446 Combining the best of Lab and Camera Raw

- In this movie, I'll show you how to take that image that we corrected in the lab color mode in the previous movie, and we're going to further modify it using the Camera Raw Filter in order to achieve this effect here, and not only do we have some mellower colors and some more volumetic forms, but we also have an even smoother histogram. I'll go up to the "Window" menu and choose the "Histogram" command and we can see, right there, look at that guy, it looks a little spiky, until I click on the warning icon right there to update the histogram and you can see that it's just smooth as silk, and it's even smoother, amazingly, than the histogram for the original uncorrected image.

Notice it has a few jagged spikes going on. So, here's what we need to do, we're going to start inside the lab corrected image and I'm going to go ahead and hide the histogram panel, and I'll click into background, because obviously I can't apply camera raw to an adjustment layer so I'll click on a pixel based background instead, and then I'll go up to the "Filter" menu, and choose "Camera Raw Filter", here inside Photoshop CC by the way, and there's a got you. Basically, this filter is not applicable to lab images and that goes for an awful lot of filters inside Photoshop, so what do you do, you convert the image to RGB, but if you do that, of course, you lose the adjustment layer, but not if you work with a Smart Object.

So I'm going to go ahead and double click on this background, in order to bring up the "New Layer" dialogue box, and I'll just call this layer "model" and then I'll shift click on the balance layer so both of these layers are selected and then I'll right click inside the image, with the rectangular marquee tool, and I'll choose "Convert to Smart Object". That goes ahead and protects that lab image from any harm. Now, I'll go up to the "Image" menu, choose "Mode" and chose "RGB Color", and this time, I don't have to worry about flattening the image, or anything like that, I will get a message asking me if I want to rasterize the image, in which case I will flatten it, and there is no way I want to do that, in fact there's no upside to that.

So I'll go ahead and click "Don't Rasterize", in order to essentially house this lab modification, it's still a lab image, inside the Smart Object, but out here in the larger world of the Photoshop composition, we're now seeing it in RGB, which means I can now go to the "Filter" menu and choose "Camera Raw Filter" in order to bring up the camera raw dialogue box. All right, I'm going to start by making some color modifications, so I'll go ahead and click on "HSL/Grayscale" up here in these right hand icons, and what I want to do is get rid of some of the magenta in her lips.

If you zoom in on her lips, you can see, we have these red almost scarlet tones in the top lip, and then we have these vivid magentas in the bottom lip that are tapering into that same scarlet red territory. So what we need to do is select the targeted adjustment tool and then with the "Hue" tab active, that's very important, you want to just go ahead and drag inside the magenta area to lift those magentas all the way to plus 100, but I've done a number on the reds too, you can see that I've basically turned them into oranges which is not what I want.

So I'm going to take this top reds value back down to zero. Can you see the difference between the uncorrected image and the current correction? This is the way that the lips looked before, and were we to go the other direction, you can even more clearly see the difference right there, and this is the way the lips look now, thanks to the fact that I maxed out this magentas value so that the lips are essentially consistent. All right, now I'm going to zoom out a little, and I'm going to switch over to the "Luminance" tab, right here and now I'm going to drag inside my lips in order to darken them, like so, and I want to take that reds value right there down to negative 30 and in doing so, I also took the oranges value down to negative 12, that's probably fine but the actual value I came up with was negative 10, pretty small difference but big difference where the darkness of the lips and the skin tones are concerned.

All right, now we have way too much yellow going on inside the sunglasses. If I were to click "OK" to apply the filter for a moment, and then switch over to the "Channels" panel, notice if I click on the "Red" channel, that we've got these bright sunglasses in addition to a lot of other bright details in this portrait shot. The "Green" channel looks more or less normal, except we've got a lot of posterization inside the lips, and then the "Blue" channel is ridiculous. We have nothing going on inside the sunglasses and we have all sorts of bright tones elsewhere, which tells us, of course, that somebody's made a deliberate modification to these glasses, there's no way that this is anything but a selective adjustment so what we need to do is rebalance things a little, so I'm going to click on the "RGB" composite once again, switch back to the "Layers" panel, and double click on "Camera Raw Filter" in order to bring back my adjustment, and I will, once again, click on "HSL/Grayscale" and what we need to do is balance some of the saturation values, so I'm going to click on the "Saturation" tab right there, and I'll switch back to the targeted adjustment tool, which has a really great keyboard shortcut of "t".

