lab appreciates,
00:26Lab respects. And you know what else?
00:30This is just a jumping off point. You are going to do things with Lab I never envisioned, you and Lab, I don't know something about
00:37the two of you.
00:38I see a happy future together. I now pronounce you
00:42two things that work well together.
00:45You may kiss the color space.
00:47Well, that's that. As I have mentioned I have lots more to show you, 30 hours on Channels and Masks alone,
00:53only about five minutes of which were spent with Lab,
00:56and don't forget
00:57if you want to see a series on Smart Objects,
00:59let us know.
01:01In the meantime, for lynda.com, this is Deke McClelland saying,
01:06See ya!
Collapse this transcript


Suggested courses to watch next:

Photoshop CS3 Color Correction (7h 13m)
Taz Tally

Photoshop CS3 for Photographers (13h 20m)
Chris Orwig



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