Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial
here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find
me on Instagram@JRfromPTC. In this video, I'm going to show you how to
create the Cinematic Effect using color grading techniques in Photoshop, but this video is
so much more than that. This is going to be a comprehensive guide
into color grading. We'll discuss the color schemes that are traditionally
used in film and why those colors are used. I'll, then, go to the different tools that
you can use to apply the color grade. We'll also take time to learn to color-correct
an image because it's really important to use images without color casts when applying
color grades. Okay, let's get started with the tutorial. First of all, what is Color Grading? You can think of color grading as a creative
color correction. It adds a color theme or a color palette to
an image or video to help you tell a story. Color grading is a term usually reserved for
film, but these days, a lot of people are using that term in photography as well. What we're going to do today is recreate the
look of a summer blockbuster film on a photograph. First, let's take a look at this color wheel. Yellows, oranges, reds, and magentas are usually
where you find the skin tones and the complementary colors are the greens, teals, cyans, and blues. If you don't have a color wheel, you can simply
go to Color.adobe.com and you can use the color wheel there. And you can click on Complementary, and then,
you find a color that is similar to a skin tone, like this one here, you'll notice the
opposite colors are in this range hereóthe cool colorsólike this blue color here. And no matter what skin tone you select, you'll
see that the complementary color is anyone of these greens, teals, cyans, and blues. Let's look at some movie stills so that you
can see the effect that we're going for and how it relates to these complementary colors,
and, I guess, that I should warn you before we got started. After looking at these examples, it will be
very difficult for you not to notice this color scheme every time we look at a movie,
but I'm sure that it's worth it because it will help you create better color grades on
your images. The first movie still we're going to look
at is of the movie Terminator Genisys, and this was, perhaps, the most popular movie
look. This is a teal orange or blue orange combination. There's a teal tint mostly in the shadows
and an orange color in the highlights, mostly, in the skin tones. This combination is used because these colors
are complementary colors. And, as you know, when complementary colors
are put side by side, they pop and they stand out. In this case, they make the actor stand out. Here's another example of the same color scheme. In the movie Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation,
the teal orange is used to make the actors stand out in this action sequence. The movie Wonder Woman has a great example
of how the actor's skin tones are not affected by the blues and teals, even in a cold and
dark environment. Notice how there's a lot of shadows in this
scene, but the shadows on her skin do not have that blue teal tint. This effect is not only found in action scenes
or dark scenes. This still from the movie Jurassic World shows
the same color combination in a bright room. This still from the movie Justice League shows
the oppositeóa really dark room where the actors' faces are bright with the orange tint. And the background, even though it's extremely
dark, it has blues and teals in it. This combination is also found in scenes where
there are not actors. The movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has
this effect on a shot of New York Cityóteals in the darks and oranges in the lights. Although this color effect can work on certain
movies or certain scenes, it can be overdone. In my opinion, 2007's Transformers went way
too far with this effect. The orange in the skin tones are pushed way
too far and everything else was way too blue. I think that this movie will look much better
if they have desaturated the colors just a little bit. Now this is, of course, not the only color
combinations. This still from the movie The Hobbit shows
a similar color effect but it uses greens in the dark areas. Usually, the skin tones remain somewhat natural
in most of these color effects. The movie The Matrix, however, has an exaggerated
green tint to it. The skin tones actually do have some of that
green tint, and it works, because it pushes the story forward. It's part of it. They're inside of a computer simulation and
that's the point of color grading. You're telling a story of the colors that
you apply to your image or film. This is a good time to point out and stress
that there are no rules as to what colors should be used or how they should be used. This is up to you and the story that you're
trying to convey by adding the color grade. We've been talking about the popular teal
orange effect, which is the effect that we're going to try to replicate in Photoshop, but
as you saw in The Matrix still, this is not the only color combination to use. For example, the movie Annelie, uses the complementary
