Mastering Infinite Color: The Ultimate Photoshop Color Grading Tool

hey everyone my name is prti NY and I've been working in the industry for over 10 years as a retoucher the biggest problem that I've personally seen happen whether it's my clients myself or other photographers is the fact that color grading is extremely difficult to do and understand that's why there's not a lot of content on it before I jump into it I quickly want to tell you the purpose of this tool simply put people don't always know what they want but they sure know what they love when they see it if you're like me you usually don't know a direction to go in even when you find a direction that does inspire you you really have to know how to do it and where do you even begin to start infinite color simplifies that entire process so you know actually how to get great results and do it fast there's also this plugin come from analyzing my own personal color grades from actual campaigns and editorials that I've retouched so even though it looks random the settings are very intentional and produce a quality that can't be replicated by honestly anything else it comes with my identity and color signature from years of professional experience so the goal of the tool is to allow everyone to have fun with color griding again and get great results before I release infinite color I actually reached out to professional working photographers in various genres just to see if they could create intricate results that they loved and complemented their work and vision just by using the tool alone the images you see before you were created with infinite color they were able to create color grades in a way that was true to them no matter how particular they were so it showed me that anyone can do it no matter the genre no matter the experience level this tool is very applicable following that we've grown a huge Community with thousands of other photographers following suit and I would love to feature people on a daily basis so that's exactly what I did and I hope to see you here as well in the future now that being said let's just jump into it and I want to show you exactly how it works I can't tell you how proud and excited I'm for you to actually witness this tool that has truly changed the way that many photographers have worked especially myself I'm not really good at color toning and I'll be honest this is something that I'm excited about because as you can see from this example shot by my wife Bella kotak who's a finer photographer I was able to create color grade within actually just a minute and this is something so complex because I was able to actually stack three different looks that the panel gave me automatically to create something so beautiful and I'll be honest if I had to do this manually or explain to someone how to actually come up with this color grade I wouldn't know what to do but the beauty of this panel is based on the visual output that it shows me I know exactly what I like and don't like and then I can guide it and get closer to what I'm going for and that's what I want to show you today let me go and hide this group for a second and start from scratch the way this panel works is actually really simple we have a create button in the center of it and then we have a few different options now the few different options here at the bottom are the layers that the panel itself generates so you can see it says curves color balance selective color gradient map and color lookup which means when I hit the create button you can see that on the adjustment layers themselves you can see the group called infinite color and within the group itself we have curves color balance selective color gradient map and color lookup very similarly or exactly I should say to the names of the layers on the panel and this is important because now instead of using the layer stack itself to turn the layers on and off we can actually come over to the panel itself and independently turn on and off each of the layers within the color grade that It produced and this is good I think because it keeps your layer stack really nice and efficient and you don't have to even use the layer stack anymore let's say for example there is something that you would like to redo again perhaps I'm going to go through each of these names and turn them on and off and this is good because it allows you to see and learn exactly which layer is doing what in the color grade and you can see wait a second you know what selective color is actually the one doing a lot of the work when it comes to adjusting these greens to this darker magenta bluish look I can't even explain it and I I let me just rephrase this we developed this panel because you know these settings themselves that each of these adjustment layers has they are intentionally created and the parameters are set so that all these layers themselves interact in a way that creates beautiful color tones every time you use a create button it's not just a randomization tool it's like these layers are playing in harmony to create a symphony that is specific to analysis that I've done on my layers every time I've come up with color grades for editorial and Commercial work it's almost like a blueprint of color grading at your fingertips that's really important let's take a look at some of the other settings that this has as well like I mentioned before maybe you have you know selective color which seems to be doing quite a lot of work here on this color grade maybe you want to randomize it again you can Shuffle just that specific layer so it's almost like a crate button for these individual layers that way you don't have to hit crate uh every single time to redo everything it makes it super easy for you last but not least we have an intensity slider on this homepage here and that's because if you are working on images that are shadows dominant or highlight dominant it should have different intensities right Shadows tend to pick up a lot of color and it tends to shift a lot more when you adjust color which is why shadowy images