Hello! Blake Rudis here
with f64 Academy and f64 Elite. I'm kicking off 2019 with a killer tutorial
on Advanced Color Toning in Photoshop. Now, I say the word advanced but guess what,
it's really simple, it's one Adjustment Layer, one Blend Mode and any colors
you choose and you have complete control over the color in your image and it is astonishing. Okay, so this works on not only Landscape photos
like this, here's the after and here's the before. Before and after, it also works on Portraits,
look at that! Look at the before, look at the after and it also works on a Portrait within a Landscape. I've got some Gradients for you,
I've got some actions for you, I've got some killer knowledge for you. Let's go! All right, so if you've ever followed me
for any amount of time, you know that I'm very passionate about two things. Color Theory and Color Grading
and it's really important to Color Grade your images so that you can make the viewer feel something
when they see your photograph. It's not always the easiest thing to do. So, what I'm going to show you today
is an advanced color toning method but before you run and hide,
the term 'Advanced' does not mean difficult. It's advanced because you have a lot of control
with this form of Color Grading. However, it's not difficult, it's one Adjustment Layer
and one Blend Mode. Keep in mind though, that this type of thing,
this Color Grading thing is something that you want to do at the end of your photographs. You don't necessarily want to do it at the beginning because it's kind of like that term, well like,
"You can't polish a turd." Well, that's the truth. You really have to make your image look good
before you can do the polishing. Color Grading is the polishing. If you bring in a bad photograph or a photograph
that hasn't been treated, before Color Grading, it's not going to look good. So, this image is an image from Saint-Émilion in France and I really like where I've gotten with this. I think I've got a to a point where I like the colors
and I like the tones and I could essentially call this image, "Done!",
but I'm not going to. So, if you're looking at this and you say, "Well, you know,
I don't really do a whole lot of Landscape stuff," hold on tight because I'm going to show you
how it works on a Portrait and whether that's a portrait of an individual
on a neutral background, or a portrait of an individual in a Landscape. Okay. So, before I begin, I'm basically going
to be shooting a lot of information at you. You're essentially going to be drinking from a fire hose
if you can imagine that visual, it's pretty funny. But you're going to be drinking from a fire hose here,
a lot of stuff coming your way. So, what I've done is I've created a series of gradients that are already built for you and I've also created an action for you,
all you got to do is, press Play and guess what, it's going to do what it needs to do. But before you go ahead and run off
to download this stuff, I really want you to pay attention to this tutorial
because I could give you stuff all day long but if you don't know how to use it,
you're not going to be using it to its greatest potential. So, please watch and we'll continue. So, as I said before this advanced color toning
involves three things. It's going to involve a Adjustment Layer,
which is the Gradient Map. It's going to involve a Blend Mode,
which is Soft Light or Overlay and it's going to involve the colors
that you decide to choose. So, let's first talk about the Gradient Map. Okay! So, the Gradient Map, basically
is a Adjustment Layer that will look at whatever you have
in your Color Palettes. So, I'm going to change this black to a red. Okay, so I have a red and blue in my Color Palette. Now, I'm going to go to the Gradient Map
and look what it's doing, it looks horrible. Okay, so what's happening is, it's saying
everything that is black or if we look at zone 0 here, change to the color red
because that was the foreground color in my palate and anything that was white, changed into blue because that was the background color in my Color Palette. Now, by itself, if we just use the Gradient Map,
it's hideous. But if we use it with the Blend Mode like Soft Light,
we actually get something that starts to look pretty good because what Soft Light does is,
if you can imagine this, if something is 50% gray, it is not going to be affected when it's transitioned into the Soft Light, Blend Mode. Real quick demonstration,
if I were to grab a new layer press Shift+F5, and fill this with 50% gray
and change this to the Soft Light, Blend Mode, you're going to see no difference. But if I change my brushes back to the default colors
of black and white and then I brush with black,
it's going to make that area darker. If I switch it over to white,
it's going to make that area brighter. So essentially what's happening here is
anything that is 50% gray, gets no effect on the image in Soft Light
because Soft Light says, "Hey! It's 50% gray, I'm just going to drop that out
