Low Key Photographic Art - How To Make a BORING Photo AMAZING!

hi everyone anthony morganti here a few days ago i uploaded this image of the lion to my instagram after that image posted two different people dm'd me asking me if i do a video demonstrating how to get this look well that's what we're going to be doing today except we're not going to be working on the image of the lion instead we're going to be working on this image of the orangutan [Music] [Music] i already did some basic processing to this image and when i say basic processing i mean exactly that in lightroom i brought the image in and in the basic tab i adjusted tone and color i did some noise reduction and some sharpening and i did lens corrections and that's it now i have the image opened up into photoshop now step one is you need to make the image dark and we're going to use an adjustment layer to do that there's four different adjustment layers that will accomplish that goal you could use any of them whichever one you're most comfortable with for adjustment layers i'm talking about our brightness contrast levels curves and exposure i like to use levels so i'm going to use that and to make it darker i just need to take the slider move it to the left now don't worry about making it too dark or don't sweat it that you're not making it dark enough just make it dark we're going to be able to fine tune this down the road so at this point just make it dark and that's what i did now the reason why we're using an adjustment layer not only is it its own layer but it has a layer mask we're going to use that layer mask to make selective parts of the image brighter typically you want to make the areas brighter where you want people to look now my vision for this image is that we're going to have light rays come in and hit him in the face and his hand so i'm going to make his face brighter and his hand brighter now we have the layer mask so make sure you're clicked on that and then what we're going to do is get a brush hit the b key on your keyboard for the brush and then to make part of it brighter we need to paint in black on the white mask so over here on your color swatches make sure black is your foreground color if it isn't hit the x key on your keyboard so that it is now as far as brush attributes make sure opacity and flow at both at 100 at this for this part then go up to the here to the brush attributes and hardness this will vary you know on your image in this case here because his forehead is brow line those are kind of hard edges i can't use too soft of a brush because it will bleed out onto the background then it won't look right so i need to use a harder brush so i'm going to bring this up i'm going to try around 90. i might have to redo it if that doesn't work but we'll try 90 and then to vary the size of the brush the right bracket key will make it larger the left bracket key smaller then what i'm going to do is take this relatively large brush and i'm going to come in and paint around this edge of this forehead area here and you can see because i'm painting in black on the white mask it's making it brighter now just try to get it as close as possible it's difficult for me at the moment because i'm trying to talk my mic is hanging in my face kind of distracting me so i'm trying to talk and do this all at the same time now i kind of made a mistake i spilled off into the background a little bit in front of his eye i'll fix that in a moment and try to get around his mouth area here and i kind of made a mistake there but that's all right so we're going to get all that all right now wherever you've kind of spilled over where you shouldn't have all you need to do is paint in white in those areas so hit the x key on your keyboard to get the white swatch as your foreground swatch i'm going to get a smaller brush come in here and fix that and i go in here as well and then hit the x key again to continue painting in black so i think i did okay probably kind of did a little better for this part it looks ridiculous don't worry about it at this moment now we're going to do his hand so we're going to get a larger brush by hitting the right bracket key and come up here and get the edge of his fingers like that make sure you get up as best you can all right i might overdid it i'll hit the x key and i'll commit again and try to erase it from where i did that's good all right now now we need to have this light fall off on his face properly we have this really ugly hard edge right now now to do that we're going to continue painting in black on the mask except what we're going to do is we're going to go up to the brush attributes and take hardness all the way down so we're using a maximum soft brush and then we're going to take the opacity and pull that down as well maybe this again is around feel i'm going to try around 30. it's at 33. i'm going to get a larger brush and i'm going to come in and then paint here now every pass i make is cumulative so i'll be adding 33 percent more brightness let's say every time i pass so you can see i could kind of fade away that line and over here as well so i could get a smaller brush come in here and just keep painting over it and you'll fade away that hard edge that i created so we're getting a better kind of fall off of light from you know where i originally painted whoops made a mistake i'm just going to hit command z to undo that i don't know what happened there hit a caffeine twitch and we'll come in here all right so not bad maybe i want to make his ear a little brighter i think i'll get a large brush here and just kind of go like this that's pretty good right there all right so we're done with the actual um part where i have it emphasized where i want people to look his face and his hand now i mentioned when we were adjusting the actual brightness of this layer not to worry about whether or not you're making it too light or too dark because you'll be able to readjust it and that's where we're going to do what we're going to do now now we're not going to readjust it with the same adjustment layer what we're going to do is we're going to use the camera raw filter and that will allow us to really fine tune our tone in the image but the camera raw filter won't work on an adjustment layer it will only work on a pixel layer so what i need to do is either flatten this or add a stamp layer on top i prefer to put a stamp layer on top to do that it's a four key keyboard shortcut on a mac it's shift option command e on a pc a shift alt ctrl e once you do that you'll have that stamp layer up there now i could add the camera raw filter to this but once i do it will get baked in meaning i won't be able to go back into the camera raw filter and readjust anything if i feel it needs to be readjusted so