Retouching Sunrise & Sunset Images Using Filters with Control Points in Color Efex Pro

[Music] welcome everybody um i'm excited to be here it feels like it's been an eternity since i've done a webinar it's only been a little over a month but i'm excited to be here hopefully you are as well i know we have a large range of experience levels from folks who've never used the nik collection before all the way to some experts i'm sure because we've got a really good crowd here today and um i'm going to show you a slide where we'll kind of go over what we're going to be talking about today but there's two things that i want to mention about this slide specifically right now um so we are retouching sunrise and sunset images um a lot of the techniques that i'm going to show you they don't you don't have to use them on sunrise or sunset images they just work well for sunrise or sunset images i i should probably do another or a quick introduction of myself lori mentioned that i have done a couple of these webinars before um i was the webinar trainer at nic software from 2009 to 2012 and then on into the sort of google years if you will um into about 2014 i had been conducting webinars and um i've done over 2000 of these webinars they have changed dramatically since the beginning um and you know they're not perfect but hopefully you get some really cool uh techniques and uh concepts out of taking your sunrise and sunset images and and you know getting a little bit more out of them uh so we're gonna be talking about these four things today adding color to dull skies we'll talk about the graduated filters um you can customize some you customize all of them but you can actually choose the colors you want to use in some of them whereas some of them have some nice presets we'll talk about those differences and then um we will talk about how to selectively utilize control points with these filters in color effects pro and then also we'll uh you know in a i'll sort of pepper in some different ways of getting natural results and the key to getting you know a more natural look is understanding what the different sliders in some of the graduated filter tools do the blending vertical shift opacity and rotation specifically cool all right so i'm going to be presenting from photo lab 4 for today but uh the concepts that we're dealing with and even basically the interface itself will look and work exactly the same way whether you're launching your nik plugins from lightroom or from photoshop or some other piece of software or even as a standalone we're going to begin with this image and we're just going to apply a couple filters to this photograph to hone in the color a little bit more and we're going to be introducing you to the cross balance filter here as well which isn't a graduated filter but i'll talk you through that one um let's see any other notes on this one oh so this is a it's a jpeg image i actually received this from one of my students so i teach photography at the rochester institute of photography and um i you know request that my students send me any images they want to once they've left for the summer and uh right off the bat gabby fedejedi uh sent me these she's a really promising student really smart and great photographer um and this is just an image of a nice i think this is dusk i probably could check the metadata anyways um let's open the image into colorfx pro and actually get down to brass tacks here so uh in photo lab 4 to access the nik collection you move into the lower right corner of the interface and there's a little nik collection button um i am in the customize section of the interface that's where i'm going to be working from uh in this webinar so the nik collection button in that lower right corner is going to allow us to open up our plugin selector so this is how you would access any of the nik plugins that you might want to from photo lab 4 note that there is a settings button down in the bottom if we have any extra time at the end i'll kind of cover some of those options as well because they're nice to know um all right so we're going to launch into color effects pro 4. as colorfx pro 4 launches what's going to happen here in photo lab or if you were to launch from lightroom is the original image usually a raw file i would suggest um would would open sorry a raw file would be duplicated into a tiff file so what you would result or the end result would be is you'd have two images in your lightroom catalog or here within your photo lab library and um it's important to note that because this is it's parametric it's um we're able to work in a non-destructive workflow and in fact for folks who aren't familiar i have to just mention what this tool does here this little pop-up that just came up this is informing us that we can work in a fully non-destructive workflow meaning we can open this image back up into color effects pro and reprocess the image even after we've finished editing the image here within color effects so it's a really nice option this is one of the new features within uh the more recent version of the nik collection by dxo so um this is just telling us that that's what's going to happen here i leave these prompts up so that when we have these webinars if you've never launched the software you're going to see this prompt as well and you're going to have the same experience basically so i'm going to click the ok button that's going to pop up every time and from now on i'll just click the ok button on that particular one if we get other um if we get other prompts i'll walk you through what those are doing okay so we're here within color effects pro 4. on the left side we have our filter library so this is where our 55 individual filters are they're laid out in alphabetical order uh and they allow us to sort of scroll through as we see fit the upper left interface or portion of the interface also um allows us to break the filters down into different groupings so right now i've sort of changed my filter library genres or or prompts here and they are set to all favorites film nature wedding portrait architecture and travel so that might be different than yours like if you have color effects pro open right now but basically what these things do is they allow us to sort our our filters by these different kinds of um filters these are ones that emulate film or if i click on the wedding filters these are filters that work really well for wedding photography um for the webinar today we're going to stick with the all prompt or the um section here uh and i want to do that just so that everybody has a similar experience again okay so let's choose our first filter and then we'll talk about what it's doing and how to control