3 MUST KNOW Color Grading Secrets

i'm going to share with you three expert tips for working with color let's face it working with color in photoshop or any program for that matter is not a very easy thing to do we think it's simple because we take color photos right but there's a lot of things that we can do in our images that are going to exploit the colors to create mood and emotion and feelings with our viewers that we need to do with our images and it's not always easy to control that because we all don't have a really strong grasp on color theory while you may not have a world of time to dive into all the color theory concepts there are some things that you can do right now that are going to make your images exponentially better when working with color the first tip i have for you is start really heavy like really heavy-handed and then dial it down so we're looking at a photograph here of kansas city it is beautiful in kansas city in the springtime the red buds back here are just on fire so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to add let's just add something like a selective color adjustment layer i'm not going to go too far into the weeds on what the selective color adjustment does but i am going to show you my thought process on how i edit the colors in the image using the selective color adjustment layer so the way i think about this the way i look at this i'm going to start with the sky with this guy do i want more cyan in it you see i bring it all the way up to see what it's going to look like and then all the way down to see what it looks like so i might bring that down a little bit how about magenta all the way up bring it down add some magenta in there gives it some contrast yellow bring it down bring it up not a whole lot of difference there let's take a look at something like the yellows or even the greens the greens might deal with the grass here let's see if we take magenta out it makes that grass look awesome but also kind of like some toxic stuff there so let's not do that uh let's see if we increase the cyan a little bit there to balance maybe adding some more of that green and then adding a little bit more yellow to that green let's see what happens here so we increase as far as we can go with these individual colors and do the same thing with our magenta bring it all the way up bring it all the way down you see how we're getting a big spread of color at some point when you're moving the slider back and forth while you're doing this your eye is going to say hey blake stop all right that looks good right there it's my eye telling me by going back and forth what it likes and what it what it sees in the image now if we look at the before and the after our greens look better our blues look better let's take a look at the reds same concept do i want more sign on the red no because these beautiful buildings in kansas city these brick buildings now become brown so let's bring this down and look we take away cyan from those reds and really that helps these the red just pop let's see what happens we round them off with a little bit of magenta in there and then maybe add a little bit of yellow to those reds now before and after here's the before here's the after now what i would do here at this point is a subtle mix here maybe say okay that's a little too much let's go ahead and bring the opacity down a little bit to get a little bit of the best of both worlds but i start heavy really heavy-handed and then i slowly taper down i do that with almost every setting that i do not just with the color work that i do the second piece of advice i have for you is to limit your color palette so yes we're working with color but we want to make sure that we limit that color palette so we're not trying to do too much with the colors here's a perfect example of an image where we've done entirely too much with the color we say to ourself yeah let's get some color in there and i'm thinking no that's way too much color in there ideally what you'd want to do here is select the colors that you do want to exaggerate the colors that you do want to exploit and let those ones pop forward while you keep the other ones at bay i'll give you an example of this this image is from agate beach now if you look at the color palette here it is a very dominant color palette in the analogous colors here of magenta through blue meaning i'm not using the entire color wheel to exploit this image i'm only using the colors that it needs to get my point across now if we look at the before image it doesn't really have a whole lot of color there i did some other work there yeah i made the lighthouse bigger i might have added a moon whatever but you see the color here it's just not quite as vibrant as it could be where i wanted to focus on those colors specifically to make them boost to make that viewer feel something when they see it here's another example of this this is from second beach in olympic national park looking at this image there are two dominant colors here it's not an analogous color scheme actually this is what will be called a complementary color scheme where you have two colors that are on the opposite side of the color wheel from one another that are basically balancing one another to create that drama or that mood or that tension or whatever it might be in the image now if we look at the original before from this this is what the original exposure looked like not that great obviously it needed some straightening but the color just wasn't there so by adding some of that color in those darker blues and maybe even a little bit of those oranges really balances out the piece now how do we know what colors are there well what you can do is you can take an hsl adjustment layer and just slam that saturation all the way up and this will basically tell us which are our dominant colors in the image our dominant colors are going to be the oranges and the blues in the image obviously it's not going to look good in any way shape or form as we move that hsl adjustment layer up that's just to assess what colors we have in our photograph here's another great example now this example we have many colors happening here you might be thinking well blake there's a lot of color here how is this in any way shape or form in some form of harmony well this is what we actually call a triadic color scheme where you can see the magentas and the subtle uh deeper almost ultramarine style purples in the sky that balance very well with the greens in the foreground but then we have this third color in here which is the yellow slash orangish color that is helping the piece and unifying the piece and tying it all together again a limited color palette if we look at the original of this one it didn't really have a whole lot of that there so did i force that color in there uh maybe i definitely exploited it i definitely