Blake Rudis Helps Me With Color Theory

Hey back in October I went to the out of Oregon conference in Newport Oregon it's part of the Outer Chicago series and it was just a really fun event there were photographers there from all around the world and we just had a great time and the lineup of instructors they had was excellent one of the other instructors was Blake Rudess now Blake's widely known as being a Photoshop guru somebody who's just very knowledgeable and educated in all things Photoshop and his Photoshop instruction is really second to none so as a fellow Photoshop educator it was a lot of fun to meet Blake and get to pick his brain a little bit Blake's also known for having a background in art and being very knowledgeable about the use of color theory in photography and in talking with Blake it made me realize that that is not something that is one of my strong suits I don't have a any sort of background in color theory and I'm very happy with the colors that I work with in my photos and I'm able to get I think very clean colors and work with the colors that are there but in terms of using color palettes and the concepts of color theory to create certain moods in my photographs that's something I really don't know anything about now the other day on one of my youtube videos Blake popped in and said hey Sean I've had some questions lately about exposure blending and your name got dropped and I said well Blake this is great timing because I've been having some challenges with color grading so I thought this would be a great chance to give Blake a call and ask him some more questions about color and how he works with color and see what he can help me out with so stick around because we get back I'll be on a call with Blake Rudess song can you hear me can you see me no I can't see ya Blake okay can you yo you can hear me okay so here it is here's the start video button okay cool hey hey there you are hey what's up man how are you good how are you doing good good yeah that's good to see ya you too hey I'm calling because I have been working on some images I'm trying to work with color and you know I'm not at all trained in color theory or you know pretty much is usually kind of flam by this sooner my pants are going by feel when it comes down to color and I just know that when it comes to color theory you've got a great background and good education and and a lot of and a lot of educational content around that and because I'm particularly struggling with a couple of these images with color I thought be worth giving you a call and seeing what you could show me cool Wow I'm flattered I mean that's like maybe I don't know for the people you could have called but hey I'm glad you call me I think Blake weirdness is the guy awesome well you know I have some questions too because they recently had at least three people email me asking me about exposure blending so I'll show you some cool stuff on color theory and then would it be cool if on the same call I just kind of flip over and we record this exposure blending stuff - oh absolutely oh my gosh that's uh that's also great yeah so you know feel free to share this on your youtube channel if you want and then I'll share your exposure blending stuff online great yeah we'll have a video on each channel and people can check them both out and hear hear the answers to both of our questions perfect that's cool because that way we all learned something here that's awesome yeah all right that's great cool so color theory and color grading man Oh what do I begin okay so let me just go ahead and share my screen here I got a couple things on here I'll kind of just go over you know a couple of the theory of it why I do it and then I'll give you a little bit of practical application stuff does that sound about right yeah that would be really helpful all right let me share my screen here okay all right can you see my screen yeah that looks good perfect okay cool so it should look like looks like a bunch of little ice gems yeah what a cool yeah this is pretty cool I was out in Yosemite and man the the landscape was just doing some really wonderful things as the Sun was coming up these little ice bubbles were just kind of popping on ice and within you know about an hour this it all disappears is really kind of cool but I wanted to showcase that and this is basically with color theory and color grading are all about alright so I'm out there I'm a new sim buddy it's freezing cold and I've got these beautiful little ice pockets that are coming out but the camera itself is kind of like if you think about you know why we do a higher dynamic range shooting you know we think three exposures that's because our camera can really only record one instance of light at any given time well the same is true for color so it records whatever color you're telling it to record if you're shooting in RAW it's gonna give you know if your auto white balance you can always change the white balance but it's not gonna be able to record your feeling in your emotion that you have with that okay so just like we experiment with you know moving and manipulating tones we do the same thing with our colors to get our feeling across so with this one I really wanted this look in this feel of this ice to be cold and help kind of push those little you know ice gems kind of out a little bit as well it's really kind of cool because this is an image that one of my subscribers had also worked on a variation of this and one of the courses that I provided and really inspired me with color theory you know that's a great thing about color is that it can inspire people in many different ways so here I've got you know kind of this bluish feeling on this image now to kind of understand color grading and