and pretend I didn't see it." But if it gets brighter than 50% gray, I'm going to make the underlying layers brighter but never 100% white. If it gets darker than 50% gray, I'm gonna make the underlying layers darker but never 100% black and this also works with color. So, we have the Soft Light Blend mode, what it's doing is, it's saying here, "I'm going to make the underlying dark colors a little bit on the red side and the underlying white colors a little bit on the blue side." We can see in our Transition here, from 0 to 10 now, that because of this we have blue in our white areas but never pure blue in the whites. It's almost like a protection measure, over our lightest lights and a protection measure over our darkest darks. Okay, so keep that in mind because when we click on this Gradient, we're gonna be using this concept of the 50% gray and the white and black or instead of white and black, we're going to be using color. So, we're going to be using 50% gray to essentially protect certain areas of our image from getting color toned and that's crazy. Okay. So, there's other ways you can use protection measures, you might say, "Well Blake, what about Blend If?" Well, Blend If is powerful but Blend If is a whole another can of worms, when it comes to Color Grading. That just protects certain things from that layer. Whereas, what we get to do here, is if we select a Gradient like this one, I'm just going to select this Gradient here. Now, if you're looking at these Gradients, and you're like, "Whoa! That's a lot of Gradients, Blake. I don't have all of those Gradients that you've built here." That's okay, because I'm giving you these but wait till the end to download it. Okay. So look what's happening with this Gradient in particular, we have our white area here; is set to 50% gray. This is our variable here, we're using this 50% gray as our protection and then we're using other colors to Color Grade other areas in the photograph. So, this is saying that our darkest darks are going to get this, this nice little felo blue color here. Our Mid-tones, transitioning into our Mid-tones, and our darks are going to have this kind of cyanish green or sea green color but then everything from the Mid-tones through the whites, they're not going to be affected by any colors at all because we used the 50% gray variable to protect it. Okay, now let's check out a different one. Let's click on this one. Okay, so with this one, we're basically saying that this cyanish green is going to be in our darkest dark areas. Our Mid-tones are not going to be affected at all because of this gray variable and our lightest light areas are going to get this color of pink. So, you might say, "Well, why is this so much more advanced than any other way of Color Grading?" Well, if I click on this right here, this 50% gray is a transition that protects certain areas of the image from being affected by the Color Toning. As we move this 50% gray, it's going to allow that green color to spread more from the darks into the 50% grays and then it's basically protecting what's happening, looks like, here like, zone 6. Okay, but then zones 9 and 7, and even zone 10 are getting a little bit of that pinkish color. So, the cool thing about this is, if you click on this, these are the transition marks. If I move this transition mark this way, it's saying that all the darkest dark areas are going to get more of this cyan, with a nice clean transition from about zone 1, all the way through zone 6. If we move this, this way it's going to allow that cyan to effect more from zone 0 through about zone 5, with a very thin transition of zone 6. And now, I'm saying all these things about zones. What I'm saying here is that these zones are zones 0 to 10, being 0 is your blacks, 10 is your whites and everything in between is the transition of the Gradient. So, how would one control this? Well, if we click on, let's say, this one. Okay. Now, what we're saying is that our darkest darks are going to get blue our Mid-tones transitioning into our 50% gray, is going to get this reddish color and our Highlights are not going to be affected by any colors whatsoever because of this
gray variable here. Now, can we change the colors? Absolutely! I've built all these Gradients for you already but if you double-click on any one of these colors, right inside the little square, you got to be really careful about this because if you click inside, it's going to add another one. You're like, "Whoa, I didn't want to do that." Well, just delete that. So, if I double click this, it's going to allow
me to choose any color I want. Now, what I suggest is thinking about color theory in this way, that if you're going to be affecting the darkest dark areas, it's typically best to use a darker color. If you're going to affect the Highlight areas, it's typically best to use a lighter color specifically with Soft Light. However, you can change these to whatever color you want. So, if we look at like this blue here, you're going to see that the intensity of that blue is going to increase just slightly. If we use this black, it's more of a nice clean transition here, from black into a darker color. If we use a bright color, you can see that we pretty much are taking our zone 1 and we're making it look like, it's a more of a grayish color. So, watch what happens when I move this down here at zone 1, it's a nice clean transition. So, I tend to use colors that I believe are going to match the Highlight or the Shadow area. If I'm going to, let's say, we'll do this one right here, we have the 50% gray in the middle. So, you'll see if I double click on this pink, it's more in the Highlight area of that color pink or magenta. If I double-click on this one, it's more in the Shadow area and that's just my personal preference with Color Grading. I think you get a nice natural transition with these
and it does give this kind of high fashion flair too, which is actually kind of nice. So, your variable here or your protection measure here is going to be 50% gray. Let's say, we don't want black to be affected at all by what's going on right here. Well, what do we do? We double click on the cyan color and if we just type in 808080, that will set everything to 128 red, 128 green and 128 blue, which is essentially a 50% gray. You can try to grab here and grab a 50% gray but you're probably never gonna get it. So, 808080 is the hex code for 50% gray. We press OK. So, what does that mean? Well, this means that our Shadow areas are not getting any color, our Mid-tone areas are not getting any color but our Highlight areas are, and they're getting this pink color and we can change this variable by moving this over to allow more pink to brighten up the image. So, you see what's happening here it's a very simple, very quick way to Color Grade our images. It's beautiful, I mean, just click through some of these Gradients and look at the story that's being told with different Gradients. This is saying, "Hey! Don't open this door, I don't necessarily know, what's behind it." If we were in, you know a zombie movie, it