exploited it because i wanted the viewer to feel something when they saw this image so yes there was a little bit of exploitation in those colors but otherwise you don't connect with the piece right that's why color is important the last example i have of this this is a great example because this doesn't necessarily follow a rule now we do have what looks like could be complementary colors with the blue and the orange or yellowish colors depending on which color wheel you're looking at and also another one here with the magentas and the greens now if we actually look at a color wheel here what we're actually going to see here is that this has a complementary color scheme it's very dominant with the blues and the oranges but it has these two accents that come in here that are your magenta or purple and green so does it fit any of those color theory color schemes maybe not but it works so yes there are rules here you can follow some rules for triadic examples for tetradic examples and split complementary and complementary and analogous yes those are all rules but sometimes there's images that just work the point here is that you're going to look at the colors in the image that you want to exploit and make sure you dial in on those colors and leave the other ones just pushed back a little bit if we look at the original of this exposure it doesn't have much color in it at all i definitely had to work with color in this image to create that mood that feeling that tension that drama with the individual that looks at it the third piece of advice i have for you which is probably the most important piece of advice that i have for you is that after you've worked with the color in your image i want you to walk away i want you to walk away so this is a photograph that i've been working on it's in my portfolio but i was working on it going back and revisiting it for this video tutorial and i did some color work and i'm like yeah i'm good this looks pretty good for me right so i'm gonna get up and i'm gonna walk away and i'm gonna come back in about five minutes okay and this is really important five minutes ten minutes whatever that is there's something that's happening here it's a little psychological trigger that's happening here that you don't even know that's happening when you're working with color and i'll explain it when i come back so i'm gonna walk away i'll be right back what yeah of course i wear sweatpants i work from home all right so i walked away and i come back and i'm like whoa this image is like wildly magenta what was i thinking blake so i'm gonna explain this to you i have this pair of sunglasses that i wear quite often while i'm driving now these sunglasses have basically a yellowish type of filter in them so when i first put these on when i go outside the whites and even the blues start to look like yellow and i'm like oh man man this is too yellow what's going on here the first time i put them on i almost took them back but then as i started driving with them on after about five maybe seven minutes everything started to look normal what the heck is going on there well it's our brain our brain is pretty darn smart where it actually wants to know what white and black are even when you put a filter over our eyes now our cameras don't adjust like this but our brain does it says wait a second blake i know that that's white if you put those sunglasses on and looked at my screen door outside you would see that it's got a yellowish haze to it but if you stared at it for five to seven minutes with those glasses on it would start to appear more on the white side so the same thing happens when we're color grading our images things in this image are starting to look normal to me as i'm color grading this so as i'm color grading and working with color i got to be very careful that i don't immediately take the shot that i have here and post it on social media because someone might say well it's a little too uh pink or magenta there blake what were you thinking so what i would do here in this case is i'd come back and look at my image and say okay yes this is awfully looking awfully magenta here let me go ahead and take a color balance adjustment layer because that's one of the easiest ones to work with for this work in the mid tones and offset that magenta by adding a little bit of green to it now it's starting to look a little bit normal let's take away some of that blue and add a little bit of that yellow to it and then we'll go into the cyans and maybe add a little bit of cyan to that then pop into the highlights here and maybe see what happens as we add a little bit more yellow to those highlights and then a little bit more red to those highlights i kind of like that and then our shadows let's see if we have any colors that are glaring here that we might need to fix in our shadows might need to add a little bit of yellow to those shadows and take away some magenta from those shadows as well so now am i done no what i'm going to do here is i'm going to walk away again and i'm going to come back after working with this so i don't get too focused on this now in the inspection world we call this something called a death spiral where you get this information this one piece of information and you dig so far into that piece of information that you don't realize that the actual information that you need to solve the investigation is over here right so i don't want you to death spiral on your color i want you to walk away you don't have to collect any evidence but walk away come back and see if that image still looks good to you after you've taken some time away from it because that'll give our brain some time to adjust to other colors other lighting so when we come back and look at it the things that are wrong in our color will just pop right out in front of us now i know i didn't go too much into technique here this is all theory type stuff if you want more stuff with technique on color theory and color grading click on this playlist here i've got a whole bunch of videos that'll teach you in-depth ways to work with the tools in photoshop if you haven't done so already please consider subscribing i like to take photoshop which is a very convoluted piece of software and try to make it really simple and easy for you to understand

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 13,727

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Color Grading, Color Theory, How to work with color, What is too much saturation, Color Wheel, Color Theory for Photographers, How to use Color Theory for photography, Examples of photos with color theory, how to color grade in Photoshop, color grading tutorial, how to color grade, Color tips, Color tips Photoshop, Selective Color, Color Wheel Tips, Analagous Color, Complementary Color Photo

Id: I2ljK4DzVv8

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021