How to perfectly match colors in Photoshop when combining photos.

in this Photoshop tutorial I'm going to show you how to match the colors between two photos so when you cut out a photo and you drop it on the background you can make the colors match they look like they're belong together [Music] hey cafe crew it's Colin Smith here from Photoshop cafe comm and welcome to this week's episode where I'm going to show you how to match the color of a cutout to match that background and it's a little bit unusual for us right now recording one of these in the studio because I'm so used to doing these live streams now so every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. PDT their specific daylight time which is California I'm doing a live stream so we can all get together during this pandemic time so if you're watching this year's in the future this is what we were doing it at the time if you're watching this right now tune in on Thursday alright let's get started with this tutorial right now so what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut out this photo and then we're gonna drop it on this background which has a very different coloring and then we're gonna make it match now I've already cut this out as you can see here I just used a layer mask here so we did a selection I'm not going to go through that in this tutorial because I have tons of tutorials on how to cut out images in Photoshop just have a look on the channel you'll see lots of them there so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab this layer here and I'm gonna drag it into the other document so just drag it up to the tab you'll see that tab will become active I haven't released yet notice that that pointer is white that means it's loaded I'm gonna take it down to about the middle and now I'm gonna release and then what it's gonna do is it's gonna combine these two images now clearly this top one is a little too big so let's make it smaller ctrl T and that would be command T on Mac ctrl T on Windows for free transform and it brings up the bounding box right now you can only see one of them because these are really huge so I need to kind of zoom out a little bit so I can fit it on there his little tip boy you hold down command zero and that will zoom it out and would be control zero on windows and that enables us to see the whole selection there and now we can see these bounding boxes and we can just kind of drag this down I'm gonna hold down the shift key to constrain it and let's just kind of put it in position let's put her right here okay I'm just hitting return command zero or control zero once again we'll fit it to the screen now we have a few things we want to deal with here one of them is the luminosity another one is the color now sometimes when you have a photo like this where you know maybe the light is coming from a different direction although it's pretty hard to tell here because we have different light sources we have these street lamps so there could be a street lamp anywhere casting the light onto her but let's just flip her around so I'm just gonna select that hit ctrl T right click and in flip horizontal so this is kind of one of those things just hit enter and drag it into position this is one of those things you can do sometimes if the lighting is coming from the wrong direction because I want the lighting to come from the right hand side here imagine is another street light just kind of coming down and that's illuminating her a little bit so a little trick you can do is to flip it around now when you do that make sure there's no logos or anything like that or a car you know where you're gonna appear on the wrong side so let's just go ahead now and we're gonna match the tone and the color so before I go to the trick for matching the color what we're gonna do right now is we're gonna match the tone and here's a little secret if I go down here under the adjustment layer create an adjustment and we're going to choose black and white what happens when we choose the black and white is it just enables us to see the tones clearly so we're not gonna get distracted by all the color and as you can see right now it's way easier to see if these are matching or not and I can already kind of tell that the shadows in this background are darker than the shadows in here so let's go ahead and do an adjustment I'm gonna add another adjustment layer we're gonna click on the adjustment layer here now you could use levels of curves a lot of the time I use curves but in this case I'm gonna use labels just to make it a little simpler for you to kind of see what I'm doing here now check out my other tutorial on curves where I go and death and teach you curves inside of Photoshop alright so what we want to do right now is if I make any adjustments notice it's going to affect everything we don't want that we just want to affect that layer underneath with our girl on it so what we can do is see this little icon there click on there you'll see a little arrow appear no it's clipping just to add our layer here and if we make the adjustment it's only gonna affect her that's perfect that's exactly what we want alright so we want to kind of match it the first thing that we can look at is the shadows if we look in here we can see we've got nice dark blacks in here very very dark tones inside the picture of our person here though we're lacking that so what we're going to do is go up under the levels there's three levels here there is blacks whites and mids so let's take the blacks and pull them up a little bit until as shadows a kind of matching the shadows inside of our photograph I think that's definitely looking a lot better than it was before look closer alright let's do the same thing with the highlights so if we're looking into the highlights what's the brightest part we've got a streetlight here we've got the moon these areas here are actually emitting light so they're gonna be incredibly bright so we could look at other areas in here and say hey you know how bright are the clouds that are being illuminated pretty bright and then we could look at her here now of course the shadows you know the highlights on this side but it could be another streetlight here we don't know so anyway let's go in and what we're gonna do is I'm just gonna recover a little bit I don't want to brighten her up because I feel like the whites are almost too bright so we're gonna go not up here we're gonna go underneath and then we're gonna pull this one just a little bit just to roll off the highlights a little bit and now we can just go to the mid-tones and just kind of tune this what feels right with this photo I'm kind of going that way of just a a little bit will go a long way and that just kind of feels more like what we want let's have a look at before now you can see it's clearly washed out and in after these tones are definitely matching a lot better that's great so now we can turn off or throw away a black and white layer we don't need it anymore let's just stare it away and we're looking good right now so here we are obviously the colors need to change what I'm gonna do just for the sake of this tutorial is I'm just gonna hit a control J I'm just gonna copy this move it to the top and hide it and the reason I'm doing it is just so I can show you a before and after later on alright so we're gonna select our layer right there and now we want to do a coloring effect so what we're gonna do is go under image adjustments and this is where all the image adjustments are generally as you saw before we did use an adjustment layer but the one that we're gonna use now is the match color and match color is not available as a adjustment layer so we have to apply it here I'm fortunately - for those of you who are wondering if I should turn that into a smart object and then I can use it non-destructively