it uh the first filter is a really wonderful contra or sorry color filter that allows us to shift our kind of white balance our color response here it's called cross balance so we'll click on cross balance and technically what this filter does if you follow me into the upper right side of the interface where i have my controls for the filter this is trying to give us a sort of throwback to the film era days where we could uh cross process or not sorry this isn't cross process where we could shoot one kind of film in a different kind of lighting environment so this is a really interesting color shifting tool uh it doesn't work on every kind of photography but i really love what it does on these kinds of sunrise or sunset images and that's primarily where i use this filter uh because you can use this particular tool tungsten to daylight number two and what this is gonna do for us is it's gonna it's going to make the image look as though we had shot with a particular white balance tungsten and um we were so tungsten film and we were shooting in a daylight environment right so what it does is it shifts the color in a relatively interesting way and i love the fact that i'm getting these nice cool tones up here um and and that's what i want to sort of exaggerate a little bit more with a combination of filters so with cross balance we're getting this sort of throwback to film days if you will and the beauty of this is that we can control all the facets of what this tool is doing so you know one of the limitations of shooting film for anybody who who had or does is basically what you get out of camera and in the processing um depending upon the chemistry is is what you get unless you're doing trickery within scanning and printing here one of the interesting aspects using this particular tool these color effects and the nik plugins is that we can actually apply these filters we can control the amount that we might want with the strength slider um in this case i'll go ahead and just bump the strength all the way up to 100 and then if we want to we can actually apply where the filter is being placed on the image using control points so this is this next feature is one of the most important features within the nik collection let alone color effects pro the control points allow us to put the filter in an area where we might want it and it allows us to remove the filter from areas where we don't want it so what we're going to do is use a minus control point here on the right side of the interface and i'm going to remove the cross balance from this section down here in the bottom of the image and we literally just click the minus control point place the point on the object or area where we don't want the filter to be and then i can expand the area that this control point affects and what's happening is the control point basically makes a selection of what you've placed the point on and it instantaneously makes a quick uh very precise selection for us so now we've removed this cross balance effect from this lower portion of the image but we still have the cross balance effect occurring uh in the upper portion of the image and in fact to to make sure of that what i like to do anytime i want to just see what the filter is doing a particular filter that is uh you click on the little check box that's to the left of the filter label so this as we move forward um this section here is going to become populated with filters right now we just have cross balance but we're going to add another one in a minute and if we want to turn this filter on and off to see what it does you click that little check box and you can see the before and the after and in this case what cross balance is doing for us is creating a color contrast between the upper portion of the image and the lower portion of the image which is going to give us a better sense of depth the original photograph while is is beautiful and is what was happening in real life um according to the camera right uh basically looked like this you know this is a little bit cool up here but basically by adding our cross processing we're able to exaggerate those contrasts in this case color contrast and um increase the sort of sense of depth that we get from the photo to take that one step further we're going to click the add filter button that's going to button up our cross balance filter and if you follow me back over to the left side of the interface we're going to add in our graduated filter right so there are several graduated filters we're going to talk about most of them um the graduated filters filter itself if i click on it what it does is it applies a a by default blue graduated color filter and by default the the blue and the strength of the effect is very strong at the top and then as it moves down into the image the effect is weaker or if there's less of the effect rather so uh i'm gonna we're not gonna leave this color set to uh blue we're actually gonna end up using orange number four but let's walk through each one of these different things because these are some of the more important filters for this webinar uh the graduated filter is a set of color presets that by default you know create this blue gradient from the top into the middle but if you click on your color set drop down menu you can scroll through and get what's called as a heads-up display on the image applied so you can see exactly what's going to happen with these different colors and in my mind most of them aren't working particularly well and actually i'm going to customize the filter to get it exactly where we want it to be before i do that we're going to leave this on the default color blue one and uh the reason i want to do that is to walk you through opacity blend vertical shift and rotation because these four sliders are the slider controls that you have within basically all of the graduated filter tools and the bi-color filters as well um which is what we're talking about right so the opacity slider is is the sort of most straightforward in my mind it's the strength right if i bring it down to zero none of that graduated color is going to be applied if i bring it up to 100 it's a very strong application of that filter and in this case basically blacks out the top of the image the next which we're not going to leave it here i'm just going to leave it there for a second so that we can get a good idea of what these other sliders are doing the blend slider is the actual gradient itself right so if i bring the blend down to zero there's basically no gradient between where the graduated filter is applied and where it's not if you slide that blend slider up you're going to get a softer gradation and you can basically set that to