From the course: Photo Tools Weekly
Creating stylistic color with Photoshop
From the course: Photo Tools Weekly
Creating stylistic color with Photoshop
- [Chris] Hello, friends. This is Chris, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Photoshop, and we'll be doing a little project where we will take a window-light portrait that I captured last week, this one here, and we'll explore how we can create a more modern or commercial look so that we can make the image look like this. Let me zoom out a little bit so that you can see that from a distance as well. Here's kinda the before as it appears out of the camera, and then after has more of that snap, or kind of a modern feel to it. Well how do we create a look like that? Well let me delete that layer, and let's create it ourselves. One of the ways that we can begin to do this is to think about the image. One of the things I see in the image is it feels a little flat. It needs more contrast; it needs more brightness. It needs some modification with color. So here, we'll use curves and a couple of hue, saturation adjustments as well. So with curves, what we can do is we can even just bring in our endpoint to kind of brighten up the image here. And then also add a touch of an S-curve. And S-curves are the curves which give us this nice contrast and color pop, so we'll go ahead and apply that there. And if we look at our before and after, we can see, yeah, great, it's looking better, right? It's more kind of alive and has more of a snap to it. One of the downsides, though, of S-curve, is that you can oversaturate certain colors. And what I wanna do is I wanna remove some of the reds and oranges from the image, and to get really specific with color like that, often we'll use hue-saturation. So if you click on the icon and use their targeted adjustment tool, you can sample different colors. This shows me I'm now working in my reds, and let me exaggerate this for a second. Can you see how I can increase and decrease those reds? So I can just take a little bit of the reds out, and maybe bring a little brightness back into those there too. Then, we can use this tool again, and we can click on another color. Let's see, actually, maybe manually. We'll just go into our yellows, and we're gonna bring some of the yellows down, and then bring back a little brightness there as well. So what this is doing for me, this layer here, is it's allowing me to have all of the contrast, you can see the before and after, without that overdone color in certain areas. Now, if you feel like you took out too much, kinda like I feel here, we'll just go ahead and take this back a little bit, and I'm gonna drop this back just a touch here, and bringing out some of that, I want a little more of the color, so it looks like I needed about half of that intensity, there. Then if you wanna even remove more color, you can get specific. So use, create another adjustment, say the hair is too bright, too much yellow there, maybe too much red in certain places, and then go to your mask, invert that. And then just paint that away in certain areas. So grab a brush, soft edge brush, tap the right bracket key to make the brush a little bigger. Opacity, drop below 50. I'm just gonna take out where the hair color just looks kinda fake. It just went almost too colorful there. And around the edges in the shadows, sometimes those will have a lot of red or yellow in them. I still want some of the color in the skin, but just not everywhere, so I'm just painting through the image, making sure to cover any little area where I feel like it might be nice to just knock this back a little bit, all right? Kinda like that. These adjustments are subtle, but sometimes they can really help. And so, so far, we can see here's the before, and then there is the after. Loving it. Now if you wanna fine-tune your contrast, just go back to that adjustment, and now that you've done all this work, you can always go and modify these endpoints here and add a little bit more or less. As I add more, it increases color saturation, so I might go to this one and then boost that up. And because I know how these work together, what I can do is find the combination of all of these values here, and I can go into this one too and go back to my yellows and drop the yellows down even a little bit more, there. And the reds, too. So I'm just gonna remove a little bit more from that area, like that. All right, now so far so good. We have this new look in the photograph. Here's before, straight out of the camera. We've seen that look a million times. Now here's a look that has a little bit more of that modern kind of feel to it. And with all of this, I like to go back and modify my adjustment layers as needed. And so I'm just gonna try to find a good mix with all these values. Sometimes it's just about kinda combining those together. All right, well if I zoom back in, you can see how we have crafted this look using multiple adjustment layers, going from ordinary to something with a little more pop or snap in it. And on that, it wraps up this week's episode. Hope you have a great rest of your day, and hope to see you next time. Bye for now.