color theory there are two separate things color grading is the act of making your image a certain color whereas color theory is what you use in order to make it that color that's kind of the theory behind it is using color theory to make the color grade that we want to get our mood and our emotions in the image so that the viewer sees and feels what we felt when we saw it it's kind of like reverse empathy you know when you're empathetic to somebody else you feel the way they do well here what we want is we want people to feel the way we feel so we have to reverse that empathy a little bit but we have to give them some information to go off of on that so that's the theory on it here is the how I do it okay so how I do it there's many different ways that you can color grade you can use just about I mean even if you're in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom and you manipulate a temperature or a tint slider that's technically color grading in a way if you move that magenta to add a little bit of color to it yeah it's a mood it adds some feeling it adds some emotion to it right yeah so we're gonna take that concept and we're gonna bring it into Photoshop because Photoshop as you know has an extreme amount of power in it that gives us the ability to manipulate colors and tones in any way shape or form that we want so the first and easiest way is to actually just use a solid color fill okay so if you're if you were to take a solid color fill and you can see this one's already preset up it's got the color blend mode and the reason why use color blend mode is it allows all the luminance values underneath to show through the color that I'm putting on it and it has an opacity of 15% okay if I were to just go ahead and add a new color fill on top of hair hypothetically speaking it's gonna be a solid color and this is why people usually shy away from color grading because they're like wait a second I need this color to invoke mood not just fill my whole canvas with blue right right so I'm gonna pick a phthalo blue here at a low blue is kind of like a cyan and a ultramarine blue mix that's like one of my favorite colors to color grade with and you'll you'll notice it's like whatever your favorite color was in the cran box is pretty much what you're gonna go to for this alright so phthalo blue let's just take it for what it is if I were to change this to the color blend mode like you saw before the whole image is gonna get blue right we don't want that right now this would be cool for like a sepia tone or a cyanotype or something like that but it's not cool for a landscape photo that i want to show a subtle hint of mood so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna just drop the opacity down to about 15% I usually start there and then I work my way up or down if I need to and you'll see that what it did is it just kind of it took some of those really vibrant orange tones that are in this image and it just pushed them back a little bit made them a little bit more subtle and that's a really really approach for color grading because what we're essentially doing here is if you look at a color wheel we're using the reverse color or the compliment color to tone down the colors that are too powerful without touching the powerful colors at all right so if you take like a hue/saturation adjustment layer and you just drop some saturation out of a color you're actually hurting those pixels well here we're just washing that orange with blue and it's pushing it back so we still have the intensity of the orange underneath nothing's damaged nothing's broken right right so that's one way that I do that the cool thing about this too is that once this is set up you got the color blend mode on there a pass is at 15% if you double click this you can then change this color to any color you want on the fly yeah and then you're like oh wait Oh kind of like that magenta is purplish look look at that yeah so immediately I thought that Fela was gonna be the color but I think I don't know something I kind of like that purple kind of like that purple that goes more towards my favorite color in the crayon box yeah well purple is like the color of wisdom so I could see why you would use that I get any brownie points for that that's a good one no I like that I like that a lot and I do love that about the the color fill it layers that you can adjust the colors on the fly after the fact like that but I've never done it in this context that's really cool yeah and typically where you would do this is on a relatively finished image okay so right if you were to put this color fill on a photo that's right out of Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom or straight out of camera it won't look good it's kind of like diet you know they say crap in crap out the same thing happens with color theory if you put crap into a good color it's still gonna be crap on the way out okay so you got a doctor up the image a little bit get your tones right get your colors right and then do color with color grading towards the end just like what video artists do you know when you watch movies like Game of Thrones or something like that or any of those HBO sitcom specifically because they state they pay such particular attention to color the color grading happens after it doesn't happen in the amra it happens afterwards to get the mood in the feeling subliminally pushed into your mind as you're watching the show and the same thing is what we can are responsible for when we're showing people our photos very cool so the other two things I use are a gradient fill and a gradient map so a gradient map really quickly here a gradient map I'm gonna go ahead and move this little camera thing down here what a gradient map does is