Completely TRANSFORM any photo with the Diamond Gradient in Photoshop

hey everybody Blake root is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 elite comm and today I'm gonna show you how you can transform any photograph with one layer one measly little gradient adjustment layer that can take your landscape photography any of your photography actually to the next level while adding color and mood to your images so that the viewer is transformed by clear theory and they don't even know what's happening here's a little quick example I've got a lot to go over here's the before here's the after oh my god every time I see this I just I just want to jump into it alright let's go ahead and get into this tutorial cuz I got a lot to share with you and I'm already really excited so today I'm gonna teach you something really cool with something called the diamond gradient and of all things you need typically think that the diamond gradient is trashed but it's absolutely not as a matter of fact that's probably become one of my favorite gradients when I'm doing sunset and landscape photography now this can be used for any type of photography of any genre photography typically how you use this is anytime you want to take the viewer and direct them somewhere like your traffic director saying hey you need to come here that's what this is for okay you can suck the viewer right in it's like a ghost trap it's like you're a Ghostbuster you throw that thing down this things coming in that's where the viewer goes when you put this gradient down now if you're not familiar with gradients or why you'd want to use them this has something to do with color theory color grading color theory is basically using color to change the mood and feeling of whatever piece of art you're working on and color grading is actually the act of doing it it's grading the photo so that it gets the photo the viewer into it I do color grading all the time with my own images so what I decided to do today was take all Adobe stock images to prove that this can work on anything anything anything anything so the way I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna show you what the diamond gradient is and then I'm gonna show you the cheater method now I even built a cheater method for you so you can download some actions and you can download sixteen gradients that are gonna work right outside the box all you got to do is follow my little directions that are gonna be given to you through the action but I don't want you to download that yet it'll be on the card well but don't do it and it'll be in the description below but don't do it okay let's let's work on this first now I do have to give you a little disclaimer I'm gonna get excited I always get excited when I'm working with gradients it's just the way it is so if I get a little overexcited don't say Blakey drink too much coffee it's not coffee it's passion okay so check this out what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna show you the gradient that I'm working with if you go to your adjustment layers below and you click on the gradient now the gradient this is the gradient fill dialog this is where you this is the command center for all things gradients okay this is telling me that the gradient is a magenta gradient that goes into transparency now this is based off of whatever you might have used in the past whatever gradient you might have used in the past and whatever colors are in your palette over here the style of the gradient this is where things are important we have a radial gradient which makes it a little ball we have a angled gradient which this is more pointless than anything else unless you're doing stuff with text this can be great for graphic design and text work but I haven't really seen too much of a place for it in my landscape photography when it comes to the reflected gradient that's great because it gives you a reflection from you know your magenta going from the top to the bottom so it's fans out in both directions it's a linear gradient that goes in both directions from wherever you tell it to go and then there's a diamond gradient now the diamond gradient I'm just gonna pick a random color gradient here I'm just gonna click on my gradients and I'm just gonna pick this one okay just to show you what threw a diamond gradient is and then we'll get into the rest of this the diamond gradient is really just a diamond look at it the shape of it it looks or appears to be a diamond it goes down in a vertical and horizontal position and it fills in right here and just goes out to the outsides this creates a nice radiating glow when used correctly but if you were to just have your color palette set to this blue and orange I mean pick a diamond gradient and you're working a landscape photo and you see this you're gonna say delete because it looks like trash right but let's use this soft light blend mode for this there's many blend modes that you can use but the best one for this right off the bat and really easy to tell us the soft light blend mode why because what the soft light blend mode does is if this layer was black and white gradient it would make our image darker where it's black and lighter where it's white but never pure black and never pure white so what's happening here is it's giving our image a slight orange where things are orange but never pure orange and a slight blue where things are blue but never a pure blue so it's a great gradient to use for color grading very quick very easy very responsive real quick before we continue this is kinda like the commercial break if you like this please press the subscribe button below and hit the little bell to get notified I do video tutorials like this all the time where I take Photoshop something very convoluted and very difficult and make it very easy to learn and give you an actionable workflow that you can use right now today so if you're the type of person that likes that kind of content press the subscribe button below and you'll get notified when the next video comes out so now let's double click on this gradient and start to experiment with this if we want to move this diamond gradient to get it where we want it to we can do that we can put it right on top of the Sun which is where I'm gonna be drawing the viewer in to because of what's going on here and that's gorgeous now we could do it here too cuz that's a great spot to looking at this gradient this gradient is going from blue to orange okay so what's happening is we're placing blue over the Sun and orange is gonna fan out to everything else the angle here is the angle of which that square or daimond is going to place itself onto the image so if you have it at basically a zero Degree it's gonna be huge for some