whatever is appropriate for your image i'm going to leave it at zero for right now because it allows me to show you the vertical shift and the rotation very easily by the way anytime we're messing around with these sliders this is it's not hurting the image at all to just slide opacity for all the way left and all the way right and if anything it's a really good way to kind of figure out what's happening with that particular slider so if any of these filters are new and you want to see what one of these sliders does just slide it all over the right and slide it all the way to the left you'll get a good idea of what's happening and then you can kind of customize it to exactly how you want the filter to be applied the vertical shift the vertical shift is how far into the middle or how far down the image the uh graduated filter is going to be applied right so at 50 cuts the image right down the middle basically um at 100 it covers the entire image so you can kind of set it wherever fits the photograph um and you know in this case we're actually going to adjust this in just a minute but i'll leave it at 39 right now okay rotation this last slider by default is set to 180. so this is it's degrees 180 degrees and apparently what that means with these filters is that sorry i zoomed in is that the top of the image has the strongest application and as we move down into the photograph there's that gradation occurring now with rotation if i go ahead and just click on that slider we can actually rotate it to be any angle we might want so in a lot of situations you know you don't you don't want the gradation or the rotation to be set at 180 maybe many of them you do and that's why it's a great default setting but sometimes you might want it at 219 right or at 360. and in fact in this case we do want it at 360. because what we're going to do i'm going to turn off the filter for a second is we're going to change the color of the horizon area to be much more red than it is right now so we're doing that with this graduated filter so we'll check it on we're going to go to color set and we're going to go down to orange number four now this looks crazy it kind of looks interesting there's definitely a cool graphic aesthetic going on here uh because of the the way that that overlay is occurring but if we wanted to make it look a little bit more natural and realistic uh what we're going to do is maybe blend the effect right so it kind of moves the the gradation blends into the um now top of the image i'm actually going to take the vertical shift and i'm going to move it down just a little bit more and then we're going to take the opacity and we're just going to lower the opacity so that we just have um you know the the exact amount of this red graduated filter applied to our image and now what we've done with our graduated filter in our cross balance filter is we've added even more color contrast to the entire image so if we turn off the filters by clicking that little check box we can see the original image if we check that back on we can see our enhanced image and in fact if you want to take a look at the before and after you can actually do that a couple different ways i'll show you three more ways to do that right now i'm just going to click the compare button so if you follow my cursor into the upper left corner of the interface if i click and hold the compare button that's going to show me the original image and if i let go i'm going to see my enhanced image so in this case we've used the two filters to sort of increase just the color contrast uh and and yield a little bit more depth overall in the photograph and the beauty of this let's i'm gonna click on a side by side with these two filters so i've clicked on the side by side preview um on the left side here i have the original image on the right side i've got the enhanced image with our filters if you kind of lean back in your chair i think your eye is probably going to be attracted a little bit more towards that right side photograph uh because of these these color differences that we've we've brought out with just these two filters and that's sort of the intention in this case of of these processes so i'm going to click the save button in the lower right corner of the interface that's going to bring us back over into photo lab and it's going to save our image as our separate file right so in photo lab which is going to work in a very similar way to lightroom we have our original image and then we have our enhanced image in the same folder and saved right next to it moving on our next photograph we are going to move over to one more image and work with um what i would say a relatively simple workflow and that is we're just going to apply a couple filters um maybe use a few control points and uh this is going to again bring out this really beautiful color contrast this is just a different image and in this case uh this was dusk and this was the raw file straight out of camera i think i might have shifted the white balance a little bit and then we have the defaults that are applied within photo lab as well but that's all that's been done to the image we're going to go into the nik collection and in this case we're going to try out the brilliance in warmth filter which is a very very powerful tool which only has three sliders which is wonderful because it does great stuff but it's very simple to use and i could i would so here's that prompt again it's just letting us know that we can work in the non-destructive process by the way if you ever want to use this tool which it's a fantastic tool so that you can again open the image back up after you've adjusted and saved your image what you would do is just click the little check box that's in the lower right corner of the interface if this check box is on save and edit later that's going to basically allow you to save as a tiff file that has its own internal sidecar which basically means it can be relaunched into the nik collection tool that you used okay so let's start on the left side with the brilliance and warmth filter and we're going to use this several times in in my mind it's the most powerful color filter tool that's within color effects pro that i use on all sorts of different kinds of images constantly uh so in this case what we're going to do is increase the perceptual saturation and then probably even increase um a little bit of the regular saturation as well so what we'll do is just sort of see what it does right so i'll increase perceptual saturation a lot and then you know what let's warm the image touch and then the the problem that i'm running into is the uh the the sky above the mountain in my mind looks relatively realistic right that