this is already set up to soft light at 48% but watch what happens when I change this to normal and then bring the opacity all the way up okay so a gradient map is basically what the gradient map does this is kind of like split toning in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw the gradient Maps is okay I want your darkest colors to be the color that's on the left-hand side of this gradient and I want your brightest colors to be the color that's on the right-hand side so the left hand side is your darkest right hand side is your brightest and then whatever happens as they come together and kind of get mixed together is what happens to your mid-tones so this is actually my favorite way to make a black-and-white image because it makes the deepest richest darks with the deepest brightest brights and a beautiful transition in between without any color loss yeah so how did you show how to make that gradient map layer sure so what all you gotta do here is go down to your where your adjustment layers are I like to use this little thing right here this little half circle down here at the bottom of Photoshop and then there is a gradient map right here above selective color alright yeah that's one whole thing in in that adjustment layer menu I've never used really oh really so what this does it's gonna select whatever color you have in your palette right here so I've got my foreground color my background color a cyan and a brown so if I say gradient map it's gonna make it look bad and that's probably why you've never used it because it takes whatever colors are in your palette and that's not very good but if you press the reverse button here typically how I do this is I want my darkest color to be on the darkest side and my brightest color to be on the brightest side so even with those two colors in here if I change this to something like the soft light blend mode look at that yeah it's like magical dodging and burning because basically with the soft light blend mode now this is gonna give you your your darks are gonna become darker without becoming black but it's gonna add that blue or that brown to it and your brights are gonna become brighter without ever getting pure white with the blue added to it yeah so then if I drop the opacity on this a little bit so it's not so powerful that subtle hint of color mm-hm really pushes and it digs into all those cracks and crevices in the wall that have such character to them it make it look like the old man's face kind of deal you know yeah yeah and that's that's one approach that I use there for color grading as well I like it and here's the cool part you've already got this set up just like that solid color fill if you pop up here and you click on the gradient map and just click on the color any gradients that you have in your gradient editor you can now apply to this and see how they would look very quickly your mood can be altered and changed right there on the fly I love it yeah and again this is just like your solid color fill layer it's a crap in crap out concept so you want to make sure that you're doing this color grading stuff towards the end even if you're gonna you know use that black and white transition that we had there to make a black and white image I would still recommend doing this I'm gonna reverse that so that it's black and white I would still recommend doing this after you've already done all of your regular tone and color processing too they make a black of my photo Wow very cool yeah very powerful black and white it's the truest form of black and white before the colors that you have Ray oh yeah really cool stuff fascinating the last one I have is actually a gradient fill layer and I'm going to show you this concept here but then I'm gonna show you a practical application of it as if I'm building it up on another image so you can see it on something different okay kind of one of the things that we've talked about before is how you get the viewer to look at something over another thing is you kind of put a spotlight somewhere and a vignette around right yeah absolutely it's a something I do you know something I use in my photos all the time right so this is really cool I think you're gonna like this great info because with the gradient fill I call this concept like making a convex piece of glass so a piece of glass that pushes forward has a 3d look to it rather than a window that you would have in front of you right right so a lot of times our images can appear flat like a window well we want to make this look like a convex piece of glass that's coming towards the individual and the way we do that is typically with the spotlight in the vignette but here you can do it with color you see that yeah Wow so here I've added a creamish color to the center and then it gets blue around the corners which then pushes the image back around the kind of like a vignette but it's very subtle almost to the point that if I never showed you I was color grading you wouldn't even know that I did that right right so here is a practical application of that so this is this is where the gradient is so powerful the gradient can be one of the most phenomenal tools in your toolbox on the gradient fill gradient map is nice but that maps out your colors to your tones a solid color is nice but that fills the whole image but what if you want to get a little bit more creative with it that's where the gradient fill comes in a gradient fill can be found right down here under gradient so we go to our adjustment layers layers and hit gradient and again it's not gonna look good just like everything in Photoshop it doesn't look good when you first start right right I always talk about almost every button in Photoshop if you don't know what what is doing it's