Color to portrait: Jon

- [Instructor] Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly, the series where we explore how we can improve our photographs with many different tools, including Photoshop, where we are right now. This is a little bit of a before and after. We're going to start off with the image on the left and explore how we can fine tune the color and tone to create a more modern and monochromatic look like you can see over here, where we have kind of these whiter skin tones and the bluer tones in the shadows.

Now, this project comes from a real world scenario. This is a portrait that I captured for publication. They needed me to deliver it to them quickly and they wanted it to have kind of a certain look to it, like the one which we just saw. So, how are we going to achieve that? Well, what we're going to do is work with adjustment layers. Here, we'll be creating five different adjustment layers: hue/sat, black and white, curves, and then two color balance layers. Right, well, let's begin with hue/saturation. I'll click on that one, and let me zoom in on the face a little bit more so we can see that.

Then I'll use the target adjustment tool. And what I want to do is get rid of the reds or modify those. So I'm going to click into where I see some of the reds of the skin tones. And this works with a lot of photographs. What you can do is, you can pull the reds out or you can shift them to yellow. So if you drag this over to the right a little bit, can you see how all of the sudden, a lot of the reds have disappeared? Let me zoom in even closer, so you can see this. See how we've kind of taken some of those reds down? Now, this isn't the finished look, but this is something that I'll end up doing with a lot of portraits.

I'll experiment with taking out some of the color variety in the skin, in order create a little bit more of an even color palette. So that's what we have so far. Next up is to use a black and white adjustment layer and to change this layer blending mode to Soft Light. This will give us nice punch as far as our contrast. It will mute the colors and tones. And often we'll want to fine tune this by dropping the intensity of it to something a little bit less. Now, the image is still too dense for me, meaning, I need it to be brighter, almost overexposed.

So I'll go to curves. And here we'll just click and drag this curve up. And so what I'm trying to do with this one is just brighten things up. I think kind of a brighter mood is more fitting for the type of color palette that we had. But still, right now it's just like we've kind of removed color and changed brightness, right? So here was the before. You know, sometimes you get your original image out of your camera and it's good, but the color, you just want to, you want to do something kind of magical or special. That's what we're doing here. So, remove some reds, black and white on Soft Light, then we go to our curves adjustment layer and fine tune that a little bit, too.

Next, let's use color balance. With color balance, you can go into shadows, midtones, highlights. Let's hit the shadows. And here, as we start to bring in some cyan, can you see how I can change the deeper tones there? And add a little bit of blue. Now we're starting to see a little bit of magic there, right? So we're getting this really kind of intriguing look. It almost, I don't know how to explain it except it feels modern, it feels cinematic. I think that's, cinematic's probably the best way.

It's almost like cinematic color grading or something like that. All right, well, after having done that, I'll create one more color balance adjustment layer. And in my midtones, I'm actually going to bring back a little bit of reds and yellows. Yeah, and then I'm going to mask this into specific areas. So here we'll go to the Mask tab, invert that, grab our brush. And I'll paint with white with a bigger brush. Right bracket key makes that brush a little bit bigger, left bracket key makes it smaller. Opacity, how do you change that quickly? Just type a number on your keyboard.

There, it's 30%, great. So now, just to show you too, brush with no hardness. I think I almost always use a brush without hardness. So I just leave that down. And anyhow, I'm just going to bring in a little bit of color into the cheeks. A little bit of color into the lips. And all that I'm doing here is just bringing back just slight color. So not over-the-top color, but I just don't want it to feel too lifeless, if that makes sense. And so here's that slight color. I'm guessing you can't probably even see the difference.

I can see it on my monitor, which is important, and it's subtle, but if I were to exaggerate it, let me just show you for a minute, you can kind of see how I'm bringing color into these areas. You see how it's in those areas. But then, under the Mask tab, if we increase our feather, watch what happens to that color, how it will just blend right in. Do you see how it's kind of blending in? So, with a lower amount of color, of course, you don't, you won't need to go that high, but you can see how you can just take that and blend that in really nicely here.

A little bit less feather, 'cause it's not quite so dramatic of a color shift. All right, well there you have it. There is a fun and creative way that we can work with color and tone. Let me go through those steps once more. It started off with an original image. Then we used hue/saturation, targeting the reds. We went into the red channel, and in the reds we dropped our saturation down and then also brought the hue up a little bit, so that made those reds a little bit more yellow.

Next step was a black and white adjustment layer on Soft Light. And we experimented with the intensity of that layer. And then we did curves to brighten overall image. Color balance to bring in some color into those shadows. And then, last but not least, just a little bit more warmth. We fine tuned, kind of brought in a little bit of that color back. All right, well that's a fun way that you can modify color and tone with your images. When you work with images like this, keep in mind it's step by step, right? It's not one adjustment, it's not two, it's not three, sometimes it's four, five, six, who knows.

But it's a combination of taking those steps which can allow you to create really unique and beautiful color in your photographs. Well, that wraps up this week's episode. As always, I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you have a wonderful, fantastic day today. I'll look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.