How to Color tone using Gradient Maps, Instant color grade in Photoshop

hey cafe crew is Colin Smith here from Photoshop cafe and today I'm gonna show you how to do amazing color work to your photographs using gradient maps in Photoshop so in this tutorial I'm going to show you three different things and we're going to do three different images the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to use gradient maps to colorize your photos and make them look amazing then I'm going to show you how to use them in black and white photos to add a lot more cool coloring then you could get just using split toning and different things like that and then I'm gonna do a third tutorial where I'm gonna show you how to create your own gradients from scratch so I think you're gonna enjoy this and I've got three different images I'm using by the way I grabbed these images from Adobe stock a great thing about working with Adobe stock is that you can search directly with inside of Photoshop just go to the library panel click on search and you can search all the photos from Adobe stock and you can actually use any of them for free you'll get a low resolution version of it with a watermark on it but it's big enough for you to experiment with and if you decide later on you want to use it you can just license that image and it will automatically updated with the full resolution version without the watermark and I've got a link underneath where I give you ten free images so check that out alright let's have a look here at gradient maps we're gonna start with this photograph and what we're going to do is we're going to use adjustment layers so we're gonna go over to our layers panel here and you see this little icon I'm gonna click on that and this is where all our adjustment layers live now we're not gonna choose gradient we're gonna go down to gradient map and then gradient map is going to appear the first thing you're gonna see is your photos gonna look like I'm white and that's because it's using the default gradient and if you look at the default gradient it goes from left to right just like a histogram so left as shadows and the right side are the highlights so if we look at this black is mapped to blacks and whites are met to whites and the different grades in between so we can change the way this work now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna click and then when I click it's gonna bring up the gradient editor and let me just move it over to the side here to get it out of the way and let's click on a blue here here's one way we've got blue to the left which are the shadows and in white to the right which are the highlights now there's a couple of things we need to do to make this work on a photograph and one of them is to preserve our brightness and a shadow we don't want to blow out as shadows or burn out our highlights we want to keep those the same as they always are but we also want to blend the colors in with the original colors so let's have a look the first thing I want to do to protect my shadows and highlight talking about the detail not the color is going to out of here I'm just gonna click OK to apply it let's go to our layers panel notice it says normal their normal is the blending mode so what we do is if we go down there's a blending mode here and it's called color and if I click on color notice what it does is it applies the new color but it protects the luminosity or the brightness and darkness of the photos if you want to know more about blending modes check out my comprehensive blending modes tutorial also has a link to a free layer blending modes ebook I was gonna charge money for it it's that kind of quality it's not promotional but you can download that for free just follow that link under underneath there alright so let's have a look at the second thing we want to do we want to blend these new colors in with our existing colors and the way to do that is to take this adjustment layer on top and we're gonna change the opacity so if we go here we can click and we can see our pasady slider and we go all the way down there's the original photo and now I'm gonna bring up just a little bit to apply a blend we're at about quarter which is about 28% right now or 1/3 and you can see now if we turn this on and off you can see the effect it's having we immediately have a photograph that looks like it's being professionally collaborated and all we did is just applied the gradient map now I'm going to show you where to get more gradient Maps right now so if we go onto our gradient and we click here we see our gradient map there and of course you know if we click down here we can see our different gradients right there now we already looked at some of these and maybe this one could be kind of interesting but there's a whole bunch more collections if we click this little gear you'll notice all these collections here come with Photoshop so you can grab those already they're all there they're just not all loaded in at once because Adobe doesn't want to overwhelm you so let's have a look at one of the collections we're gonna get out to the photographic toning and we have two options if we click OK it's going to replace our gradients with this be aware if you've created custom gradients they'll get nuked out of here and you'll lose them like these ones so what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose append and append what that does is if I click this little corner there I can pull it down it adds it to there so to append is to add to the collection and not replace anything replace we'll get rid of everything and only have the new ones in there alright so we've got a lot of different photographic toning ones here and if we start to click on these look at these some of these are just beautiful and we can see that just by going through there clicking one click we can see exactly what's happening so I kind of like that that's really nice it's a warmer one we've got kind of cooler ones here and you can see that you know there's some really nice warm ones there and see we've got a kind of a black and the shadow there we've got a brown in the mids and just kind of a slight creamy color in the highlights and I like this one here I'm curious that what's your favorite