would say, "Keep out. Dead inside." Okay, but if we click on something like this, it's now got this more warm feeling to it, where you know, maybe you're showing up to a friend's house for dinner, if we click on this one, it's got more of a nostalgic type feel to it. We click on this one, again because of that cyanish color, it's saying kind of keep out a little bit here, but if we click on this one, it's more bright and uplifting. The whole idea here is that we use color to change the overall feeling and tone of the image. So, if I press OK here, I want to show you that this doesn't just work on Landscape images or like this image would be, I don't know like street photography. It also works on Portraits. So, the action that I've created for you, all you have to do is press Play on this stuff like Gradient Toning and it's going to automatically set you up with a Gradient and that's a Gradient that I've already built for you. But just look at the difference here. This one, you know, it's very neutral. Whereas, this one, it's almost like, it almost feels like she's overcoming her past. Why? Because it's blue in the background and kind of subdued but she's brighter. But if we click on this Gradient, look what happens if we change it to something like this. The whole story and the whole mood changes and this is where you take complete control over the story in your images and really get the vision that you have in your head for this scene that you've photographed. Now, I didn't photograph this, I got this off of Adobe Stock but look at this. This purple tends to have more of this feeling of wisdom. So, this looks like that she's in deep thought about something that happened in the past and she's kind of overcome that and we have very different ways that we can look at this image, based on what Color Tone we use. The same thing happens with an image like this, where we've got a Portrait, another Adobe Stock image, where this woman, the same woman that's actually in this one, is now on her bike. So here she's overcome something and now she's getting on her bike and she's riding in the wind. So, if we grab our Soft Light Gradient Toning, we put that on. Look at the story, that's being told here. This is saying, "NEM NEM, there's a twister, let's get out of here!" But if we click on this Color Tone and we change it to something like this, this feels more like a fitness type thing,
where she's on the move because of the green and the energy that's conveyed through that green. We click on something like this. This is more like riding through the wind at sunset and you know, that all the things that you might feel from this. So the really cool thing about this advanced Color Toning is, you get complete control over the viewers mindset, when they see the image based on the colors that they're seeing and what they're feeling from it. You get the protection measure of using 50% gray wherever you want. That's your variable, that's what says, "Okay! I'm not going to allow the darkest dark areas of this image to be affected by any color because I'm putting 50% gray there." But I am going to allow, specifically with this one, the Mid-tones to get red and the Highlights to get a little bit yellow. Here's a difference, though. Right here, we're saying, "Highlights, don't be affected." But my Mid-tones and my darks can be affected by color. So, the 50% gray becomes your variable that you could put whatever you want. You can change the Transition, you can change where it sits on that Gradient and you can dial in exactly where you want the Color Grading to happen in your photograph. This is some extremely advanced stuff and guess what, it's happening on one Layer with one Blend mode and the colors that you choose. So again, as I said before, I've built all these
Gradients for you. Click on the description, you can download those and there's also that action, when you install that action, all you have to do is click on the Soft Light Color Toning. There is another one in there that is called the Overlay Gradient Toning and if we do the Overlay Gradient Toning, you're going to see that it acts really fast and really heavy because that's what Overlay is all about. But, the other thing I didn't tell you about here, is at any time if you drop the Opacity here, you get an added measure of control over
that layer as well. So, some really advanced toning happening, one Layer, one Blend mode, the colors you choose and the intensity that you want it to be at. You can choose to experiment with either the Overlay Gradient Toning and the Soft Light Gradient Toning because both of them use that element of the 50% gray as not affecting your layer at all. So, again my name is Blake Rudis with f64 Academy and f64 Elite. If you like this, please consider subscribing. I love creating tutorials like this. Advancing your knowledge and just helping everybody grow here. If you could do me a favor and like this video and share it with a friend and maybe spread some comments about the things that you like about Color Grading and maybe what you learned in this tutorial, I would love to hear it. Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this, I sincerely appreciate it.