colors green and red--green in the shadows and red in the highlights and skin tones. Mad Max uses a monochromatic color grade throughout
most of the film. Terminator Salvation uses grays and very little
saturation. This is the second still from the Terminator
movie that we used. It's not only because Terminator is one of
my favorite movie franchises, but it uses colors in different ways to convey different
stories. Genisys is set, for the most part, before
Judgment Day - The Apocalypse, while Salvation is only set after the destruction of the world,
so it makes sense that they would use a gray and desaturated color grade for this film,
again, another example of how color pushes the story that they're trying to convey. A color grade is nothing more than a creative
color correction. Its only purpose is to help you tell a story. Sometimes the color grade can change within
the same scene. In the movie Limitless, the main character
dramatically increases his intelligence by taking a pill, and two color grades are applied,
depending on his state of mind. The movie has a cold and desaturated look
when he is of average intelligence, and it becomes a hot bright yellow when the pill
NZT turns him into a genius. You can actually see this color grade change
on screen. Everything goes from cold to hot in an instant. And it's supposed to represent how his new-found
intelligence makes him see everything so much brighter and clearly. This is why I ended with this screenshot. I hope that this 6-minute explanation helps
you see and understand color grading and color themes more clearly, and that these examples
give you ideas of how you can color grade your images with the techniques that I'm about
to show you. When applying a color grade to your photo,
you have to be sure that the image that you're using does not have a color cast. Ideally, you should be working with neutral
grays. This is not a color correction tutorial, but
since color correcting is so important for color grading, we'll take a few minutes to
do a basic color correction, just in case your image requires it. So, if we want to apply the cinematic color
effect to this image, we would first have to remove the green color cast. And one of the easiest ways of removing a
color cast is with the Curves Adjustment Layer. So with this Curves Adjustment Layer, we're
just going to apply a quick color correction. The Curves Adjustment Layer allows you to
edit the RGB composite, that is the entire image as a whole, or to use the RGB channels
to make adjustments to each individual channelóred, green, and blue. I'm going to click on the Curves Adjustment
Layer and we're going to work with these eyedroppers here. So let's start by clicking on this top eyedropper
which helps us set the black point, and then, click and drag on this triangle over to the
right. Notice how the image gets darker. What we want to do is figure out where the
darkest point of the image is, so I'm going to hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click. You'll see these weird colors and that's okay. I'm still holding Alt, Option on the Mac. I'm going to click and drag over to the right. Notice that at a certain point, I'm going
to get black. Once you start getting black, that means that
those are the darkest points of my image. So you'll see the front tire get some black
in those areas there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to release
the key and with the Black Point Eyedropper selected, I'm going to click in the areas
where we had black here in the front tire. So I'm going to click, and that there is my
black point. I'm going to do the same thing for my white
point. So I'm going to click on the White Point Eyedropper
right down here, hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click and drag this triangle to the left. And once you start seeing white, that will
be the brightest point of the image. Now be careful when you're setting your white
point. Make sure that you don't set a specular highlight. Make sure that it's a white; they should have
some detail. So, in this case, it's probably right here
in this area, so I'm going to click there to set my white point and notice how much
better the image looks. Now we get to set our neutral gray, so we
got to click on this eyedropper here in the middle, which sets our gray point. And we just got to click anywhere on the image
that we think will be a neutral gray. In this case, we can just simply click on
the white here on this truck. This should be a neutral color, so I'm just
going to click here and notice how much better the image looks just by applying those quick
adjustments. We actually did this color correction the
longer way. There's shorter ways of doing it, but I wanted
to show you the long way so that you understand what the Curves Adjustment Layer is doing
behind the scenes. So, with the Curves Adjustment Layer selected,
I can click on this icon right here and it just resets it, so all the adjustments that
we made are all gone. Now let me show you how to do this much quicker. Adobe likes to hide all the good menus on
