Dual Lighting Effect In Photoshop - Method For Best Results

in this video i'm going to show you how to create the dual lighting effect in photoshop this effect is fantastic for portraits i'm sure you're going to love it this is going to be a beginner's tutorial that means that i'm going to provide all the information in small digestible chunks so that you understand what the steps are but i'm also going to explain why i'm doing certain things and hopefully that will help you understand photoshop better if you want to follow along with me make sure that you look in the description for the link to my website where you can download this photo and of course you can use your own images if you like but if you do make sure that you use an image that has good lighting if you're using a photo that looks a lot like the lighting that i have on this video it might not necessarily work because i don't have any strong contrast between the shadows and highlights so it won't look as good so make sure that you use a photo that has the right lighting all right let's jump right into the tutorial this is the image that we're going to work with and as you can see it's a great photo like we were talking about it has a light source that's coming from the left and another light source that is coming from the right and what you first have to do is decide what color your main light source will be in this case i'm going to make it blue but it can be any color that you like one of the easiest ways of creating this primary light source is by using a gradient map you can create one by going into the new adjustment layer icon and selecting gradient map and this is going to create a black and white image the reason that photoshop is creating a black and white image is because those were my foreground and background colors when i created this adjustment layer if you have different colors for your foreground and background then you're going to get a different result but this adjustment layer allows you to map a color to your image based on the luminance values of your image let me show you how that works i'm going to click on the gradient map here in the properties panel to bring up the gradient editor and from here i'm just going to click on this swatch right here and what this is doing is showing us a better representation of what's going on photoshop is applying violet to black and orange to white and the colors in between are a gradient from violet to orange so when you click on one of these swatches you can see the 50 point right here and if i click on that you can see that the location is at 50 percent so that means that the 50 gray will be this shade right here like a dark orange but anyway the point is is that you can click and drag on this point and adjust the lighting of your scene so that's basically how the gradient map editor works by the way you can click on the gradient and add a different color if you wanted to but anyway what we want to do instead is first of all delete this swatch by clicking and dragging it out and then apply our primary lighting color so what i'll do is i'll start with the darkest color here and i want it to be black i don't necessarily want a different color but all the magic is going to happen here on the right side if i double click on this color swatch it brings up the color picker and then i can select a color to apply to my image in this case i'm going to apply blue because i want the primary color of my image to be blue i'll press ok and one more time but we have one issue that we're going to address now i'm going to create this using several adjustment layers you can actually create this effect with just one or maybe even two adjustment layers but in this case i'm going to create multiple adjustment layers because i want to separate tonality from saturation that way i have more control over my image as you know here in the photoshop training channel i like to show you how to take more control of an image so even though we could create this effect just by using like i said one or two adjustment layers i think that is much more efficient if you do it with multiple adjustment layers and let me show you how that works with this gradient map selected i'm going to change the blending mode from normal to color because i want the layer below to control the luminosity of my image the color blending mode keeps the current layers saturation in heels in this case the blue so we're keeping the blue on that layer but we're keeping the brightness or the luminosity to be more exact below so that way we can adjust the color and saturation without really affecting the brightness with color selected you can see the result now when i open up my gradient and i change the brightness of this color it really doesn't change the luminosity of my image it only made it black and white because the color is completely black and there's no saturation or brightness there so that's why we're getting that result but we can still colorize it and make it any color that we want and the layer below controls the luminosity so that's why we did that and i'll just cancel because i want to use the same blue i selected earlier then i'll press ok and i'm going to right click on the layer mask thumbnail and select delete layer mask this step is not necessary but it'll make things easier to see the next step is to confine my adjustment just to the model because again i want to have the flexibility to adjust different elements of my image as opposed to having one global adjustment layer so what i'm going to do is create a container a layer mask to contain this effect to the model and then later on we can work on the background separately so what i'm going to do is go into select subject and photoshop will use artificial intelligence known as adobe sensei to analyze the image and make a selection around our model if you're in an older version of photoshop no worries you can go into the quick selection tool and then click and drag over your image to make a selection just like this one in this photo it would have taken less than 30 seconds to do so with my selection