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

881 What if Rembrandt had painted sea lions?

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

881 What if Rembrandt had painted sea lions?

- [Instructor] In this movie, I answer that burning question, what if Rembrandt had painted sea lions? And so the idea is I'm going to take that image that I developed in the previous movie, and I'm going to warm it up and give it some additional chiaroscuro, if you will, so that interplay of highlight and shadow, first pioneered by Caravaggio, but it caught on with the Dutch, including, as I say, Rembrandt. All right, so all I'm going to do is create a solid fill layer and set it to the Vivid Light blend mode. And here's how that's going to work. I'll go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and then choose Solid Color, and I'll go ahead and name this layer warmth, let's say, and click OK. And then, I just dialed in a warm color, with a hue value of 30 degrees, a saturation of 40%, and a brightness of 60%, and you can see that we get this kind of enlightened beige, that would've been very popular with Rembrandt, at which point, I'll click OK in order to create that new layer. All right, next I decide to experiment with the blend mode, and I went ahead and dropped down to these guys, the Contrast modes, which begin with Overlay, and end with Hard Mix, which is hardly what I'm looking for, but one of the advantages of a blend mode like Hard Mix, is that it responds differently to the opacity and fill values, so notice if I press the escape key, here on the PC, to unstick my blend mode pop-up menu here, not necessary on the Mac, and then I take the opacity value down to 50%, by tapping the five key, that we have a terrible looking effect, whereas, if I tap the zero key to increase the opacity value back to 100%, and by the way, the reason this is working is that my rectangular marquee tool is active, up here near the top of the toolbox, and now I'll press shift + 5 instead to take the fill opacity down to 50%, and you can see that we get a much different looking effect. I'll try to make this even more obvious by pressing shift + 3, let's say, to take the fill opacity down to 30%, notice that we're getting some very smooth transitions, whereas if I press shift + 0, to take the opacity value up to 100%, and I just tap the three key by itself, to take the opacity value down to 30%, we get this terrible looking posterization. All right, but that's not what I ultimately did. I'm just going to tap the zero key, to take the opacity value back up to 100%, and I'll press shift + 5, to reduce the fill value to 50%, and then, I will switch to a different blend mode, that also differently supports opacity and fill. There are eight of them in all, and among the contrast modes, there are three. So we have Vivid Light, Linear Light, and Hard Mix, so those are the three modes, where the contrast modes are concerned, that respond differently to the fill and opacity values. I went with Vivid Light to produce this effect right here. All right, so just so you can see the difference, I'll turn the warmth layer off, this is before, and this is after. Once again notice that the opacity value is set to 100%, and the fill value is set to 50%. Now, I think that does a brilliant job of warming up the sea lions, however, we're also warming up the surface of the water, which I don't think is what we want, so I'm going to add a layer mask by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and clicking on it, it may be that your layer already has a layer mask, in which case, you can skip that step. And then, you want to select the Gradient tool, which you can get by pressing the g key. All right, now I'll go up here to the far left side of the Options bar, and I'll right-click on this little gradient icon, and I'll choose Reset Tool, and that way, assuming that you tapped the d key, to instate your default fill and stroke colors right here, you will see a white to black gradient like so. And now what I want to do is drag from about the top of the central sea lion's head to its tail, up here toward the top of the image, and I'm going to press the shift key as I do so in order to constrain the angle of my drag to exactly vertical, at which point I will apply white down to the start point, and black to the end of my drag up here toward the top of the image. And that helps to restore some of the natural blues. So you can see the difference if I shift + click on this layer mask. This is how things looked without the layer mask, this is how things look with that gradient layer mask now. All right, and just so we can see the big difference here, this is the developed version of the photograph that we saw at the outset of the movie, and this is that version now, as it would've been captured by that Dutch master, who never saw a digital camera in his entire life, Rembrandt van Rijn.

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