the make your image look like crap button I like that it's true so gradients say I just kind of it was like why would anyone ever want to use a gradient it's like the silliest tool in our toolbox right and there's many different types of gradients this is a linear gradient which would be very similar to what you would have in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw where you put a graduated filter so that's basically what this is it's a graduated filter but this is coming with color and let's say I wanted that to go from the top to the bottom so that's how it's set this up as a linear gradient and there's many different gradients here but I'm just gonna press this and press ok because I need to get this set up just like the other two I need to setup whose I'm gonna change this to the soft light blend mode okay and now you're kind of seeing the darks getting darker the lights getting lighter with blue being added to that mix so if we double click on that gradient we click on this color here we can change this color or we can use any other gradients that we have in our box this is a blue going to transparency which makes it like the graduated filter but if I did this red to orange look at how that landscape dramatically changes now as I said it's not the best thing in the world but if we drop the opacity here this is where you you know start to blend these things together and it might not be the best color grade for this because if we look at the original image if I were to really get analytical about this I'm seeing hints of yellows and hints of magenta in here so I probably don't necessarily want to use this very outlandish orange and red but if I click go if I double click on this and then I change this to let's say this gradient look at that mm-hmm see that that yellow to magenta hint is beautiful but there's more double-click on here that was just a linear gradient yeah if I set this up as a reflected gradient and then I dropped this scale down to 1 you can see exactly where I'm gonna place this reflection okay and then if I bring the scale up its gonna get magenta from the center but I don't want that well that's just like the other one we have the reverse button present verse look at that so now the tops getting more magenta foreground is getting more of the magenta but the center has that nice glow that you would get from the sunset beaming across the image as you see here very fun another cool thing you do here is if we change this to a gradient that I always thought was trash as this diamond grading diamond it's a diamond shape look at that I mean it looks hideous as you move this around like a flashlight this looks like someone put a box around a flashlight but what does that also look like a little bit ah it looks like a spot of light yeah so boom put it right there on the Sun put it put it where the light doors is what yeah all right you're out of town and then if we make the make that bigger oh look at that yeah now you don't even know there's a diamond there right we know there's a diamond there well if you were is not gonna know there's a diamond there wow you know you can still incorporate masking with this as well so let's say the foreground here you know I don't want that to be on that rock there I can just you know get a brush here and just brush with black along there so that rock doesn't quite get that magenta cuz that would be a little you know not necessarily a cure but you know whatever masking techniques you want to use here you can use again you got to be careful when you're masking it though you don't want to get that bleed there but you know you get the idea yep all right yes that's nice I'm gonna stop sharing my screen now hold on say I won't talk to you about this real quick all right stop share so what you see here is that now you take that concept that we've just talked about there with color grading with either the solid color the gradient map or the gradient fill and you combine that with what you do with you know exposure blending or luminosity masking and the sky is literally the limit with color grading absolutely yeah that's really powerful that is some great stuff thanks a lot for showing me that that's I mean obviously the the sensibility for what colors go well with each other and what colors you want to use that's a that's kind of an acquired skill and an artistry there but the ability to work with the colors and move them around and change them in those ways man that's really powerful because usually I'm if I'm working with color I'm usually just changing the hue you know the whole thing or working with like color balance adjustment layers and things like that where I'm you know those those do a great job but those that type of kind of more sweeping artistic color change with that kind of control because when I'm doing that kind of stuff I'm usually trying to just kind of hand paint in colors and stuff right it's it's it's really haphazard and hit and miss but see that's the important stuff that you do before you do the color grading exactly so you do you get your stuff set up the way it is with your tones and your colors you get them looking good but then you want to add the mood and you want to add that feeling in there and the comfortable thing about this for anyone who's watching this even you know when this does have two YouTube channels is that it's all theory we're practicing colors it's the right you can't do anything wrong with it that's the cool thing yeah I like it yeah awesome awesome Blake thanks for showing me that I can't wait to you know get on the computer and give some of this a try and see what I can do with it if I get anything good I'll let you know but it'd probably take me a while to kind of perfect it right well