active i can now go into the quick selection tool the tool i was just referring to and just click and drag and add to any area that photoshop missed with the artificial intelligence and in this case it does a fantastic job and this is something that i like doing in a lot of projects i don't necessarily like to apply the layer mask onto single layers especially if multiple adjustment layers are going to control the same thing instead what i like to do is apply the layer mask onto a layer group and then place my adjustment layers into that group and that's beneficial because if you want to adjust your layer mask then you only have to do one adjustment and you don't have to spend time refining multiple adjustment layers to do so all you need to do is create a layer group and you can call this layer group gradient then you can select your gradient map and drag it in there notice that my selection is still active and all i'm going to do is select the layer group and click on the layer mask icon to create that mask so now everything i put in that group will be controlled just by one single layer mask and i think that's just a more efficient thing to do alright so now that we have our primary color let's add our secondary color so the color that is going to be coming from the left side and hitting our model and just to keep things organized what i'm going to do is rename this layer i'll call it blue and if you want you can apply a label to it by right clicking on the layer and selecting a color i'll select blue and this just makes it blue in the layers panel and it makes it easier to find with that layer selected i'll press ctrl j on windows command j on the mac to duplicate that layer and i'll call this layer orange because i want an orange light coming from the left hand side and i'll right click on it and label it orange like so so now we have our blue layer and our orange layer but our orange layer is not orange is blue we can easily change that by going into the properties panel and then clicking on the gradient from the gradient editor i can double click on my swatch to bring up the color picker and i can just select whatever color i want and you can just find any color that you want again i'm going for this orange color here but it could be red or anything else that you want i think that color will work at least for now and i'll press ok and i'll press ok one more time and just to show you why changing the blending mode to color is beneficial let me show you one thing if you disable the blue layer notice that the orange is not affected at all but if the blue layer was set to normal watch what happens see that see how the orange is now affected because the blue gradient is also mapping the brightness of the color that you selected so that's another reason why i like to change the blending mode to color so that way the brightness is not affected what we want to do now is apply the lighting selectively onto our model to do so i'm going to hold alt on windows option on the mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail to create a black layer mask that will hide all the contents of a layer with a layer mask white reveals and black conceals so when you create a black layer mask you'll hide all the contents of your layer which is exactly what we want to do and now we can selectively paint back the orange over our image to do so select the brush tool from the toolbar and make sure that white is your foreground color you can see the foreground color here and here's the trick for you if you have something else whatever shade of gray it may be it doesn't matter what you can do is press d on the keyboard to enable your default colors and notice how the foreground color turned white then you can tap the x key on the keyboard to swap between the foreground and background color and that's how i like to work with those keyboard shortcuts it's much easier than opening up the color picker but anyway what we want to do now is paint over our image you can do so with your mouse i'm using a mouse right now but even better if you have it use a wacom tablet and that's how i'm going to continue for the rest of the tutorial because using a tablet gives you more flexibility than a mouse this doesn't mean that you cannot use the mouse it just means that you have more control with the wacom tablet and it makes things a bit easier using a mouse would just take you a little longer so with the brush tool active if you have a wacom tablet what you want to do is click on this icon here to enable the pressure sensitivity on opacity that means that when you paint without clicking on this button you'll just paint at 100 opacity or whatever number you have here if you enable this when you paint notice how it wasn't at 100 opacity the opacity is based on how hard i push over the image as i'm painting so that gives me much more control because i can build as i'm painting like so and that's exactly the type of control that you want what i'll do now is simply fill my layer mask with black here so that these brush strokes go away because i really don't want them that was just for an example so you can fill with black by the way or fill with the background color to be more exact by pressing ctrl backspace on windows command delete on the mac and what you want to do now is think of the lighting that is coming from the left and what is creating the highlights over the image so clearly nothing on the right side will have any orange but everything like her hands here her shoulder her face will have orange and even parts of her hand on this side because her hands on this side are catching the light that's coming from the left so what you want to do now is simply paint over your image and again i have pressure sensitivity on so i'm just building on the effect and what i'm going to do now is speed up the video so you don't spend so much time watching me fine tune these small details but i still want you to see what i do so i'll speed up the video and i'll come back in just a moment and as you can see this is my result we have light that's coming from the left and