the fly out menu right down hereóthis little 4-little line icon. Notice that all the panels have it. There's a lot of good options there, so always
go in there and click around and see what you find. One of the options that is hidden here is
the Auto Options right here. Another way of getting to it is by holding
Alt, Option on the Mac, and clicking on the Auto Button here, which brings up the Auto
Color Correction Options. And notice what happens when I click on Find
Dark and Light Colors. It color corrects the image almost as we had
it before. Photoshop did what we did automatically. It found the dark and light points, so I'm
going to press OK. And then, the other thing we can do is simply
click on the eyedropper tool to set the gray point and just click here, where we did before. So, obviously, that was much faster, but I
wanted you to understand how the tool works, rather than telling you to click a whole bunch
of buttons. And this next example is going to show you
how you can determine what type of color cast your image has. I'm going to open up this group, but I'm also
going to delete the Curves Adjustment Layer that we created since we don't need it anymore
and I'm going to disable this layer. And then, we have these gradients here, and
I'm just going to zoom in a little bit, just so we can see them a little bit better in
our screen. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to open
up the Info panel, so I'm going to go into Window, Info, and that's our Info panel here. Notice that when I hover over the image, numbers
appear. We have R.G.B.óRed, green, and Blue. Those are the values of each individual channel,
so if I come over into the gradient here in the center, notice how all the values are
the sameóRGB. No matter where I hover over, the values are
exactly the same. That means that all the levels of each individual
channel are the same. We have a neutral gray all across this gradient. If we look at the gradient to the right of
that, notice that the red channel has a larger value than the other two channels no matter
where I hover over the gradient. So, for example, in this point here, I have
Red of 221, Green of 213, and Blue of 208. That means that we have a red color cast on
this particular gradient. If I hover over the gradient here to the right,
you'll notice the same thing, but in this case, the Blue channel has a higher valueó177,
185, and 197. So, when you're working on your image, just
hover over an area that should be a neutral gray and look at those values. If one of the values is much, much higher
than the other, then you probably have a color cast in that particular color. Going back into the image of the truck, if
we hover over this white area here, notice the RGB values, Red of 122, Green of 177,
and Blue of 122. Obviously, there's a big green color cast
on this image. So, now, I'm going to click on this tab so
we can work on the image that we're going to apply the color grade to. And notice that this is an image with neutral
grays. If I hover over the pillar here, you can see
the RGBó139, 137, and 132. They're not equal but they're close enough,
so that means that there is no color cast. I can also move and hover over his suitó61,
62, and 66óagain, there is no channel that dominates any of the others, so this image
has no color casts. Obviously, if I hover over the yellow here,
the blue is going to be really low because the opposite of yellow is blue. That means there's not a lot of blue in this
channel, but this is not a neutral gray. So keep that in mind. You always got to hover over something that
is a neutral gray. So the first thing that we're going to do
is create Curves Adjustment Layer. You don't really need to delete the mask on
this Curves Adjustment Layers, but I'm going to just because I think that it keeps my layers
panel with a little less clutter and it makes it easier for you to see, but you don't have
to delete them. Now, I'm going to go ahead and make an extreme
adjustment here and I want you to see something. Notice how this adjustment not only changed
the luminosity of the image, it also changed the colors of the image. When working in Photoshop, I prefer to have
more control. I prefer to have the colors and the luminance
separate, so I can control them separately, so, with curves, you're adjusting both. But if we switch the Normal Blend Mode to
something else, we can control Color and luminosity individually. So, first, I'm going to change the Blend Mode
to Luminosity, and notice what happens. The Luminance values are higher, but the colors
are not saturated, so I'm going to go back and change it to Normal. Look at the face here. Look at the red here in the pillars, the way
to saturate it. But if I change the Blend Mode to Luminosity,
I can make this extreme luminosity adjustment, but the colors are left intact, so that's
what we want to do. I'm going to click on this icon here to reset
that curve and I'm going to rename it "Luminosity," so that we know what that adjustment layer
controls. So I'm going to go ahead and just make an
adjustment to this. I'm going to click and drag this point down,
and click and drag this point up, just to create a little bit of contrast. And that looks pretty good, so I'm going to