they very cinematic tend to have a lot of colors attached to it that are very visible I should say and personally I recommend to keep the intensity slider actually quite low and then hit the create button to begin with because then you get a more Nuance look you get colors that are more suited to the image and it gives you better control over the direction it will go if you're someone like me and who would like just to you know a little taste of the way the colors are going to be modified then a low intensity is a good way to go because then you can see subtle shifts and slight shifts because then you can also build off each other now we also have some of the settings here if I right click on create you're going to see I can change the name of it I can change the group color as you can see for me I have a uh a gray color here which is why the group is set to gray you can also change it to orange or red but this will only take an effect the next time you hit the create button so keep that in mind I can call this toning if I want to whatever it is that you normally call it next I have a group opacity which is something that I have set to 50 um but by default you will have your set to 100 but it may be too intense I have found a lot of people who use a panel tend to set the group opacity somewhere between 25 to 50 off the bat and that's a a good thing to remember again we wanted these settings there so that depending on how in tense or minimal you like to color grade you have full control over it and how the panel responds to you so don't be scared in case the colors are too intense or not intense enough it gives you the option to do that finally we have the option to have a group mask so you see here it has a white mask this is really great for making sure that you know colors might not um impact the dress as much maybe this is something that you think is important you would like to have the dress stay with the true authentic colors of the designer that they intended or maybe you don't want the colors to contaminate the skin so I'll just roughly and terribly show you how I do that so you can see with a a black brush I've selected the white mask and now I'm going over the skin so now it doesn't impact the skin and the dress and I think that actually looks really good the magenta of these leaves here tend to blend really nicely with the dress and this is the best part about the panel is I don't really know how to color grade the best way um or for example I don't know what direction this image should go in but because I've hit the infinite color a few times I've been able to see a variety of potential with the image and now visually it just looks good you know for me I know when something looks good but I don't necessarily know what that's going to be before I start color grading so we're going in a circle here but you can see how we have been able to use the tool to complement what we are going for or what the potentialist image has right finally we have always on top which means that the group itself is always going to stay on top of your layer stack this is good because if you are working on retouching and you have a ton of different layers going on you want the color grade to be at the end so it doesn't stay underneath any skin tone adjustments or any other curves or anything going on it has its place and you know exactly where it's going to be so that's cool um now once I go back and speaking of nuance want color we can actually stack these color grades so if you remember the initial color grade that I did here you'll see three different infinite color groups this is super easy to do now and let's say that let me turn off my color grade stack here let's say that I have this color color grade that we did Super nuanced you know I like the way that it's going but now I'm going to go ahead and add a couple of more color grades I'll increase the intensity here just a little bit and uh what I'll do is I'm going to before I hit create I want to hold option on my keyboard on a Mac or if you're on a PC you're going to hit alt and with that press down I'm going to hit create again and you can see here I have my new infinite color group with it set to the name that I have adjusted in the settings as well as the group color and the opacity so I'll reduce the intensity again but this time maybe I'll just keep curves and selective color on and actually really like that a lot I really like that I'm just going to do one more for kicks and giggles I'm going to hold option and click on create again and just see what different tones I like so with that group being set I'm just going to keep on hitting create without the option button selected so I can shuffle through and get these variants that's super interesting actually and this will obviously change based on who you are but I think that look really good um and another thing to note is that these different options that I'm stacking is just a way for me to possibly create variants different variants of whatever whatever I've created maybe I already like the first group we created and these additional ones are just variance and minimal adjustments to what we've done before so you can use it in that way too um another way that you can use it is that you can just keep on stacking and the more complex your layers are the more intricate and unique the results are so it's totally up to you and I have noticed this because a lot of people that use infinite color tend to stack these different color groups to create intricate tones and I'm just I'm just in love with it and I think I hope you are too finally the panel itself has memory so for example let's say I click on the toning group on top and then come back to infinite color you'll see over here that the panel itself remembers that we only had curves and selective color on as well as the intensity now if I come back to the base one infinite color and I come over here you'll see it remembers that it had everything on as well as the intensity this is great because every time you're trying to modify the group for example