looks like it's a color that could occur and this water probably could occur as well but if we look at the before and after i've added quite a lot of that perceptual saturation and substantially warmed up the water as well so i don't i don't really want all of that effect in there so we're going to go back to those control points and in this case we're going to use a series of minus control points to remove most of that brilliance and warmth effect just from the water right and so here's this technique you click on the minus control point and you place that point exactly where you want it to be right and so that minus control point is going to look for the object that you've placed the point on and it's going to in this case because it's a minus control point remove the effect now if i increase the size of the area sure that's going to remove the effect from all of this stuff but it's also going to remove um that brilliance and warmth filter or whatever filter you're using uh from other parts of the image that that the control point thinks it should be controlling in this case removing the filter from so a little bit more of a precise way of working in this situation is to actually use smaller control points and to use a bunch of them right so um we could every time we wanted a control point hit the minus control point on the uh right side of the interface and just place the point where we want it to be right but there's a there's a few faster ways of working and in fact what we'll do is duplicate these minus control points into a line to do that you hold the option key down if you're on a mac or alt if you're on a pc and while you're holding the option key down rolled uh click and drag the control point away so so i'm holding alt click and drag my control point and that's going to give me a duplicated minus control point which is going to yield me the same size control point and then had we adjusted the opacity slider within the control point it's also going to duplicate that effect right because in a control point you can change the size of the area that it's going to affect and then you can change the strength of the control point itself a minus control point is going to be set to zero percent so it removes the filter effect you can bring that up any percentage between zero and a hundred percent right so if we wanted some of this brilliance in warmth maybe 20 percent we could go ahead and set it at 20 or 20 ish percent or so and voila now this control point has 20 percent but the rest of these control points don't so what we're going to do is group the control points together so that they'll all kind of operate as if they're one control point there's actually two different ways to do that here's one of those ways so if you want to um group control points you have to have to first um wow i can't speak at all you have to first activate the control points and so to activate the control points uh you can either click and hold shift right and this works in in your windows and mac operating system if you're going to uh want to highlight multiple files or something um and and maybe drag them somewhere i don't know and then the other way to do it is the same way as you you might do this inside of your windows or mac operating system in a folder you can literally just click anywhere that's not on one of those files one of these control points and drag so if you click and drag it creates this little bounding box when you let go of the mouse it's going to allow you to control uh those control points all at one time and in fact to kind of group them permanently what you'll do is you'll move into the right side of the interface i shouldn't say permanently it's not permanent because you can undo it if you want to but if you open up into your control points section here and you move to the bottom portion of the control points section you can click this button right here when you've got a a bunch of control points selected and that groups them together so now i can control this one control point and it's going to affect all of those points right so this one set of sliders opacity and even size will affect um all of those control points now that was a kind of a lot to take in i think i actually want to group this point as well so what we'll do is we'll click on our grouped control point and then hold shift click on this one and then i'll just click the group button again and now that one's grouped as well so it's a really handy tool to be able to group these and control them like this and so that's that that might be a little bit um uh you know advanced if you've never seen the tools before but note that you can learn with the tools you can apply these filters globally and or you can apply them selectively using control points like this all right so we've talked so much about control points let's sort of take a look at what's happening here with the image i i think i'm going to take a plus control point and let's place it here in the orange and just expand that out and you'll say well dan why why on earth would you use one big control point uh here where you use a bunch of small control points there well in this case these small control points need to stay small and and only really affect this area whereas this one large control point i don't mind it kind of going everywhere because i want the filter effect basically everywhere else within the image so i feel confident that that's going to do what i need it to do now if you're not confident or it in what the filter is doing or the control point is doing and you want to see what the tool is doing uh you go back into the control points section which by the way um if you missed it i don't think i even mentioned it to open into your control point list you literally click on the words control points on the right side here of the interface so you click on that and that's going to give you a list of your control points as long as well as your grouping tool and so on now control point number nine that is the big control point that we just placed in there if i were to move over to the right side of that interface and click on that little checkbox this is telling us as we click on that exactly where the filter is being applied and where it's not so this control point is placing the filtered effect anywhere that's white and then these control points are doing a nice job to kind of remove the filtered effect for you and then this this portion of the mountains in turkey those are getting some of the application of the filter and depending upon your opacity you'll get more or less right so you can click on the opacity and literally what this is showing you is the mask that this control point is affecting right