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Contents
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Workflow strategy when shooting Raw + JPG3m 54s
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Quicker processing with review and camera calibration4m 15s
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Creating a concept layout with Lightroom and Photoshop8m 56s
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Fun layer project in Photoshop and Lightroom7m 43s
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Brush away unwanted objects in Lightroom CC5m 11s
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Using blur and type, part 14m 26s
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Using blur and type, part 26m 16s
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Better black and white workflow, part 19m 28s
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Better black and white workflow, part 24m 4s
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Action sports retouching, part 18m 57s
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Action sports retouching, part 26m 14s
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Face-Aware Liquify6m 59s
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Fixing teeth in a fashion photograph7m 51s
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Replace the sky in a drone photograph9m 6s
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Creating a great exposure from a single frame, part 15m 30s
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Creating a great exposure from a single frame, part 29m 29s
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Creating a luminous black-and-white portrait, part 14m 13s
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Creating a luminous black-and-white portrait, part 28m 8s
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Fixing overexposure with Camera Raw, part 15m 10s
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Fixing overexposure with Camera Raw, part 28m 52s
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Creative layer blending with Adobe Mix9m 58s
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Making a composite with Adobe Mix9m 35s
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Bring out detail in a landscape photograph, part 16m 20s
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Bring out detail in a landscape photograph, part 27m 51s
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Export a image from video footage9m 9s
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Finishing an iPhone photo11m 38s
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Combining the best expressions from two images5m 30s
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Celebrity portrait workflow in Lightroom: Part 15m 51s
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Celebrity portrait workflow in Lightroom: Part 26m 22s
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Creative layer blending project9m 14s
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Replacing a background and creating vivid colors6m 7s
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Jump for joy: Finishing a beach photo in Lightroom and Photoshop8m 57s
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Becoming an expert with masking in Photoshop6m 12s
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Advanced masking speed tips8m 29s
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Preparing a portrait for Instagram with Lightroom5m 25s
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Finishing a portrait with Photoshop7m 59s
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Using Lightroom to creating a stylized look that prints well5m 22s
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Cleaning up a creative portrait6m 37s
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Hacking Lightroom to create layouts for other projects6m 17s
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Using Content Aware Scale to add to the composition4m 25s
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Extending and filling in the background projects7m 27s
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How to create Gradient Tone Mapping color effects9m
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Creating more precise Gradient Map effects6m 47s
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Natural wrinkle reduction7m 10s
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Advanced wrinkle reduction12m 50s
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Tips for viewing and organizing your layers in Photoshop8m 11s
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Becoming an expert in layers in Photoshop5m 17s
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Using VSCO in Lightroom7m 27s
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Syncing adjustments in Lightroom7m 18s
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High-impact color with Camera Raw and Photoshop6m 57s
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Using Lightroom and Photoshop to create vivid color6m 1s
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Intro to better B&W with the Silver Effex Pro plugin5m 47s
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Taking a deeper dive into Silver Effex Pro10m 10s
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Creating a Panoramic Photo in Lightroom4m 47s
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Advanced Lightroom and Photoshop Pano Workflow6m 55s
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Opening raw files into Photoshop4m 13s
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Three ways to work with Camera Raw and Photoshop8m 14s
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Smart Filters: Using Smart Filters for creative options6m 53s
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Stacking up Smart Filter effects6m 2s
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Cleaning up and removing the background of an image8m 8s
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Two ways to add a new background8m
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Covering up problems in the frame7m 36s
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Removing a person and finishing a photograph9m 20s
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Photoshop Fix to Photoshop CC workflow11m 22s
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Add light to photos with Lightroom10m 56s
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Use Lightroom Collections to process color and black-and-white images6m 39s
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Skin smoothing with the Imogenic plugin Portraiture7m 27s
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Advanced Skin Smoothing Control with Portraiture9m 7s
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Accurate sharpening with Lightroom6m 4s
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Create Collections in Lightroom8m 12s
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Craft creative looks with the Alien Skin Exposure plugin in Lightroom10m 25s
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Use the Alien Skin Exposure plugin in Photoshop11m 32s
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Quick mobile retouching with Photoshop Fix7m 47s
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Add Lens Flare with more precise control9m 50s
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Two ways to crop in Photoshop and extend the canvas6m 9s
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A few methods for working with canvas size7m 45s
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Use plugins in Photoshop for special effects: Analog Efex Pro6m 57s
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Use plugins in Photoshop for special effects: Analog Efex Pro Advanced5m 41s
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Lightroom cropping shortcuts7m 59s
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Remove unwanted objects in Photoshop4m 30s
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Remove unwanted objects in Photoshop: Advanced5m 56s
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Use plugins in Photoshop for better results: Color Efex Pro11m 10s
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Preserve tones with the help of Lightroom clipping indicators6m 3s
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