hitting our model there's a couple things i want to point out that i think are important number one i didn't mention earlier that another advantage of having the mask on the layer group is that we don't have to worry about going over the lines when we're painting if you hold shift and click on the layer mask thumbnail you'll disable the layer mask and you'll be able to see the brush strokes that are outside the mask and these brush strokes wouldn't look good if they were over the background obviously and by applying the layer mask to the layer group when we paint over our model our brush strokes are contained to our model's edges and that's a huge advantage what i'm going to do now is show you the advantages of applying multiple adjustment layers to this effect so one of the things that you can do first of all is you can control luminosity independently so you can create either a levels adjustment layer or curves adjustment layer whichever one you feel more comfortable with levels tends to be easier for beginners so i'll place that below the blue gradient but it's also inside of the group you can see the indentation here that means that this adjustment layer is inside of the group and what you can do now is with the levels thumbnail selected you can go into the properties panel and from here you can adjust the brightness independently of the color again if you had this layer set to normal you would have to come in here and adjust the brightness by adjusting the brightness of the color that you select and this would create a problem because if one color swatch is controlling the hue saturation and brightness of the pixels below then if you make an adjustment to one you might inadvertently change the other two however if you split the components into adjustment layers then you can make an adjustment to one and not worry about the other two in other words if you want to adjust the hue you don't have to worry about the saturation or the brightness because you're controlling it individually so that's the advantage of using multiple adjustment layers with this effect but anyway so that is the advantage that you can adjust the levels adjustment independently also another big huge advantage is that maybe you like your gradient but you don't necessarily like how saturated it is or maybe you want to shift the hue a little bit it's really easy to do by just adding a hue and saturation adjustment layer and then clip it to the layer below by clicking on this icon a clipping mask or clipping simply means that the layer below controls the visibility of that current layer in other words this hue saturation adjustment will only be applied to the orange gradient so let me show you how that works i can change the hue so maybe you want to just change it up a bit and make it yellow or make it more red or change it completely to something else if you want but the point is that you have that flexibility now and also if you have an effect that is a bit too saturated you can reduce the saturation accordingly and make it work for your scene again the more adjustment layers that you have the more control you have over the image and in my opinion that's a better way to work with this adjustment layer there i can make my adjustments and you can see how this adjustment changed my orange gradient what i'm going to do now is work on the background so to do so i'm going to create a solid color fill layer and i'm going to select a blue that is similar to the one that we were working with and i'm going to change the blending mode to color but i'll place that below the gradient like so then i'm going to take this layer mask and apply it to this solid color fill layer but i'm going to invert it at the same time because i don't want the solid color failure to affect the model i want it to affect everything else in other words i only want it to affect the background so i need to take my models layer mask and invert it let me show you how to do that i'm going to delete this layer mask just so it's easier to see the fast way is by holding shift and alt and clicking and dragging the layer mask onto another layer photoshop will then duplicate the layer and invert it you can see the thumbnails here in the thumbnail below we have a black silhouette and in the thumbnail above we have a white silhouette that means that the layer mask on the grading group is only applying the effect to the model and in this layer mask the effect is applied to the background and not the model and again if you wanted to you can create a group and then place that layer mask on that group and drop the layers in here and anything that you apply inside of that group will only affect the background so this is how you can create much more interesting effects again i know that i sound like a broken record but i like to split my components into different adjustment layers to have more control at this point keep fine-tuning the image and if you haven't renamed your group go ahead and do so i'm going to name mine background and this is my final result let me know in the comments down below what you thought about this technique if you found anything in this video useful at all make sure that you click on that like button now it really helps out the channel with the youtube algorithm also if this is your first time at the photoshop training channel don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification button so that you don't miss any other future photoshop tutorials and if you want to learn more about color in photoshop make sure that you watch my recent video on the trick for specific color changes i'll place a link to it below in the description my name is jesus ramirez as always thank you so much for watching and don't forget to check out the tutorial

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 63,907

Rating: 4.9663367 out of 5

Keywords: Dual Lighting Effect in Photoshop, dual lighting effect photoshop, Photoshop Dual Lighting, jesus ramirez, jrfromptc, photoshop training channel, photoshop tutorial, ptcvids

Id: Dd-Lig_Y3zk

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021