so white reveals it's gonna anything that was white there is going to have the filtered application anything that was black has none of the filtered application i'll show you that and then anything that's gray has some of it all right brilliance and warmth and a lot on control points there so we're finished with brilliance and warmth we're going to click the add filter button and we're going to add uh the graduated user defined filter so follow me to the left hand side of the interface on the last image we use the graduated filters and that had that series of preset colors right if i click on it i've got a nice set of presets within the color set the user defined option basically does the same thing except it allows us to choose any color we might want so um there are benefits to each one the graduated filters the the other filter that we used a minute ago that works really well with those presets because there are predetermined colors that knick software knows is going to work really well the graduated user fi defined filter is really great because you get to decide what you're using it for and what color is going to be applied but the problem is you can choose not so great colors right because like this red one this looks okay here i guess but if i go and i click on the color swatch itself this is going to open up my color picker and if you're on a pc this color picker is going to look very different than if you're on a mac but you can basically decide any color you might want and it's easy to decide um on a color but it's hard to get a really beautiful color right so right now i've set this to gray if i close this now i have a gray sky which is fine right but that's not what we want in this case i think we want let's say like a purple sky so uh what we'll do is we'll click on that color swatch again which by the way you have a color swatch which allows you to choose whatever color you might want in in the entire you know color wheel um or the the color wheel that apple or windows has you know available to you anyways or the color picker here allows you to actually choose a color that's in the image right so i can actually choose the color that color that's right in the photograph we'll use that later in the webinar for now we're actually going to click on the color swatch itself and let's just choose a purple color so i'm going to mess around with my red green and blue slider and um that looks good but maybe we want it a little bit darker see what that does uh we're going to get this nice magenta purple sky so once we've chosen the color you just close the color picker oof that's very strong you see what i mean like you you can choose any color you want and so sometimes it doesn't work particularly well i think in this case it actually will i just need to remove the opacity so i just need to less you know remove some of that effect maybe down to nine if it were all the way up at 100 percent we could get a really interesting graphic effect out of that but in this case i think it needs to be lower to get a more realistic natural kind of color combination so i bring the opacity down i like the blend at 100 in this case i think it works well with that sky i'm going to bring my um vertical shift down just a touch and i'm going to leave the rotation alone and let's just take a look at that before and after by clicking the compare button there's the original here's the enhanced maybe it's a little too much color still but that's the beauty this that part's completely subjective it's up to you and i would say it's probably up to how you're going to output the image you know if you put a photograph on let's say instagram or facebook more saturated colors usually garner a more positive response but if you were to try to print this image maybe i need to be a little bit more subtle or maybe a little bit more precise to get the exact color combination i want so that the print comes out the way that you know would be most effective so there are things to kind of think about in that regard uh anyways i'm going to click the add filter button we're just going to add one more filter we're going to use the tonal contrast filter to bring out a little bit of detail in the sky and in the mountains right in here because there's this really nice layering of these mountains and i want to kind of exaggerate that a little bit so follow me to the left side of the interface we're going to scroll down and i'm going to add tonal contrast the tonal contrast by default much like many of these filters might have a very transformative effect on the image right but don't let that sort of thing scare you away uh it definitely turns me away from some of the filters like dark contrasts and um even juice pastel but if if you put in a little bit of time knowing what that filter kind of does you can get some really amazing applications of these tools that will really bring out in this case texture or or exaggerate the depth that's within the mountains in the background the thing is you got to play a little bit um you know there are presets and there are tons of recipes that are built into colorfx pro 4. they do a great job but if you spend a little bit of time and play around with let's say these contrast types and say okay balanced looks pretty interesting um in the mountains back there so as i click on balanced maybe i just decide to remove a little bit of the mid-tone contrast and a little bit of the highlights contrast to reduce it overall let's just take a look at the before and after there's the before tonal contrast there's the after i like what it's doing i don't know if we need the added saturation because we've already gone in and controlled all of those facets so i'll go to the saturation slider i'm just going to click on the number so you can click on these numbers and you can type in any number you want so i'll type in zero and now i don't i'm not changing the saturation with the tonal contrast filter but i am getting a little bit more contrast in in texture and depth out of the mountains i i like what it's doing but i only want it in the mountains so this is where we're going to use plus control points right so we used minus control points earlier to remove the filter effect from the water and in this case what we'll do is you will use a plus control point or a couple of plus control points to um apply the filter exactly where we want it to be and nowhere else right so this is going to create these this little bit of exaggerated contrast and now you can actually get a sense of the depth of the the mountain here you can see where there's a little line and then it's been exaggerated a little bit using that tonal contrast filter so in this case it's subtle but