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

759 Backscatter and split toning

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

759 Backscatter and split toning

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take this monochrome underwater seascape and we're going to get rid of all this backscatter which is this floating junk in the water that's being picked up by the strobes and we're also going to add some color in the form of split toning. Now, if you open this image along with me here and the details appear to be quite gummy, as they are in my case, that's a function of the fact that Photoshop is not respecting the filter mask and so all you need to do is turn the smart filters off and then back on. Alright, so, we're going to start by taking a big swing at this backscatter because after all, if I were to double-click on the thumbnail for this layer, here inside the Layers panel, in order to bring up Camera Raw, we could go add all this junk using the spot removal tool which would take several dozen clicks and, I imagine, would be very boring for you to watch. So, fortunately, there's a better way. I'll just go ahead and cancel out of here. And then, with this smart object selected, and I can tell it's a smart object by the appearance of this little page icon which tells me that it's embedded inside this file, I'll go up to the Filter menu, choose Noise and then choose Median. And I came up with a radius value of eight pixels which makes everything look pretty darn gummy but it does a great job of wiping out that backscatter. So, this is before, where I had to turn off the preview check box and this is after. Obviously, I'm going too far which is why Photoshop gives me this filter mask which allows me selective control over the application of this filter. And so, I'll go ahead and grab my brush tool which you can get by pressing the B key and I'll click inside the filter mask right there, that's that white thumbnail, and then I'll right-click inside the image window. The size isn't as important as the hardness value which needs to be cranked down to zero percent. Then, you want to tap the D key to instate your default colors so the foreground color is white and then tap the X key in order to swap 'em so the foreground color is black which is going to allow you to mask away the important details inside this image, most notably the divers themselves who, we want to make sure, are nice and sharp and so, I'm going to paint them away as you're seeing right here and I'm also painting back their bubbles because otherwise, they're just going to be all gooey. Alright, now I'll reduce the size of my cursor by pressing the left bracket key. I'll press the X key in order to swap the foreground and background colors once again, so now the foreground color is white and then I'll just click some of these spots here in order to paint away the backscatter. And that's going to work out pretty nicely. Now, it doesn't get rid of everything which is why we need to get rid of the worst of the stuff using that spot removal tool. And so, I'll just go ahead and double-click on the thumbnail for this layer in order to bring up Camera Raw and I'll go ahead and grab that Spot Removal tool which also has a keyboard shortcut of B for brush. Notice my settings here, I've got a size value of 10, a feather of 50 and an opacity of 100% which works out pretty darn nicely and now, you just need to go after the biggest stuff, not all of it by any stretch of the imagine, just the really big junk. And you can probably get away with just clicking without worrying about exactly what is getting sourced where. But if you don't get the results you like, you could drag around this green dash circle. Alright, now I'm going to paint away that. So, mostly, I'm just clicking with the tool but, every once in a while, I'm dragging in order to paint away a large detail. This guy does not want to be lifting this detail right here and then I'll just go ahead and click a few more times and if you want to get a reality check, then just go ahead and click OK, because right now, you're not seeing the results of that median filter and you won't until you return to Photoshop, like so. Alright, now let's apply some split toning and you do that by, once again, double-clicking on the thumbnail for this layer in order to return to Camera Raw and then select this guy right here, Split Toning. And you're going to have a better sense for what's going on if you start by increasing the saturation values. So, here inside the Highlights area, I'll take the saturation value up to 60 and then I'll tab my way down to the saturation value in the Shadows region and I'll take it up to 20. Then, I'll take the hue value in the Highlights region up to 220 and I'll take the hue value in the Shadows region up to 30 and we get some very subtle color, as we're seeing here. After which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. And the color appears here inside Photoshop. Now, I want you to see something. Remember, in a previous movie, that I had just opened the DNG file inside Camera Raw and then I clicked OK? As a result, we're working inside the RGB mode here inside Photoshop but if I had not done that, if I had just set about converting to black and white right off the bat, then we would not see the color and that's because we would be working in Photoshop's Grayscale mode. I am not going to rasterize, by the way, so I'll just go ahead and click on that Don't Rasterize button. This message is meaningless when we're working non-destructively. So, I'll just go ahead and click discard. And we'd end up seeing a grayscale image, even though, where I had to double-click on this thumbnail again, it appears in color here inside Camera Raw. So, I just want you to bear that in mind. If you were to encounter something like that, you would just go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose RGB Color. You do not want to rasterize! It frustrates me, frankly, that rasterize is the default choice because if you were to do that, you would permanently damage your image and it would stay black and white, even as you convert the color mode to RGB. In any event, you definitely want to click Don't Rasterize in this case. Now, upon further reflection, I would like to see more color. So, I'm going to double-click on that thumbnail once again, switch over to the Split Toning tab and I'm going to take the highlight saturation value up to 100 and then I'm going to take the shadows saturation value up to 50 and I'll Shift-Tab back to the Balance option and take it down to negative 40 and, as you can see here, that's going to balance the colors towards the oranges which are assigned to the shadows. Alright, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change and now, I'm going to zoom in here so that you can see that we've got a big problem. Can you make that out in the video? We're losing noise. So, all of a sudden the noise is just getting canceled out by that median filter which means we need to bring back some grain and the best way to do that is to go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur Gallery and then choose Field Blur. Now, we don't need much blur, so I'm going to take this down to five pixels. Mostly what we want is noise. So, go ahead and switch to the Noise tab, down here in the bottom right corner, and then take the amount value up to 20% which is going to do a great job of matching that noise, at which point, you can go ahead and click OK to apply that change. And because the blur gallery is bound by the exact same filter mask as the median filter, everything works out quite nicely. And so, here's the image as it appeared at the outset of this movie, in black and white with a ton of backscatter and this is how it looks now, thanks to my ability to apply split toning in Camera Raw, as well as the backscatter defeating power of the median filter and the spot removal tool.

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