It is probably my favorite of these modification tools. So I'm going to start by dragging inside the sunglasses here in order to leach some of the yellow out of them, like so, until I get a yellows value of negative 30, looks pretty good. I also managed to take the greens value down to negative two but that was probably because when I put this together, I was dragging from a slightly different location. All right, now let's increase the saturation of the lips a little, so I'll just go ahead and drag inside them until I get a reds value of plus 30, an oranges value of plus 19 is what I came up, for what that's worth, and then, notice her neck right here, I'm going to go and zoom in on it, we're starting to see the neck separate between these warm tones up top here and these purplish tones that are being informed by the color of the jacket but then in between, we've got some colors that are graying out, and I can make that very apparent if I take this magentas value down.

So notice this ring of magentas right there, what I need to do is take it up slightly so that it's commensurate with the modification to the reds, so I'll go ahead and take it up to plus 20, let's say. All right, now I want to fix the detail a little bit. So I'm going to zoom in on the lips, where a lot of the posterization is occurring, and we can see some of the noise inside of her nose, as well, so I'm going to crank this "Luminance" noise value up to 50 and then I'll take the "Color" noise value up to 50 as well, and that smooths things out considerably, and now I'll just crank the "Sharpening" value all the way up to 150, that brings out a lot of additional noise thanks to the "Detail" value, so I'm going to take it down to zero, and then I'll increase the "Radius" value to 2.0 like so and that'll just thicken up the edges a little bit.

All right, now I'm going to zoom out and switch back to the "Basic" panel, where I'm going to take the "Clarity" value, I think, up to plus 50, let's say, just so that we have a little bit of additional edge contrast which is going to give us some sculpture in the face. Notice this is how she looks with the low clarity value. This is how she looks with a pretty meaty clarity value. 50 is, you know, relatively high. All right, now, notice that I'm losing some of my blacks up here, so I'm going to press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and drag this "Blacks" slider triangle to the left, until I see a little bit of clipping, indicated by the color onscreen, and now I'll click "OK" in order to accept that modification.

All right, now let's bring back the histogram panel and I'll click on that little update icon. You can see, we have a very smooth histogram, but you may wonder why it's so short. The one I showed you before was pretty tall, and that's because we have this shadow clipping over here on the left hand side. Now this is, strictly speaking, color clipping. We don't have anything turning absolutely black, we just have some independent clipping in the red, green, and blue channels. Here's how to get rid of it by the way. This is a little meta tip, this might be the best part of this whole movie. Double click on the "Camera Raw Filter" once again to bring back camera raw of course and then click in the "Vibrance" value.

As you may know, it's an equal opportunity saturation adjustment tool, so in other words, if I reduce that vibrance value to negative 20, I'm going to leach away just the most saturated colors. So, in other words, it's not going to have a huge affect on the overall image, but it is going to have an affect on the clipping, so again I just changed that value to negative 20, I'll click "OK", and now check out what happens to the histogram. Look at that, we lost all of our color clipping over here on the left hand side, and if I click this little update icon, we have a super smooth histogram indeed.

All right, now I'll go ahead and press the "F" key a couple of times in order to switch to the full screen mode, we might as well go ahead and zoom in as well, and just for the sake of comparison, I'll press the "F12" key to revert the image. This is the image as it appeared, corrected in the lab color mode, it looked great in the previous movie, but now it looks garish by comparison, and here is the way it looks now, thanks to our ability to convert the lab image to RGB inside of the Smart Object container so nothing gets harmed and then, correct the result using the Camera Raw Filter.