reason and ninety degrees is gonna be smaller and fan out from a horizontal and vertical position I typically keep mine at this angle here at 90 degrees and everything seems to work out just fine the scale is how big that's gonna fan out so if we go with like five hundred percent it's gonna start blue in the middle and fan out to the orange on the outside which with this it's just gonna add a lot of contrast because we have a high contrast blue that we're using so let's just make that 200% now here dither dither is where if you're starting to see some banding coming through because of the grain that you're using you'll hit dither which will add noise to that banding and it will try to fill that in and make it appear a little bit better as you use that gradient if you're working with high resolution images you really shouldn't see too much of this unless you've done a lot of work and a lot of pixel destruction okay the reverse now this one's important especially for this gradient because as I use this gradient you see the blue is in the center I don't want the blue in the center I want the orange in the center because that's what color the Sun is so if I press reverse it's gonna invert that gradient and Wow look at that I told you I was gonna get excited oh that is awesome so what it's doing is it's made the Sun that we have our angle and our scale set to orange and it's fanning out into that high contrast blue which magically makes this photograph look better I mean look at that that's crazy now we want to chain the color of the gradient we're gonna click inside the gradient and here we have anywhere that you've created gradients or anywhere you've collected gradients you can select any gradient you want to see what's gonna happen here or you can say okay let's get a little bit more fine-tuned for this image that we're working on so this orange is a higher contrast Orange if I double click on it it's basically a purist form of orange if I bring it into something like this because of the way soft light works it's going to add that orange color but make it lighter as well that's why it's important to understand your blend modes we'll press ok now if we double click on this one we can change the color from the bluish color to maybe something that's more conducive to this image like maybe I magenta or even going to the Reds look at that Wow transform an image with one single gradient or press ok now the reason why this one's working the way it is remember we had to reverse this one but the gradients that I have set up for you you won't have to reverse them that actually shouldn't be necessary for you so we'll press ok we'll press ok and look at this Wow transform that transform the color transformed everything now if we double click on this and we change the scale to something like 250% you can see how we get more of that orange in the background it fans out now you're not just stuck with this remember you have all things here you have blend if you have opacity you have your masking you can do whatever you want with this so let's say I want the black areas in the photo underneath to kind of shine through this a little bit because everything's getting a little too contrasting in that red if I double click on this it brings me into my blend if options and my blend if options I want the underlying layers darkest dark areas to be protected so as I move this over it starts to allow those dark areas to kind of shine through that so we don't lose that in that mess of color grading there and we can do the same thing on the highlights side by letting some of those highlight colors come through too if you press alt or option you can cut this little thing in half and split it and life is good look at that wow wow wow and that's pretty cool so that's on an obvious sunset image ok and it actually was a pretty darn good looking sunset image to begin with but let's take a look at something like this we already have kind of a blown out Sun back there and that really doesn't quite match the contrast of the rest of the image with this blowout like this you would think that we want to be sucked into there a little bit more so how can I control that well I told you I made you some actions right well if we open up this actions folder here it's the f/64 Academy diamond gradient magic we press play on step 1 what that's gonna tell us is hey set the location of the diamond set the scale and set the color of the gradient you can use my gradients you can use anybody's gradients so we're gonna move this so it's right over that Sun and look at that looks pretty good right now I also made a series of blend modes for you here too so you can maybe try linear light which is gonna set you up with a different fill because this is based on fill and not on anything else which actually looks really great for this one because it's taking that light that's there and it's making more light exist we have the hard mix blend mode which is gonna give us some more color contrast and then if we press play on this one it's gonna get us back to that same soft light effect that we had before the linear light blend mode works great for this and just know that linear light is controlled by fill so if you need more of that contrast to change that to something like 25% instead of 15% and look at what you get there now I've also set you up with some gradients and what I want you to do here to get your gradient set up in a way that you can use them in a really conducive way is if you go to window and then you click right here on gradients yet this might be like this for you I'm gonna grab this and just put it up here in between my histogram and my swatches because now this is great you know double clicking in here and then clicking in here to go and change your gradient is a pain so with the new Photoshop CC 20/20 we can actually control this gradient right from the gradients that I've built for you so after you install my sunset gradients you can just click through here and magically change your photograph look at that oh my goodness I'm telling you as I just click around I'm like wow you know here we're taking colors that are already existent in the image and just making it that much better and it's incredible the reason why I built these actions for you and built these gradients for you is it's a lot of steps in order to get that gradient set up isn't it you got to set the gradient you got to set the diamond you got to come back out of it set the blend mode go back into it get it dialed in to where you want it then change the color of the gradient that's like seven steps of excessive craziness that you don't necessarily need to go through so if we click on this one this is a great photograph to start but my eye is drawn to the