leave it up there. And I guess this is a good time to point out
that as you follow this tutorial with your own images, you shouldn't try to duplicate
the shape of my curve or enter the same numerical values that I do under different adjustments. You got to remember that your images are going
to be different. They're going to have different tonal ranges,
different colors, and any adjustment that I make, if you duplicate that exactly, it
will probably have a different effect on your image. So, what you need to do is look at the adjustments
that I make and use them as reference. And then, make the appropriate adjustments
so that it looks good on your image. So what you need to do now is create a new
Curves Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to delete the Layer Mask and, you guessed it,
this is now going to control the color. So I'm going to go into one of these channels. I'll choose Red just for this example, and
I'm going to make an extreme Color Adjustment. Notice that this brightens up the image. Again, we're controlling both the Color and
Luminosity, but if we change that Blend Mode from Normal to Color, we only control our
colors. Watch what happens when I click and drag this
point down. I don't make the image darker in the opposite
coloróin this case, CyanóI simply add the color, but if I change the Blend Mode back
to Normal, notice that the image gets darker. So leave this adjustment layer set to Color,
and click on this icon here to reset the Curve, and, of course, I'll rename the layer and
call it "Color," so that we know what it controls. Now, before we continue, I'm actually going
to create one more Curves Adjustment Layer just to explain a couple of things. This one's set to Normal, so it's going to
control both Luminosity and Color, but it's going to help me explain how the Curves Adjustment
Layer works. So we have this point here, and I can click
and move that point around to make adjustments to the image, that, there, is the black point,
as represented by the gradient right below it. You can think of this horizontal gradient
as a before point and this vertical gradient as the after point. So, currently, the black point, as you can
see right from the gradient below it is black, but if we click and drag that up, it's no
longer black. Now, it's this shade of gray here to the left. The same thing is true for this point up here. Notice how it's white here at the bottom,
but if I click and drag it down, it's no longer white. Now, it's this shade of dark gray. So by dragging these points up or down, we
add light to the image. So I can create a new point and I can click
and drag it down to take away light and click and drag it up to add light. You can think of it as a dimmer switch, like
what you may have at home. You can subtract light and add light as you
drag the dimmer switch up or down. We also have the individual channels. Let's start with the Red channel. I can add light, in this case, the color of
the channel which is Red, or I can reduce light, which will subtract the color of the
channel and add the opposite color of the channel, in this case, Cyan. Notice that line that runs across the Curves
panel here. If I point us above that line, it's going
to add light in that color, again, Red. If I point us below that line, it's going
to take away the channel's color and add the opposite color, in this case, Cyan. If you don't see that line, you can click
on this icon here and go into the Curve Displace Options and make sure the baseline is Enable
and see how it sort of appears and reappears there. Now, I've been mentioning that there's an
opposite color to every channel. Red's opposite color is Cyan, Green's opposite
color is Magenta, and Blue's opposite color is Yellow. And those are very important for you to remember
so that you know which channel controls what color and how to move them accordingly. Now if you don't remember what the opposite
color of this channel is, simply go into the Info panelóRed, Green, and Blue. Right across from that, you have Cyan. Green, right across from that, you have Magenta. Blue, right across from that, you have yellow. I've created this graphic, which you can find
on my website PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. Look for the link right below this video to
take you directly there. I will also include it for the download for
this tutorial. And while you're at my website downloading
this image and the other tutorial assets, don't forget to check out my courses. I have a Beginner's Photoshop Course, a Compositing
Course, and a few others, so check them out. But, anyway, I'm going to delete this Curves
Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to continue working with the Color Curves Adjustment Layer
that we created earlier. And we're going to start working with the
Red Channel. And if you remember, the Movie Look Effect
that we're going for includes the Blue, Teal in the darks, and the Orange in the light
colors, especially, in skin tones. So, what I can do is I can click and drag
this point, and if we go under the line, we take away the color of this channel, in this