you really should know um you know how much intensity there was and what layers were on so you can modify accordingly and you can Shuffle the layers independently and so forth so the magic that that group created for you can be replicated if you create again or if you hit Shuffle or whatever so I think that's really cool now that you've seen that in action let me show you how to save layers so if you've ever created something that you know you don't want to lose forever you can save layers right through the panel itself you don't need to know how to make an action so let's go over that next I have this beautiful image here by our good friend Lucas stelli who's phenomenal photographer and I want to create a color grade using infinite color and save those layers so I came up with this color grade here which allowed me to make a really nice warm summer look and I want to save that to apply to a series of images or perhaps another set later on and I can do that by clicking on infinite color as a group expanding the folder and while holding shift and clicking on the first layer here it selects all the layers within the group and the group itself then I want to come over to the tools Tab and this will only be available uh in terms of saving or backing up and importing if you have 2021 and above and and you'll know you'll have it because you'll be able to have the plugins menu and that's how you know that you're able to um use this option um infinite color will work in versions before then but this is an upgrade that comes obviously included as long as you have 2021 and above so make sure you have that installed then all you need to do is click on this plus button here under user looks when you click on it it'll pop up with this button and it's it initiates the setup option and all you really need to do is right click on it and name it and that's it so I'll call this warm summer and I'll say save layers and it'll say that worked close and then when I hit back you can see the button right there so now if I delete this group here and click on warm summer it allows me to save those colors even cooler I can share this with my friends or anyone for that matter if I click on this wheel option here this Cog on the top right that can say backup or import backup will save everything that you have in your tools tab here and any other settings that you've done as well um and import will allow you to import your color grades from other people too and that's a good example because if you have something that you see someone doing and you would love their color grades and they use infinite color they can share that with you or you can share that with them too cuz once you back up it will generate a file which you can then send to whoever you'd like and they can import your colors too so it comes comes up with a nice network of people who would like to share their color tones finally if you'd like an online option simply click on open infinite color create plus and then you can rename it to whatever you'd like you can call this warm summer I'll just make it easy for us hit save and there you go that way you never have to worry about losing whatever you've created finally we have an option here under tools for for really Minor Adjustments or nuanced controlled adjustments at the bottom these four tools at the bottom left is uh an option called regions and regions allows you to control your shadows midtones and highlights independently so if I click on highlights and adjust the curve that it is uh attached to you'll see that it's adjusting just the highlights you can also go to the color channels independently and also adjust the colors of each area too we also have midtones which are areas between the shadows and highlights so I can lift them up if I want some a softer transition I can also go to Shadows if I would like the Shadows to be a little bit richer so you're able to actually change the Nuance of the photo just like that without really having to do a lot of work makes it super easy for you I think being lazy is the best thing ever when you have tools that facilitate that next aside from regions we have grain and this is a smart filter in Photoshop that allows you to add digital noise and I call it grain because it's the most similar and easy to understand and this is great because in case you want to adjust the amount of it you just simply click on add noise and change the amount or percentage to decide how much you would like then over here next to it I have contrast very self-explanatory it is a black and white adjustment layer set to soft light and you can change the opacity of that as well finally we have fade and fade will simply just do kind of the opposite where it will just bring um more depth into the Shadows it will fade the shadows out a little bit more so it's a crossfaded look and you can use it for whatever you prefer using uh using it to with these four options together I think it makes a nice nuanced example of how to um adjust an image and it complements the entire retouching um set here for infinite color finally let's go ahead and take a look at our final tab which is harmony to create harmonious tones in an image the color Harmony tab here infinite color Suite allows you to create color schemes for your images and the good thing about color schemes is that it with little effort allows you to create harmonious and pleasing color tones without doing much um all you really need to do is come over here put on the create button once you have a Harmony set so for example let's say you have a complimentary color grade or a color tone U that you'd like to do and that's a simplest example I'll show you how this works once I have this button selected you'll see an icon which has these two colors that are the opposite ends of each other or these dots that are the opposite ends of each other which means that the colors will be two and it'll create something very complimentary that's why it's called the complimentary color scheme now I'll hit create and now it's going to ask me what color would I like