From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

714 Contour map + gradient map

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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714 Contour map + gradient map

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- [Narrator] In this movie I'll show you how to combine a contour map along with a gradient map. And that will allow us to take this effect that we created in the previous movie and turn it into this cool color effect right here. Alright, so here we are in Photoshop with the top layer selected. Here inside the Layers panel which is going to allow me to add a layer at the top of the stack. By going up to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer and then choosing Gradient Map, which will allow me to name the layer as I create it. And I'm going to go ahead and call this guy Purply Blues because that's more or less what it's gonna be. And then I'll click OK. Now the purpose of the gradient map feature is to map colors onto existing luminous levels inside the image. We're mapping the colors from left to right, black to white. So in other words, any color that's found over here on the left side of the gradient will map to black and any color on the right side will map to white. So all we're doing at this point is making the blacks black and the whites white and everything else in between some shade of gray. If we wanted to switch that around I could turn on the reverse checkbox. I don't want to do that however, so I'll turn that off. And I'll design my own full color gradient by clicking on that gradient ramp right there, which will open the Gradient Editor dialog box. Now, currently black is set to black which is exactly what we want. If you wanted to change that you could double click on that little color swatch below the gradient bar, in order to bring up the Color Picker dialog box. I'm happy with black, however, so I'll just cancel that. I do want to change the white color. So I'll double click on it's color stop. The color stops, by the way, are located below this gradient bar right here. These guys above the bar are opacity stops and we're gonna leave those alone. So I'll just go ahead and double click on that white color stop and I'm going to change the hue value to 180 degrees which is cyan. I'll take the saturation value up to 30% and I'll leave the brightness value set to 100%. And then I'll click OK. And we're now mapping all the whites to this pale cyan. Alright, now I'm going to add a color stop right about there. I actually want the location value to be 20%. And then I'll double click on that color stop to once again visit the Color Picker dialog box. I'll change the hue value to 300 degrees which, as you can see, is magenta. I will take the saturation value up to 100% and then I'll take the brightness value down to 20%. So we have a kind of dark purplish color. Then I'll click OK. Now I'll create another color stop right about there. I'm creating these color stops by just clicking below the gradient bar. And notice I have a location of 50% which is exactly what I want. So I'll double click on that stop and I'll click in the hue value and I'll press Shift + Down Arrow a bunch of times to take that value down to 210 degrees which is blue. And then I'll tab down to the brightness value and take it up to 50% and I'll click OK. Alright, now I want to add another color stop right about there, actually not quite, I want the location to be 80%. Then I'll double click on that guy. A hue value of 210 is fine. I'm going to set the saturation value to 50%. And I'm going to take the brightness value up to 80%. And what's so magic about these values? Absolutely nothing. They're just values that I came up with through trial and error. Now click OK. Now you could go ahead and name this gradient and click the New button in order to add it to your gradient library, if you want to. I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to click OK, in order to create that new layer as we're seeing right there. Now I actually don't want to darken the colors quite this much and so I'm just going to mix the colors associated with this purply blues layer along with the original luminous levels by changing the blend mode from normal to color. Like so, and that will end up giving us this effect here. Now, my one problem with this is that these black lines are cutting into this kind of purplish background right there. And you might think that you can just darken up the colors by clicking on this gradient ramp once again to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box and then you could drag the blacks over like so in order to darken up everything. Problem is the reason it's not working is because the blend mode is now set to color. So we are no longer affecting the luminous levels. So if I want to darken things up, I just cancel out here. And then I would go put to the Layer menu, choose New Adjustment Layer and choose the Levels command in order to create a levels adjustment. Again, I'm choosing that command so that I can name the layer on the fly. You're supposed to be able to alt click on this little black white icon and choose a command from the list while the Alt key is down. That works great. On to Mac where you press and hold the Option key but on the PC it hasn't been working for years now so that's why I go to the command. Every once in a while people ask me. And I'm just going to go ahead and call this guy a blacken and click OK. And then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac and I'll drag this black slider triangle. And because I have the Alt or Option key down I can preview the effect of my change. If I release the Alt or Option key you can see I'm just seeing a full color image. But if I have that Alt or Option key down I can see which colors are going totally to black because they show up as black onscreen. And so with the black point of 20 everything works out quite nicely. And a great thing now is the black continues from the background into these contour lines that are etched into the face. So that each one of these slices looks independent from the ones above and below it. Now if you compare this to the final effect here, you can see that the final effect is a little softer. And let me show you what I mean. I'll go ahead and switch back to what we have so far. I'll double click on the thumbnail for that blacken layer to once again bring up the Properties panel. And I'm going to make this panel a little bigger so that I can see the entire histogram. Notice if I press and hold the Alt key while clicking and holding on this white slider triangle we can preview that we have some blown highlights inside this image. Which is fine. This is a highly graphical effect but let's say that's not quite what you want. In that case, go ahead and click on that H lines layer right there and change its blend mode from overlay which is the blend mode we assigned in the previous movie to soft light instead. And that's going to temper the effect as we're seeing right here. That also brightens the blacks in the background. So if you look carefully, we can once again see those purple slices. To get rid of those, switch back to the blacken layer right there and then press and hold the Alt key, and click and hold on that black slider triangle. At which point you can see we've got a bunch of colors that aren't quite black in the background but they more or less go away if I take that black point value up to 30, like so. At which point you can see we have some nice dark blacks. If that's not quite good enough for you, notice we do have a little bit of purple showing up in this region right here. Then just press and hold that Alt key again and click and hold on that black slider triangle and take it up to, say, 40 which is gonna make that background very black, indeed. Now, I'll go ahead and hide the Properties panel and I'll press Shift + f in order to switch to the full screen mode and I'll zoom on in as well. And that's how you combine a contour map along with a gradient map adjustment layer here inside Photoshop.

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