case, Red, and we have the oppositeóCyan. So notice how the darks are now getting that
Cyan color. Now we can click and drag this point to the
right, and then, click and drag this point to the left, the lights. Notice the skin colors, they're getting redder. Now, we can work this way, and there's actually
a better, easier way to work. We can click on this icon here, this Direct
Selection Tool, so we can get this eyedropper and we can hover over the image. Notice that as I hover over the image, there's
a circle going up and down that line. That's telling us what value is directly under
what I'm hovering, so I can come into anyone of these points so, maybe, here. Click and drag down to add cyan, and then,
came into the face and click and drag up and add red. And notice that by making that simple adjustment,
we already created a very convincing Movie Look Effect. Now I can go on to the other different channels
to continue working on the image, clicking on the Green channel, and I can click on the
skin tones, click and drag down to take away green because I want to add a little bit of
magenta. And then, on the darks, I can click and drag
up to add a little bit of green. If I go into the Blue channel, I can do the
same. I can click on anyone of these dark areas
and drag up to add blue, and the face, I can click and drag down to take away blue and
add a little bit of yellow. And as simple as that, we created the teal
orange color effect in Photoshop. Now this effect is not complete. We can actually continue working on it, so
a couple of things that I want to show you is just a few shortcuts to make it easier
to work for you, so I'm going to go back into the Red channel, and notice how we created
these points. You can actually see what point is selected,
the point that's filled in. That means that we can now control that point. You can click and drag on them as you see
me do already, or you can use the arrow keys in your keyboard to move them up or down,
left or right; so I can move this up or I can move it down, left or right. You can use the plus or minus keys to move
between points, so notice how I'm pressing the Plus key right now to go up the line,
and I can press the Minus key to go down the line. So, I can select the point at the bottom,
and then, drag up to take away some of that cyan or drag it down to add more of that cyan. So this is how you would make those fine adjustments. Sometimes it's a little hard to control if
you're using a mouse, and even a little bit harder to control if you're using a Wacom
tablet. Sometimes, you click and drag more than you
intend. And, actually, this kind of Photoshop tips,
these little tidbits, they're the kind that I show on my daily Photoshop tip. I have a daily Photoshop tip on all my social
media accounts, so check me out on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and all the others. And if you subscribe to my newsletter, then
once a week, I'll send you a recap of the previous week's Photoshop Tips, and it's all
a whole bunch of stuff like this, hitting shortcuts and things like that. But, anyway, another thing that you may want
to do is go back into the Luminosity layer. And now that you know that you can select
this button here, you can click on it and drag on areas that are too dark. Now, I'm using this icon a lot, but every
time I switch between layers, I have to select it. If I click on this icon here and select Auto
Select Target Adjustment Tool, that will automatically get selected. Notice that I can switch between Curves Adjustment
layers, and it's always selected, so I'm going to leave that on because I'm going to keep
using it. And under Luminosity, I'm just going to go
in the areas that are too dark and lighten them up a bit. Maybe some areas need to be a little bit darker,
so maybe click and drag this down. And one thing I want to mention is usually
the one I have points that are too close to each other, like here, so I can just click
and drag one out. And the reason for that is if you have two
points and you drag them side by side, you're going to wash out the image, and it's not
going to look very good, like this area here. So it's a good idea not to have points that
are too close to each other. So we can continue experimenting with this
image and try to get a better effect. In this case, I think this is going to be
good for this example. I already achieved the effect that I was going
for, and what I'm going to do now is simply put these adjustment layers into a group by
holding Shift, and clicking them both, then pressing Ctrl G, Command G on the Mac, and
I'm just going to call this group "curves," because I applied a Curves adjustment layer. So that's before and that's after. Sometimes when you finalize your color grading,
the adjustment layers on their own, they're not good enough, and you just need a more
targeted result. So what you can do is use other adjustment
layers and use a layer mask, so I'm going to click on the Quick Selection Tool. I'm going to click and drag on his face to
make a selection, and then, I'm going to create a new adjustment layer right above the color
adjustment layer. And this is going to be a Hue and Saturation