no that's cool because I need to hear about this exposure blending stuff so you know I'd like to see what you're doing with that too absolutely yeah glad to show you awesome so I think you can tell by watching my face during the phone call that I was just hanging on for dear life Blake was sharing so much information and so much knowledge about color it was all I could do just to keep up in the moment but since then I've had a chance to go back and review the video from our call and then try applying some of these ideas to a couple of my photos just to see if I could make anything work and and I still have a long ways to go I'm still working out but I think I've I've come up with some stuff that's pretty good so let's go over to the computer and I can show you what I've figured out so far all right so this first image here I like this spot on the Oregon Coast and this was kind of Twilight long-exposure you know the wave motions all kind of blurred out I like it it's a really dramatic scene but I've never really been happy with the colors it's kind of blue hour and it's it's a little too blue and yet I do want it to feel kind of Twilight II so I don't know no matter what I did if I tried to adjust the colors I just never got it where I liked it and about in fact eventually I just decided that I would just go full black-and-white with it just because I couldn't get the colors where I liked well based on Blake's information and the stuff he was showing us I decided to try putting a gradient fill adjustment layer on there and this is the gradient that I came up with and let's see what the effect is so you can see it's it's subtle but what it's done is it's warmed up some of the cools and darken them and it's also allowed some light to come in and some warmer light to come in from this side it creates a little more dimension it I think feels a little more balanced and gives the eye some place to draw to is really subtle but it's a big change if we take a look at what adjustments I made there so I'm using actually the the diamond gradient style that he showed us in the phone call and the gradient that I'm that I made again it goes from kind of a peach color through some darker oranges and reds and then eventually we get into this purplish blue color and yeah so that's how that one came out let's go on the next one this is an image of the Painted Hills in Oregon that I like the drama in the clouds I like the composition that I was able to get with the grasses in the foreground but the colors again just aren't right it's too kind of bluey greeny through the hills but when I try to make adjustments for the color balance to get those colors feeling better then I lose the colors in the clouds kind of this kind of blue gray steely thunderstorm that was going on so again another gradient fill adjustment layer and a similar gradient to what I made on the last one slightly different though and this time I just applied it through the center of the image if you take a look here I'm using the linear style so that linear gradient is just across the center here actually no I take it back it fades up from the bottom to the top and creates kind of a warmer bottom layer but I didn't like it being warm all the way into the foreground so I painted on the mask in some areas down the foreground so it's kind of cool fades to warm draws the eye the hills are the color they should be and then back to that unaffected or slightly darkened sky back there and the warmth is seeping up into the skyline back here a little bit from that gradient and I could mask that if I didn't want that to have any effect but I actually like that a little bit of warmth that it's putting back there all right and in this last example there's an image of Smith rock that I generally like I love the clouds I love the light I love the time of day the compositions are classic but this sky color here in combination with the colors in the clouds just isn't working for me it's kind of weird bluey greeny yellowy sky and then there's really nice cotton candy pink clouds and so for this I used a gradient map and I used the gradient map to map some warmer colors into the highlights of the sky and here's the colors there so these reds are what are going into those lighter areas of the sky and they're fading to kind of a neutral blue in the rest of the image so that the darker parts of the image or the darker tones really aren't being affected that much they are being slightly cooled and darkened and because I didn't want that effect to go everywhere into the shadows I created this mask with a darks luminosity mask selection and painted that mass so that I could keep that bluer darker color out of the deepest shadows so that's what I was able to come up with like I said I still have a long way to go but it's a great start I'm really excited about it it's some new ideas for me to work with and my images I can see that as I practice with it it's really gonna have a lot of applications and I think it's really gonna up the level of my images overall so I really want to say thanks to Blake for helping me out with that if you haven't already head over to his channel so you can check out the part of our phone call where I show him about exposure blending and while you're over there make sure to subscribe to Blake's Channel he posed Photoshop tutorials all the time and thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again in the next one [Music]

Channel: Sean Bagshaw

Views: 24,959

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 Academy, Photoshop, color, color theory, color grading, post processing, tips, lessons, photography, image editing, developing

Id: SbSh7A-zi78

Length: 28min 36sec (1716 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019