it's very effective in being able to kind of really bring out all of those attributes of the image um so here's the original photograph and then we've applied brilliance in warmth graduated user defined where we chose our color in this case a really strong purple and then the tonal contrast filter to finish we're going to click the save button and i'm going to adjust my notes here and we're going to move into uh the next image oh cool okay so again here's our original image and here's our enhanced image i think my my purple application was maybe a little bit too strong in that case um but it works well for demonstration purposes okay so this is the next image we're gonna take a look at and and we're gonna we're slowly getting sort of more complicated and complex with our application of the tools so uh what we're gonna do is this is the original there you go and then uh here is the enhanced and this is this is how or or basically what's going to happen when we finish the image for now i'm going to remove this filter from or this image from my library the finished image because we're going to make a new one and i don't want two of them in here so i've just right clicked on my image i'm going to click remove and that'll just get rid of it out of my photo lab library all right so we've got our photograph we're going to click on the nik collection we'll go into our color effects pro 4. and uh we're gonna start out talking about the the bi-color filter there so kind of like the graduated filters and then the graduated filter with the user defined option there's a bi-color filter and then there's a by color filter user defined as well okay so there's our little option saying yep we can work in a totally non-instructive process and we're going to start with the bi-color filter we're going to actually end up using bi-color user defined because i want to you know walk us through both of those but these filters work almost exactly the same way the difference between bi-color and graduated filter is that we have two colors being applied one from the top and then the other from the bottom up by default uh so with the user with the by color filters you have a series of heads up presets so you can just scroll over each one and these are all presets that work pretty darn well for different kinds of photographs and they're they're they are the colors that would respond in a pleasing way without much work right that's sort of the idea of having these preset in here and oftentimes they work perfectly i've definitely used this cool warm option several times on different photographs and then i've used the violet and pink on other photographs for now though we're going to replace the bi-color filter with the bi-color user defined because i'm going to show you this application and i want to do it in a little bit more of a funky way than um what we did before we're actually going to use two of the same color basically to to get a kind of interesting effect that um one gradiates into the other so it's kind of fun because it's it's a different way of thinking about using the filter itself so uh just like our graduated filters you have opacity which is the strength just bring that all the way up for now the blend which is the um the gradient between the top and the bottom uh the vertical shift right so we can maybe set that right at the horizon if we wanted to and then the rotation which we're going to leave at 180 but you can see what happens when we rotate it now by default the upper color is going to be i think this is the default setting anyways blue and then the lower color is orange but what you can do is actually click on your color drop or the color picker option which turns your cursor into a little color picker and we're going to do a little experiment here so usually what i do to use this filter is i click on the eyedropper and then i actually turn off my filter and then i choose the color that i want with the with the um filter off and that i think is what we're going to end up doing but let's try a little experiment so we're gonna have the filter on and then we're gonna click the color picker and then let's see what happens if i choose um down here which in the original image is blue but with the filter applied is red i just i don't remember what happens yeah okay well that's cool looking but what's happening now is when i use the color picker it's choosing the color that it sees on screen not necessarily the color that's in the original image so i i guess what i'd like for you to do is note that if you want a color that's showing up on you know the screen afterwards and and um you can leave the filter on if you want to choose a color that exists in the image already what you're going to want to do is turn the filter off and then click on the color picker and then choose your color so i'm going to choose blue here i'll turn it on let's see what happens great that's pretty close to what i want and then the other the lower portion let's just choose a color so we're going to click on the actual um color swatch itself the sort of little orange filter right now we click on that and we're going to choose a slightly darker blue color so we've gotta we gotta we're gonna manufacture that oh which by the way i keep using the red green and blue slider um it's just one of the ways of choosing your colors uh this also has a color picker in it and then it also has the ability to go to a color wheel where you can kind of move the color wheel around anywhere you want it to be so um it works basically the same way whatever the color swatch is in the lower left corner is what it's going to it's the color that will end up being applied by that portion of the filter so i guess it's sort of an important aspect to note um if you if you haven't used that a whole bunch before which yeah okay so i'm choosing a slightly darker blue color i'm going to close that and then i think that's actually too much saturation so should you decide that you don't like it you can just click on the color dropper or the eyedropper or the color swatch again and in this case i want it a little bit less saturated so i'm going to move it towards the middle and if it's directly in the middle you're going to get gray the further out from the center is the more saturated colors so we'll choose a little a little bit less saturated blue and we're going to end up removing some of the opacity but for now we're going to blend this so we have two color blues they're slightly different and this will end up being this nice sort of subtle application of the bi-color filter and as we start to exaggerate more colors using other filters we'll get some really cool um opportunities here so by color user defined