to avoid that what you could do is make this layer a smart object to do that go up to filter and down to convert for smart filters and when you do that you'll notice there's a little square in the corner now that means it's a smart object you could add smart filters to it now we're going to add that camera raw filter we're going to go up to filter down to camera raw filter and it will open up the image into adobe camera raw now i'm going to still work on tone i'm going to take contrast way up now that's really emphasizing the brightness on his face and his hand a little bit on his ear right and maybe i'll take highlights down a little bit shadows down even more it's all by feel all right you know so just you know try to work on it make it look like you think it should look now have you ever seen an image and it was soft but it wasn't blurry you could accomplish that with the texture and clarity sliders and you could do it one of two ways they both will make it soft but not blurry but it will look slightly different so it will depend on your taste and maybe on an image to image basis first way is you just take texture down you see when i do it i'm making it soft and bring clarity up a little bit the second way is just the opposite you just take texture up and take clarity down a little bit so use whichever one you like best for the image you're working on in this case i think i'd like to texture down clarity up a little bit just like that you can move dehaze as well to add a little more contrast if you feel uh it needs it now a lot of photographers work in color also at this point so they'll adjust vibrant saturation they'll go down the color mixer color grading even calibration i think that's folly because we're going to be color grading this in a moment and when we do the color grading is going to be so overwhelming that it's just going to obliterate any color adjustments you do at this point so don't bother color messing with color now just worry about the tone and i think i got it the way i wanted it's dark his face is bright his hand is bright even his ears a little bright i kind of like it um a little more yeah then we'll click okay all right so now we have it kind of tone graded the way we want it to be if that is a term now we could do color grading at this point but i'm going to add light rays and i want the color grading to affect the light rays as well so what i'm going to do is add a light ray to his face to do that we're going to get a new blank layer just click right here then what we're going to do is we need to get a brush hit the b key on your keyboard for the brush just double check that it's a maximum soft brush so hardness is at zero opacity is at a hundred flow is at a hundred then what you could do is you need to click on the white swatch if you click on the black swatch you'll get this that's not going to help you hit the x key till the white swatch is there click on the white swatch and now you could select a color so what i'm going to do is select something yellowish like right there all right we'll click ok then what i'll do is i'll get let break a key get a little smaller and we're going to just click once now don't click up in the corner even though the light's going to be coming from up there if you do what will happen is when you make this into a light ray it will have a hard edge on either side because you're clicking on the hard edge of the corner of the image click down here when you do that you'll have softness all the way around then what you could do is hit command t to resize it and you could make it bigger then you can move it around and now we need to stretch it out to his face and what you could do you make it a little bigger maybe is what you could do then is hold the commander control key and command if you have a mac control if you have pc and grab this corner and then you could stretch it out now what i need to do is i could need to zoom out a little bit hitting command minus a couple three times and then you don't have to hold the command or control key in any longer just the first time and then you could kind of stretch things out the way you want them make me minus a minute now this actually could be a tedious part of the operation because to get these rays to kind of look proper often takes a lot of work and for this video i really don't have the time to make a you know a one hour video uh getting the light ray to look perfect so we're going to do the best we can but just be aware that i'm probably not going to be happy with the light ray when i'm done so i'll hit the check mark and we'll zoom in by hitting command 0 on my mac control 0 on the pc so we have a light ray coming in in his face i would kind of like another one hitting his hand so what i'm going to do first of all if it's too like intense you could just take opacity down right if that helps like that all right and then i want that second one right so i'm going to add another layer another blank layer i still have the same brush i'll get a smaller brush and we'll click over here right then i'll hit that command t again maybe we'll move it up in here somewhere and i'm going to rotate it this way so that i could then hold my command key in and grab this one and stretch this one down in this way hit command minus a lot to make it very small and then i can stretch it out so it's hitting that okay and then hit the check mark and then hit command zero then i could affect the opacity here as well make it better match the other one okay so we have these couple light rays coming in i really don't like them i would adjust them more but let's just say we like that now is the point where we actually do the color grading we're going to use a color gradient adjustment layer that is right here we're going to click right on this it's a gradient map actually now when you do that you go oh my gosh don't worry about this what we're going to do is change the blend mode to either overlay or soft light either one will work they give you a slightly different look i usually prefer soft light so i'm going to go with that and then we're going to take the opacity down to start with to around fifty percent all right just around because we're going to try different gradient maps to see which one looks best on this image and this will give having soft light opacity of 50 will be able to look at them and compare them better now what is included with photoshop are a number of different gradient maps they're all in these folders there is one set of gradient maps that used to be included with photoshop years ago that they no longer have by default in the gradient map adjustment layer it's called legacy gradients they are available though and you could load them in here i already have mine loaded in at the end