areas of highest high which is out here and not towards this area we don't have a son here do we but what did I say this is a ghost trap you can throw this thing out you can suck the viewer in let's do it so I'm gonna go into my actions I'm gonna press play on that gradient it just what happens it's gonna open up right in the center like that will press continue and then I'll just get this dialed in right where I need it to be dialed in and press okay now that I have my gradient set up over here all I gotta do is click on the gradients and I can change and alter the mood of this image just by clicking through these I like this one right here this is great watch watch this oh the highs all over the place ha gotcha now you're right here you suck the viewer in let them see your focal point and then have them kind of transition out around the rest of the image this is where color grading comes in now I like this because of the colors that it chooses here it's a cooler temperature of the entire image which gives me more of a longing type of memory type of feeling but you can use something like this or something like this with that inverted look to have that warmer feeling this feels like a warm summer day this feels more of like a cool winter sunset right so we change the mood physically change it so that the viewer actually physically feels colder or hotter or we just change the mood of the feeling based on what the brain is seeing when it sees those colors take a look at this image this is more of a typical sunset image that what most of us would have these ones over here are already rather processed photographs this one is a not so processed photograph so let's use that action press play on that diamond gradient BAM look at that move it right where we want it to be holy cow if we want to get it dialed in even easier go to 15% to get that dialed right over top of that Sun then change that scale back to something like 200 with this one you can probably go to to 50% and look at that we've got this beautiful just awesome glowing Sun now that's beaming right towards us and the whole dialogue of the colors on the outside changes and we can change that based on what we want that to feel like do we want to exaggerate those colors that are there or do we want to put more of the the feeling and emotion of the colors that we want into that photograph with this image the colors that are there are blues and and oranges which are great but with this one I'm actually getting a little bit that magenta in there which I tend to be really gravitate towards magenta I'm not quite sure why but I really like it I don't even like the color pink at all but for some reason magenta and my sunsets is something I can really gravitate towards but look at that totally transforms the image in one single click now does this have to be just on sunset style images not necessarily we can use that gradient again that diamond gradient press play on that Wow all right this is gonna look awesome well press ok double click this so we can get this dialed in right about here press ok actually let's get that scale to something like 250 and now we can change that color look at that look at the mood that we got there and you see here like there's no real highlight for the viewer to kind of get into it's like oh yeah those are beautiful lavender plants and it's nice but this is like whoa oh my gosh we use that lavender color to our advantage to really push the mood and feeling of this photograph so we get sucked into the middle we just want to look and we want to look all over the place and look at how dramatic and intense these colors on the outside I've gotten Wow Wow and let's go to this one very similar type of image this one can be easily transformed as well not necessarily a Sun back there but our focal point is back there we can hit that diamond gradient on here get it dialed in where we want it to be and then maybe change it to oh my gosh we can change it to oh my gosh oh my word and you know there is a lot going on with this now on the outsides here and it really does vignette in an exaggerated step in yet so let's just drop the opacity suddenly 75 percent so it's not so dark on the outside there but look it just says oh we can look all over this photograph all over I'm looking all over oh now I'm right in the middle holy cow man gradients will transform the way you edit your photographs so if you're just tuning into this or you tried to skip around a little bit if you want in the card above you can download the actions that I've created for you along with the 16 sunset style gradients that I have here so you can just right now press play on this action and start clicking away and transforming images that I already know you have in your portfolio that you want to make better after watching this video it's gonna happen in a second with one layer this is one layer come on folks one layer bad oh man I wish I could say and then there's more but I already showed you a lot all right so I use these gradients all the time in my workflow I use them all the time in my critique sessions to show people how they can really draw the viewer into their image with color grading and color theory I really think that the same is possible for you once you get used to using them obviously there's many other types of gradients I'm only showing you the diamond gradient right now because of the way it fans out so well with landscape photography but I employ you to try the radial gradient I employ you to try the reflected gradient actually I've done an entire course on this stuff called Photoshop foundations gradients and it's a phenomenal course that goes over the gradient in much more depth than I have here in this last 15 minute video so I certainly hope you enjoyed this subscribe to this video if you want this stuff go to the description download the actions or go open the card above to download these actions I want you to have this kind of power and control over your landscape photography because it is absolutely fantastic what you can do with it when you exploit it thank you very much for taking the time to watch this I sincerely appreciate it [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 45,249

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Color Grading, Color Theory for Photography, Diamond Gradient in Photoshop, Diamond Gradient, Gradients in Photoshop, Soft Light Blend Mode, Color Theory, How to make better photos, Adjustment Layers, How To Adjustment Layers, How To Gradients, How To Gradients in Photoshop, Gradient Adjustment Layer, PixImperfect, Phlearn, Photoshop Training Channel, Gradient, Gradient in Photoshop, ps diamond, add gradient

Id: yWi8fDQM35Q

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020