we chose our two colors i'm actually going to click the minus control point and i'm going to remove it from the sunset itself so we don't have any of the application from the sunset and maybe even i'll leave it in the water so those are minus control point removing it from the sunset from there we'll click the add filter button i know i'm coming up on time we've got several more things that i wanted to talk about we'll use brilliance and warmth again in this case and since we've used this filter before i'm just going to do it quickly i'm going to increase the perceptual saturation quite a bit uh i'm going to warm the image just a bit as well and then i'm going to do are we increasing saturation no i'm not going to increase the saturation because we've done that with brilliance and warmth okay so now from there what i might do because i'm now warming the image and adding this perceptual saturation which is kind of the opposite of what we did with the bicolor user defined is i'm just going to take minus control points and i'm going to remove it from some of the areas where i want the color to be a little bit more blue the reason i might want some of these colors to be a little bit more blue is we are generating this color contrast right so having the blue colors in the areas maybe where i i don't want you to pay as much attention and then having the nice contrasting warm colors you know in the sunset itself and then also maybe in some of the clouds the highlights of the clouds now we're getting this really wonderful contrasting sets of colors and this is going to yield us this really wonderful depth it's almost like a tunnel view now right because we've got the sun setting in the you know behind the clouds there uh in the background you've got this couple that are sort of blurred because of the long exposure and then we have this really nice blue color and tone um that we're exaggerating by oops i don't want those there i want minus control points sorry about that minus control point right there cool and then a plus control point right here nice okay brilliance in warmth with a pretty extensive set of control points applied plus control points placing the warmth where we want it minus control points removing it from the areas we don't so one more filter we'll use here maybe two um the colorize filter now the colorize filter is is an overall color shift right and so the default here has made the whole image much more sort of desaturated and more blue and cool uh and what we're going to do is use a different method so every one of these different kinds of color applications and color filters will have a drop down menu like this or most of them will anyways and this is going to allow you to choose these different methods so like method i don't know technically what all of the methods do from memory anyways but method number five starts out by desaturating the entire image to black and white and then putting your color over the image so that could be an interesting way of working the other filters are using different kinds of blendings to kind of apply the color in a different way it's different math to get it exactly where it wants to be and what i want to do here is i'm going to use method number one but we're going to sample our sky here some of the more saturated area and then i'm going to increase the strength but i'm only going to apply the effect in some of the areas where i know i want it so i want it in the water here just to sort of exaggerate some of that colorization again to kind of draw your attention as the viewer in towards those warm areas and then also i'll put it into the sky here so this is kind of lowering the contrast of the sky right in again depending upon what you might do with the image if i were to post this on instagram or online it would probably have more impact to have that area be light and white but if i'm printing the image i might want some more value in there instead of it being really white in there and so by adding in this colorization now i have a little bit more tone and color in there and therefore i'm going to get a a more excuse me i'm going to get a more successful print in my mind again obviously depends on what you're going to be doing but um i like that colorize filter for that purpose it gives us some some tone in those highlight areas that are maybe a little bit too bright we're going to finish this image off using pro contrast it is a a very powerful filter that only has three sliders it allows us to correct any color cast that might be on the image actually in this case it does some interesting stuff as i bring the color correct color cast slider up and then i'm going to add a little bit of dynamic contrast as well now i'm coming up on our time i understand that um so i'm going to kind of cut us loose here i just want to show you one more before and after um so we used several filters in this case the bicolor user defined brilliance in warmth colorize and pro contrast and we we basically just brought out and exaggerated the colors that were basically already there and this is actually closer to the way i remember this scene being when i shot the image right of course my memory is probably flawed but shooting a raw file straight out of camera that's going to yield me as much information as that camera can and oftentimes it's going to look a little bit flat and oftentimes possibly desaturated right out of camera it does depend upon how what software you're using to process the image of course and um and so on but by using these four filters in this case i've got the application that i want that i think really works well for this image i'm all done editing so i'm going to click the save button and i'm going to throw it back over to lori to see if we have any questions that i can we do dan we have a couple questions uh the first one is what is the difference between saturation and perceptual saturation that's a fantastic question um the way that i think of it uh might be technically different than the um than the actual definition so i'm going to give you you know two opportunities here the the way that i think of perceptual saturation is it is a uh tool that exaggerates the hue of the color more so than the actual saturation of the color and what what that means is if you think of if you think of saturation as as a volume as sort of the amount of color if you will um you can turn up the color or you can turn down the color with with saturation uh the perceptual saturation will actually look at the image and shift the hue of the color so that you know what was um you know this color orange is now a more yellow orange and what was you know what this blue color was is now a more cyan blue and you'd