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

725 Creating a full-color hedcut effect

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

725 Creating a full-color hedcut effect

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now last week I showed you how to take a full color photograph and turn it into a black and white hedcut a la The Wall Street Journal. The thing is I really miss that color, which is why this week I'm gonna show you how to bring the color back. Now you may look at this and say, gee whiz Deke, that's just a matter of applying the Color blend mode. No. Here, let me show you exactly why that is not the way to work. All right, here's the full color hedcut in all of its on-screen glory. We're gonna be starting off inside of that file that we created last week, but as you may recall, this is a grayscale image as indicated by the word Gray up here in the title tab. Grayscale images cannot accommodate color inside Photoshop. So what you need to do is go up to the Image menu, choose Mode, and choose RGB Color. Now at this point you're gonna see a couple of alert messages. If you want the effect to look absolutely the same as it does now you'll have to flatten the image. However, if you wanna keep it nice and flexible you don't wanna flatten it. And so I'm gonna click on the Don't Flatten button. And then Photoshop will ask you if you wanna rasterize your smart objects, which actually serves no purpose whatsoever, so I'll click Don't Rasterize. And a moment later you are going to see the image change. Notice how it brightened up. So this is the before, grayscale version of the image, and this is the after, RBG version. So we're brightening the image quite a bit. In a way it kind of flattens the effect, because we're no longer seeing the big shadows under the nose and down here in the neck. However, once we add some color it's gonna look absolutely great. All right, so I'm gonna scroll up to the top of the Layers panel and click on that top layer, which is called firm lines. And then I'll switch over to the original full color photograph, which as you may recall, comes to us from the Dreamstime image library. About which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of that URL layer by pressing the Backspace or Delete key. And now what I wanna do is double-click on this layer here inside the Layers panel and I'm gonna call this new layer full color and click OK. And now armed with the Retangular Marquee Tool, which as you can see, is selected up here at the top of the toolbox. I'll right-click any old place inside the image window and choose Duplicate Layer. And then I'll go ahead and change the Document to Faux hedcut, which is the file from last week, and I'll click OK. And now if I switch back to it you can see that we have that full color image at the top of the stack. Now what I'd like to do is use this layer to colorize everything below it. And so normally you would just change the blend mode to Color, which is a total no-brainer, but it also doesn't work. And that's because we had very little in the way of gray values. We've got a lot of blacks, which don't colorize, and a lot of whites, which don't colorize either. Just the gray values. And so just the luminance levels in between respond to the Color blend mode. Which is why we're seeing just a little bit colorization around those thick outlines. And so what we'd have to do instead is switch this guy to Multiply and that will infuse the effect with all kinds of color. The problem is it goes way too far. In other words, we're overdarkening the shadow details. So somehow what we have to do is extract the luminance from the color and then Multiply it in. And so I'm just gonna turn this full color layer off. I'll go on record of saying I'm not sure this is the most efficient approach. It seems like there'd be a better way to work, but here's what I came up with. I'll go ahead and switch over to the full color photograph and then I'll go to the Image menu, choose Mode, and choose Lab Color, which is gonna separate the luminance and color information. And now I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Channels command to switch to the Channels panel, so that we can see we've got this Lightness channel here as well as a and b. And if I shift + click on b you can see, that's the color information without the luminance data, which looks weird and really isn't gonna do us any good. So what I'm gonna do is click on that Lightness channel and then I'll turn on the eyeball in front of the Lab image, so we can keep track of it. What I wanna do now is just fill the Lightness channel with white. So go ahead and tap the d key to make sure your default colors are in place, which is gonna set the background color to white. And then I'll just go ahead and press ctrl + backspace, that's cmd + delete on the Mac, to get rid of all the luminance. So the Lightness channel is now white and the a and b channels have all the color. That's just too darn light however, so I'm gonna press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that change. Notice the Lightness channel is still selected independently. At which point I'll go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and choose Levels. Or you could just press Control + L or Command + L on the Mac. And now what I wanna do is brighten the shadows. And so I'm gonna click in this first Output Levels value and change it to 200, which is going to lighten this channel dramatically. So basically what's happening is the darkest color now has a luminance level of 200, which is very bright, while the lightest is 255, which is white. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. Now you can switch back to the Layers panel, right-click in the image once again with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, and choose Duplicate Layer. I'm gonna change the Document to Faux hedcut, and I'm gonna call this new layer extract, just so that I know that I've extracted this color data. And I'll click OK. And that goes ahead and performs the color conversion from the Lab mode to RGB on the fly, because after all, the layer composition is an RGB file. And so you can now see we have an extract layer at the top of the stack. And so I'll now change it's blend mode to Multiply and we end up with this very bright effect right here. Now I still have that full color layer in place and it's gonna come in handy. So I'll go ahead and turn off the extract layer, turn on full color, notice how much darker it is, click on it, and now I'm gonna change its blend mode to Overlay, just so we can see what's gonna happen. Once again, we're not getting much out of the Overlay mode and that's because white and black are not affected, just the colors in between. However, if I was to switch that mode to Hard Light then we're gonna end up colorizing all of those black outlines. Pretty much everything that's black is getting colorized by this full color layer. So now that we have those full color outlines I'm gonna turn on the extract layer, so that we have color inside of the model's face as well. All right, now I'll press shift + f in order to switch to the full screen mode. And I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. And just so you can compare before and after we started quite obviously with a black and white image and we now have a full color image thanks to our ability to extract the color data using the Lab mode and then Multiply those colors into our digital hedcut effect. All right, so that's the end of the hedcut technique, which is too bad, it was a really good one. Now remember that time I told you we were gonna create a mashup of E.T. and Jurassic Park, Jurassic World to some of you, but then the Avengers got in the way? Well next week we're gonna really do it. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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