Adjustment Layer, and I can simply saturate the face more if I need to, obviously, that's
way too much. This is not the Transformers movie and I can,
maybe, make other adjustments if need be. In this case, they're not really necessary
but I just wanted to show you that you do have that option. Also, you can apply the Hue and Saturation
Adjustment Layer as a Global Adjustment, so I'm going to delete the layer mask and, maybe,
you can bring down the saturation, so we still have those tones that we apply, but they're
not as saturated. So this will be a little bit more like the
Terminator Salvation movie that we looked at in the examples. So, as you saw, it's not very difficult. I'm sure that you can do it on your own. And if you decide to color grade an image,
upload it to Instagram and use the hashtag #ptcvids. That way, when I search for that hashtag,
if I see your image, I'll comment on it. But, anyway, I do understand that the Curves
Adjustment Layer can be a bit intimidating for some people. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show
you how to recreate this effect using other tools in Photoshop that maybe a little more
intuitive that may be a little more visual. But, in the end, I think the Curves Adjustment
Layer is the better tool, so I recommend learning it, but I still want to give options for those
people who are just starting out. What I'm going to do now is create a different
adjustment layeróSelective Color. And Selective Color allows us to select and
add or take away a different color, so we have these colors here. So, for example, the blacks, these are the
dark areas of the image. I can add cyan. Notice that we have cyan here. If I click and drag to the right, we add cyan. What do you think will happen if we click
and drag to the left? We'll add the opposite color and, as we know,
it's red. So in the darks, we're going to add cyan. We want to take away magenta to add a little
bit of green, and we want to take away yellow to add a little bit of blue, and we can actually
make those darker by adding more black. In the reds, which is where the skin tones
usually lie, we can take away cyan, we can add magenta, we can add yellow, we can decide
to make him darker or brighter. In this case, I'll make him a little bit darker. And we can continue working with the other
colors, maybe in the neutrals, we'll just add a hint of cyan, and maybe a hint of blue,
by taking away yellow, of course. So, as you can see, we created a very similar
effect using the Selective Color Adjustment Layer. Notice that this time we left it set to Normal
because we're adjusting the luminance values on a separate slider. Of course we can continue and make adjustments
to different colors, but I think this does a good job illustrating how this adjustment
layer could create a very similar effect. There's yet another way of creating this effect
with a different adjustment layer and that's with the Color Balance Adjustment Layer, and
this one helps you select Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights, and add the colors. And, actually, this adjustment layer does
a great job in showing you each channel's opposite color. We can start with the Shadows and we can add
cyan, we can add blue, and we can add green, and we create that teal effect. We can go into the Highlights, add a little
bit of red, a little bit of magenta, and maybe a little bit of yellow. And, again, we have that same blue, teal,
orange effect that we're going for, and believe it or not, there's more ways of achieving
this effect. Let me disable this layer. There is something called a Color Lookup Adjustment
Layer. And this adjustment layer allows you to apply
lookup tablesóLUT files. And LUT files are used for color grading in
video, Adobe SpeedGrade, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Premiere, all use these types of
files to apply color grades to videos. In Photoshop, we have some of those files
built in. If you click on this dropdown here, you'll
see a list of color grades that we can apply so I can select one and just scroll down the
list, and you can see all these color grades that we can apply to this image. The one that we're looking for is the Teal
Orange Plus Contrast and I'm going to click on that, and it applies the effect that we're
trying to recreate. Now, I want you to notice one thing. We don't have any controls. We can't adjust the effect. We can, of course, bring down the Opacity,
or we can decide to use Color, so we only take the colors from that adjustment layer
or even the Luminosity, to only take the luminosity values of that adjustment layer, and we don't
have a lot of control. So that's one of the reasons why I don't like
to show this technique to start out with. Now don't get me wrong. I use Color Lookup Adjustment Layers all the
time, but I am aware of their limitations, so I do use Blend Modes and Opacity to make
the right adjustments when I do use them. And you can actually create Color Lookup Adjustment
Layers based on the color grades that you apply with regular adjustment layers. So what I'm going to do now is select the
Color Lookup Layer, hold Shift, and click on the Selective Color Adjustment Layer to