color combination drop a comment and let me know it I'd love to know what colors you like in your photos so this is the first example so let's have a look at this before and after so there we go before and it's not bad but here just gives it that little extra professional sparkle all right let's move on to our second example now which is a black and white image have you ever struggled to do colorizing to a black and white image maybe you just add you know just a tenth but this is going to do so much more than adding a tenth to the photo this is really going to give it some life and make it look professionally graded so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our blank blending modes here gonna go down to a gradient map that's gonna apply it now remember what we're gonna do here we don't really have to do luminosity or the color sorry but we can even though this is black and white notice how it did kind of affect it a little bit and I'm gonna keep the opacity quite high on this this time maybe like 50 percent and we can change this later if we want to okay so now let's click on some different gradient Maps but just gonna open it here and we can click on these and look at this beautiful color grading that we getting on there you know we can go from these crazy ones and then we can go down here the more kind of designer looking ones I kind of like that signer type kind of looking one and if we go on here we can drop our pasady all the way down and just bring it in a little bit or we can go very high see that may be a little much there and we can bring it up to there okay so you've got a good idea of how this works with the black and white pictures now let's do one more tutorial really quickly this time I'm gonna jump in and I'm going to show you how to create your own custom gradient map let's go here and we're gonna grab our layer styles and we're gonna grab the gradient map the default one let's change our settings remember we went color and we drop this opacity down to 33 nice okay to do this what we're gonna do is we gonna click here onto the gradient editor and I'm just gonna slide this over to the left so we can see what we're working on and the gradient editor will open up so this is the default gradient we were working with shadows highlights and notice it goes black to white now if we want to change a color what we can do is we just click on the color stop and maybe we want to kind of put a blue color into the shadows notice the color is now active click on it and that will bring up a color picker and we can grab why don't we go for the teal kind of effect so we'll go for the orange and teal look so now we've added teal into the shadows and let's get it a highlights we're gonna add an orange so we're just gonna click here and notice we can change the color there before I do though I want to keep the extreme highlights pure white so what I want to do is just copy this stop here's a little trick if you hold the alt or the option key you can click a copy and that will keep this same color as the original one that we played so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna click on the color now and we're gonna grab an orange so we're gonna go in there apply that Orange and now you'll notice that it's in the highlights let's do the same thing for here but we're gonna just click to add another stop we're gonna change this to black and what we're doing now is we're sitting our extreme shadows to black and are extreme highlights to white and we can see that in if we move this yellow over notice how it affects different parts of the image and we go over here so the mid-tones now are becoming orange so we can affect these different ranges by how far over we push this and that's why we added the white we could actually bring the white in and clip all these areas here to pure white and see that so this gives you a lot of flexibility so I was just pull my white back here and I'm gonna bring these down I'm gonna leave the mid-tones alone I'm gonna go for it just kind of this area in the highlights and you can also grab this stop here which will change the way blends between the two so I'm gonna go here and just have a little bit of white all right so let's have a look here same thing we can do with our teals notice we can bring these down so we can affect more the mid-tones or we can go in here pushing it to the left that affects more of the shadows now here's a little trick if I go in the middle here and I choose something like a gray what I'm doing now is I'm not gonna really affect the mid-tones so much see that and I can use this to kind of go across and let's say at that therefore there and I feel like that arm is just a little too bright so let's click on it and what we're gonna do is begin to reduce the brightness of it so just click on the top and drag across here so got a little less of that orange there we go that's looking better and now I'm just gonna click OK and we're just gonna take our pasady all the way down to zero there's the original photograph and now we can just dial in a little bit about look bring it up to there and we can get this cool kind of a cinematic look so if we look at that before and afterwards it gives us a cool effect so if you love Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials hit the subscribe button right now and that notification Bell and then you'll be informed whenever I upload a new tutorial which is at least once a week don't forget your 10 free images a link underneath from Adobe's stock and if you're a photographer and you want to sell your photographs you can get them in front of millions of people and make some extra revenue there's a link underneath of how to become a contributor to Adobe stock if you like this tutorial smash that like button in to dust and until next time I'll see you at the cafe you

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 33,420

Keywords: photoshop, screen cast, tutorial, how to, color grading, color toning, color, gradient, gradient maps, retouching, photo, photography, style, fashion photography, beauty photography, color in photoshop, styles, black and white, color tones, tint, color tint, high end

Id: szlK4ad8krg

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 03 2018