in my Shadows so I'm simply going to click on say this nice cish tone I'll hit okay and it's going to allow me to automatically generate this group and don't worry I'll adjust this in a second but when I come over down here to my grade map you will see one thing happen under your properties if you don't have properties loaded it's under window and properties you will see the colors themselves that are being reflected in the image naturally I would not uh recommend you use the color blend mode by default you can change the opacity if you want to for this particular image maybe having something lower is better but let's say you would like to change the blend mode over here on the bottom left we have this little icon it says C which is reflective of the color blend mode when I click on it once it changes over to soft light and for me I think softlight works a lot better when it comes to color grading personally speaking but uh you can experiment the differences uh yourself I think soft light what it does adds nice contrast along with the colors that you've chosen so it's a better integration over the original color tones in image with ones that you've selected you can also reselect the Colors by hitting create and then maybe I'll want something a bit darker it's like a dark blue like that and see what a difference it makes by changing the brightness of that color it automatically selected and place the color that we put into the Shadows but on the other side of spectrum it created a color that's the specific complimentary color tone to whatever that we've picked and it makes it super easy for us to do now let's say that uh we would like to use some of these other options we have a triadic which is a three-point color scheme so it'll select three colors now that are on the opposite ends of each other you see how it just kept that blue that we have selected but it will generate these two other colors that are all equidistant from each other on the color wheel which makes your shadows midtones and highlights actually look quite pleasing and you can see this image here that Luca created looks really beautiful just by selecting a few different colors there's a couple other things that we have included you can obviously go into 4o or fiveo and adjust the opacity and see how it looks and fivepoint actually does something that's really intricate and unique and you can decide whatever color scheme they like however let's go back to our complimentary for a second and I want to talk about shift shift is a way to change the balance of the color scheme let's say right now as you can see here in the gradient map option we have the shadows and highlights or half of the image and the other half of the image and one tone and the other but perhaps you would like these warm tones to impact the image a little bit more what we could do is if we adjust the shift to the left you can see here that now the balance is shifted to the left and what that means is that more of the image here is being impacted because this is very similar to a um histogram and the histogram itself is on the left being shadows and the right being highlights and everything in the middle being gradation so now we have more warm tones encroaching into the shadow region and the further I go the more it impacts so now this is good because you might not know specifically how much Shadows are in an image or where the Shadows start and end but just by pushing the shift left and right you decide exactly what the balance is going to be furthermore we have another option here called rotation where if I click on this it will shift the colors to the left so here's what I mean let me go back to this triadic color scheme really quick so you can see a few different colors I will reset reset the shift in the middle here and pay attention to what happens to the colors as I hit this rotate function and the colors will basically cycle through the different regions like this so you can see that reddish pinkish tone go from highlights midtones to shadows and back again so it allows you to determine what color you want wear within the color scheme itself and as you look at the image you can see it actually makes a big difference finally we have a randomize function which will randomize infinite color to whatever you'd like within a gradient map so you can see here that the colors will completely randomize as you keep the uh color scheme the same and of course I would recommend maybe reducing the opacity to begin with around 10% or so and then decide if you'd like more or less and keep adjusting in that way the randomization function is very interesting and can by itself be use H to create really quick and harmonious color tones just like that and simply put you're able to do it finally you can also hit option or alt and come up with another uh stack as well so it will then just add another folder with another gradient map and again infinite color will remember which gradient map is what and adjust accordingly and we also have settings so if you right click on create you can change the group color similar to the infinite color portion as well as a group mask and making sure it's always on top so there you go I think with that in mind I think you know you're able to have a good understanding of how infinite Harmony works well that's it for infinite color I truly hope you enjoy this demonstration and a look into what this panel can do I know firsthand that so many photographers have really taken advantage of this plug-in to create some incredible pieces of work both in the commercial and editorial world as well as personal projects to learn more check out our website at infinite at color panel.com where you can see other videos as well as what photographers and creators have made with it and also be involved in our Facebook and Instagram groups so you can share your work and so we can also feature you

Channel: Infinite Color Panel

Views: 606

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Id: tbWv5rvrlrU

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024