select all three, and hit the Delete key on the keyboard to delete them or you can click
and drag them on to the trash. And I'm going to click on this composite folder
which shows the composite files that I used to create this image, and I'm just going to
delete that as well because we don't need that for what I'm going to show you now. We can actually export this color grade as
a LUT file and apply it to video using any of the applications that I mentionedóPremiere,
SpeedGrade or After Effects. But before we export the adjustments, we need
to have a background, so go into Layer, New, Background from Layer. Notice that, now, it renames it "background"
and it's got that little lock there. Now go into File, Export, Color Lookup Tables,
and these are the options that you get. I'm going to leave them all at Default, but
make sure that CUBE is selected, and then, press OK. And I'm just going to save it in the folder
for this tutorial that I have in my computer. I'm calling it "Cinematic Color Grading,"
click on Save, and Photoshop is going to save that Lookup table. Now I can disable this Curves Adjustment Layer
and I can come in here and add a Color Lookup Adjustment Layer, and I can load a 3D LUT,
and notice the file that I have here. I have a Cinematic Color Grading.cube and
I can click on that, click on Load, and Photoshop is going to load that LUT file onto Photoshop,
and notice that it's exactly the same adjustment that I created, but on one single Color Lookup
Adjustment. And I can take that same file and take it
into Premiere, take it into SpeedGrade or take it into After Effects, and apply the
color grade that I've created in Photoshop onto a video. I'm not going to keep this adjustment layer
for this tutorial because I don't really need it. I'm happy using the Curves Adjustment Layer
to create that effect, but it is the same effect. And another way that you can apply the color
grade in Photoshop is by using a gradient map, and this doesn't work at all like the
adjustment layers that we've been using, but I still think that it can help you create
some pretty interesting color grades. So let me show you how to create one of those. I'm going to click on the adjustment layer
icon and select Gradient Map. By default, the gradient map uses a foreground
and background color, but I'm going to click on this down-pointing arrow and simply select
Black and White. This is going to turn the image, of course,
black and white. I'm going to double click on the gradient
to bring up the Gradient Editor. And the way this works is very simple. It maps a color to your image based on the
luminance values, so using black and white makes it really easy to understand. This color here on the left controls the darkest
point. This color on the right controls the lightest
point. So the darkest point is black, obviously,
the darkest point here will be black. If the lightest point is white, then the lightest
point on the image will be white. But what if we choose different colors? For example, this preset here? Now the dark point is this purple. Notice how it's reflected here on the image. And the lightest point is now this orange. Notice how what used to be white in the image
is now orange, and, obviously, the colors in-between our gradient and in-between those
two colors. Now, usually, you don't get really good color
grades just by selecting two colors and pressing OK. You have to use Blend Modes, so you can use
a blend mode like Overlay, Soft Light, Color, just so you can better blend the colors with
your image. And I'm just going to leave it at Normal,
for now, click on this down-pointing arrow, and then, click on the gear icon. And notice here the different gradients that
Photoshop gives us to work with. And the one we're looking for is called Photographic
Toning. I'm going to press OK to replace my default
colors and I can see what this look like. Now these are not necessarily much better
at first, but if I select one like this one here, I can come in and change the blend mode
to something like Soft Light and notice the difference. This looks a lot more like the color grades
that we have been applying, and I can select the different ones to help us find the appropriate
color grade for our image. So something like this looks pretty good. And this is using Soft Light. I can try Overlay, which is the stronger effect,
and, of course, Color, but usually, that doesn't work as well. Soft Light is one of my favorites when using
the Photographic Tonings under the gradient map. And that's it for this tutorial. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned
something new. Make sure that you leave all your comments
or questions down below. If you create an image using this tutorial
or any other of my tutorials, feel free to share it on Instagram with the hashtag #ptcvids. I often do a search for this hashtag to see
what you're all up to. If I find your image, I would leave you a
comment. Also, don't forget to subscribe and click
on that Like button. If you have a friend who you think will enjoy
this tutorial, please share this link with them now. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you
again soon.