i'll show you how to load these gradients into your photoshop so that you could use them the reason why i like to use them is because inside of that folder is another folder called photographic toning i like to use these when i open that up you can see there's a bunch all right i'm going to click on that first one see what it looks like then what i'll do is i'll use the right arrow key to just go through them and you can see it gives you a dramatic different look sometimes you could see as we go through and that's why i mentioned it was um probably folly to adjust color earlier because you could see this really does change color i mean you go from that to that you can see what i'm talking about okay so just find one you like all right maybe maybe i don't know that one i don't know what do you guys like there's so many i mean i could just keep going through these yeah all right let's just say uh was it this one this one depends you know what mood i'm in sometimes i like a cooler look sometimes i like a slightly warmer look let's let's go with that one all right so we like that now what i could do is i could come back in and readjust these rays let's go to this one right let's make our image smaller biting command minus a few times so i need to readjust this ray i'm going to hit command t and then i'm going to i have to hold in the command key now to try to stretch it out again i kind of screwed that up a little bit maybe that's a little better i don't know kind of messing it up but like that i don't know we'll say we'll go with that now i could i typically spend a lot of times on these light rays to try to get them to look better they're a little too bright i think so i'm gonna bring the opacity of that one down to maybe 69-ish 67 go up to this one and try to make that around the same okay let's just go with that all right so we're going to hit uh command 0 to fit the screen all right so now we have this now we've come a long way here's the original image and now we have this all right now at this point you could if you want to tweak color a little bit more put a stamp layer on top and then add another camera raw filter and then with the camera raw filter adjust color there or you could add a hue saturation adjustment layer and with this you could adjust color as well let's say make it less saturated maybe i'll like that and you could do you know something there as well so you could use either one to adjust color the last thing what you finally will do to really finish the image up is dodging and burning now you could dodge and burn right on a pixel layer meaning put a stamp layer on top again or flatten the image and just dodge and burn right on that but sometimes when you do that you'll get some color shifts so what i prefer to do and what most photographers prefer to do is this little trick you'll put a blank layer on top and then you'll fill this blank layer with gray on a mac you could hit shift delete on a pc at shift f5 and you'll get the fill dialog in the fill dialog use 50 percent gray and click ok so you have this gray layer now what you do is change the blend mode of that layer to overlay when you do that it disappears but what will happen is if you make it either lighter or darker gray in areas it will make the image darker or lighter in those areas and you won't get a color shift so what you do is now get the dodge and or burn turtle now right down in here i want to make this area right in here darker so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get the burn tool so i'll go right here they're in this little cubby always the keyboard shortcut by the way and now it's by default showing the dodge tool i don't want that i want the burn tool and i'll make sure that hardness is at zero you want to make sure exposure is not at a hundred like bring it down low like 20. this is a cumulative adjustment and usually you start with mid tones that will give you the most effect and then just come in and start painting on the areas in this case because i'm burning i'm making it darker so just keep going maybe get a larger brush for this and go like that now once you've kind of exhausted the effect with a um mid-tones you could try let's say shadows and we'll make that darker so here's a before after there's before and there's after so you can see how i'm doing it also i could use the dodge tool to make it brighter make sure that exposure is still low around 20. again start with mid tones let's make his ear brighter so i'll go in here and then i'll make his eye brighter in here so you come in and fine-tune things uh parts of the image here and there let me give you a before after there's before and there's after um so you can see come in and do this now i'm not going to do the entire image in this video but you get an idea how you could go about doing it then once all that is done you're done um with the image and hopefully that you've created something you like because there's a lot of steps involved and they all kind of add together to come up and end up with something now i mentioned that in the gradient map adjustment layer that there were those legacy gradients and by default they're not there now to get them there what you need to do is to go up to window and then down to gradients and when you do that you'll add it over here to this panel then click this little fly out menu and when you do that if you go down you'll see legacy gradients click on that and that will add them not only to this area right here but it will add them to the gradient map adjustment layer as well so they'll be there forever you only have to do that once and if you want to get rid of this you don't want it here what you could do is go back up to window and click on gradients again oops you don't actually to get rid of it this is weird yeah you have to click here and then you have to close tab group then that gets rid of it yeah so that is our color grading tutorial on getting this kind of dark artsy look hopefully that helps you process your images in a way that helps you express yourself better thank you everyone watches my videos i really do appreciate it talk to you guys [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 12,043

Keywords: photoshop, morganti, anthony morganti, photo effects, tutorial, photoshop tutorials, photoshop manipulation, photo editing, learning, Tips, How-to, low key portrait in photoshop, Editing low light photos in photoshop, Transform Boring photos To Amazing, Process low light image Photoshop, Retouch Dull Photo photoshop, improve low light photos Photoshop, Post-Processing Low-Light Photo, Fixing Bad Lighting in Photoshop, Low light photo editing photoshop, camera raw photoshop tutorial

Id: Ufxnjoj1QOs

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021