unfortunately mesh color does not work on a smart smart object either so we're just going to go ahead and apply it right here so choose magic color great now this match color is so powerful when it comes to matching our cutouts with their backgrounds we've got three controls basically but we can also choose where we want to apply it so what we're gonna do is under source if we look at the name of the document we're working on right now it's called match color BG and by the way I grabbed both of these photos from Adobe stock so if you're looking for photos check out our Dobie stock that had lots of good ones there alright so what we want to do is use match color BG so we choose source here and we want to use match color eg so now we're working inside the same document this is so powerful it can actually take the color from another document and apply it but that's another tutorial all right so now we want to choose which is the one we want to get the colors from that's the layer and if we look down here it's called background so under layer go down and choose background now immediately we're going to see the tones permanent background are being applied now obviously it's a little too strong that's okay let's just drag this off to the side a little bit so we can see what's going on we have three options here luminance allows us to adjust the brightness color intensity allows us to adjust the saturation but not the saturation of the entire which is actually the saturation of the layer before we apply this effect so that would be the saturation of that layer itself and fade enables us to fade how much of that adjustment we apply so obviously the match color is too strong so we're gonna take the fade and we're gonna pull it back if I used to pull the fade all the way up it would have no effect but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start at a hundred so my I can calibrate and obviously this is too much so let's start to dial in that color adjustment so as we're going here we're starting to get a little bit more picking up those tones of that surrounding area alright that's looking pretty good so far I think I might need to brighten it up a little bit though with the luminance so let's go to the luminance and we're gonna brighten it up a little bit see what we're doing we're just getting it to kind of match a little bit better fact I've ever got a little far and if I want to fade him more I can that I actually want to just fit it in about there feels quite nice nice have a look at that luminous is one other thing now the color intensity if I increase this see how it increases the original colors if I decrease it gets rid of the original colors and all you see is the color that we have applied so I'm going to take the color intensity all the way down and now we're gonna pull it up so what we're doing is bringing back the original color so we can say hey how much of our original color do we want and fade of course is how much of this new color do we want so let's just kind of get it maybe there when it colors it just on the kick in and you can see that's essentially what we're looking at if we look at this before-and-after you can see was that and get a pretty good effect now you can't play ramp the luminous you can make this darker if you want it and you know it depends how we really want to do this let me go up just a little bit I kind of like it about there and click OK and this is what we see right now so if we look quickly this is what we had before and this is what we have after now here's a nice thing about applying these tone adjustments separately if we feel these are a little strong that's what would look like without it still looks a little too washed out but we can go in here under our level adjustment that we created and we can roll it back a little bit and just that to blend that in and just kind of mix it so if we wanted to make this a little bit less contrasty we can see now it's starting to match a lot better now this one last thing we want is some kind of a grounding shadow here so she doesn't just look like she's floating in the air so why don't we do that quickly so let me just grab this and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually just gonna make a copy of this so just ctrl J just copies it let me hide all this okay what I want to do is I just want to apply this mask first so this right click on this mask and we're going to apply that layer mask and then that just gives us that transparency and now I want to convert just fill this with black so I know if I use the alt or the option Delete key that would fill everything with bright we don't want that but if we hold down the shift key so that's option shift delete it will protect the transparency when we fill it and that's great all right let's turn a layer on on top let's just select a black here on the background and I'm just gonna hit the arrow key and just nudge it down a couple of pixels and we can see now is starting to get this shadow underneath obviously it's everywhere else but don't worry okay so let's just choose filter and we're gonna grab the blur grab our Gaussian blur and then just give it a little bit of blur so watch this on the bottom here just trying to soften the edge of that a little bit so it's not so harsh it just should be just a very very small amount there we go just a small amount there and now we only want it on the bottom of the case to kind of ground that shadow so what we're gonna do is just select the rest of it just grab our lasso tool and I'm just gonna start from here make your selection all the way around go up under there and so I've selected all this and I'm just gonna delete it centers with that selected hit delete ctrl D to deselect and if we look at this before and after you can see we've put our little grounding shadow there now of course we could also you know cast shadows and do more things like that but that's the basics here of matching the color let's have a look at this before and after so if we look at this before you can see it doesn't match at all and then after starting to match that scene so using this match color is gonna work really well for pretty much any image sometimes you want to watch out though if there's a lot of color in the background say there's a lot of different colors in the foreground but the sky and the luminance is a different one you could actually just make a selection around that area and then when you apply that match color it's actually gonna take just from that selection so that's just an extra little tip there so this tutorial was a request from last week's live scream so come on into our livestream on Thursday and if you want a tutorial you can request it right there so anyway let me know in the comments what you guys thought about this was this useful did you learn something new I'd love to know let's hear your comments underneath and if you're new here to photoshop cafe welcome to our family I really encourage you to hit the subscribe button right now so you can get a new tutorial from me every single week make sure you turn on all notifications and then that way you two bullet you know when I upload a new video which is every Tuesday so anyway guys if you like smash the like button into dust until next time or this Thursday I'll see you at the cafe you

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 70,046

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, learn photoshop, how to, photography, colin smith, photoshopcafe, colin smith tutorial, photoshopcafe tutorial, adobe photoshop, match color, match colors, match photos, match colors in photos, compositing, cut out, combine images, combine photo, combine photos, blend with background, change background, replace background, blend layers, match layers

Id: XHTvzBUP5Lo

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020