get something like this right and that that's how i think of perceptual saturation but if we jump over into my my google chrome um i'm in so i open up my browser here we're at the nik collection website um this is where you can see any of the upcoming webinars as well as request not requested recorded webinars uh but if you go to the nik software website and you want to learn more about what every one of these different filters can do or if you have a very specific slider that you want to learn more about if you go to the explore section and then you go to customer support it brings you to this really handy help page that can be overwhelming at first because there's a ton of information but what you'll do is scroll down to the color effects pro section and then click into filters you got to do a couple things you have to click into filters and then you have to click on view page because there's a ton of information in here so when you click on view page here this opens up the page and this has a listing of every single filter that's within colorfx pro and um here is the brilliance and warmth filter which has the definition of perceptual saturation which this is the technical way of thinking about it right i i sort of conceptualized it myself and then you know spit it out at you but technically perceptual saturation is not necessarily increasing just saturation it alters the hue of the color and so on i'm not going to read the whole thing but this is great information and if you have specific questions about those sliders that's a really great place to find that information it is indeed okay question number two does the order of the filters override the filters above it so great question yes it absolutely does so the order that you apply the filters will yield you a different aesthetic result and um i word it that way because you know you might you might have well you definitely have friends right you might have a friend who's using colorfx pro and they tell you to use three or four different filters but if they put them in a different order than you put them in you actually do get a different response and so i'll show you that here um i'm going to just add a couple random filters let's put glamour glow on the image and then let's put um i don't know what else uh i'm just going to go with those two for now um and then let's add one more filter because this happens a lot with tonal contrast if you put tonal contrast at the bottom of your stack of filters it'll actually look different than if you put it at the top of the stack so the order does matter although you can't go wrong really it's whatever you like um but something like tonal contrast if you're getting maybe a too transformative and of an effect you know even for what you know when you adjust the settings what you can do is click on any of your filters and reorder them right so if you click and drag so you click on the title itself and drag it to the top as i let go watch the image it'll re-render and it'll actually or probably anyways will look different than this yeah it's subtle in this case but it does look different now um the order does matter and in this case of course i just also need to dial down the effect cool okay let's see here two more questions um here's one what happens if you've already modified one control point and then you add it to a group what happened so oh i see so a good question i think i think it gets overridden so let's see if i take this opacity which is at zero and i bring it up to 49 percent and then i go and highlight this image or this control point and i group them what's happening is this control point just was overridden it was at 0 and now it's going to be at 49. yeah so whatever you technically this i i call it a master control point this control point which is slightly bigger than a regular non-grouped control point um you can you can see there's this little size difference we'll just compare the two um and then the this is the master control point and then this would be sort of if you will the slave or or the one that's being used um in tandem with the master control point or control points um it it basically adheres to whatever that um that master control point is i don't have a better way of wording that yeah okay uh last question here a couple people are asking you may have gone over this already but with photo lab is there any editing you do in photo lab before you go into nick great question yes absolutely so um a lot of times in these webinars we're only you know i have four points to cover and we just got through those four points um we could spend hours in here talking about all of the different processes and ways of going about things and thinking about things there's two schools of thought in regards to would you adjust the image beforehand before bringing it into the nick collection there's one school of thought is no you don't do anything you just you just kind of let the software do what it wants to do and then you open into the collection um i i don't subscribe to that necessarily i try to um process the image in my raw software to get it as close to or at least set up for the nik collection so it's close to whatever i want my final output to be and then i use the nik collection to kind of massage the tones to get it where i need it um knowing the tools that i'd like to use for that particular image um yeah so i do tend to do a good amount of work for these webinars we're not able to really get into most of that kind of stuff we'd need three hours we'd do an hour on the on the raw processing we do an hour introducing into the filters and then we we do an hour playing with them together um but yeah so one one last part we didn't get to talk about this image and it's something that i'd like for you to think about as well with sunrise and sunset photographs oftentimes you will want to shoot an hdr exposure series because of the difference between the brightness of the sun rising or setting compared to the scene that you're shooting right and in this case this is a seven image exposure series and then it the original roth or sorry the original um hdr image looked like this and then i went and exaggerated the heck out of the color doing this as well which actually i printed an image that was very similar to this on a matte paper and the mat made it slightly less saturated because of the way that the you know the image was translated into print and then the way that it laid on the paper itself and it made for a really beautiful matte print even though on screen the saturation maybe was a little bit out of hand okay one more question lori before we go uh that was it for now i want to thank everybody for joining us today thank you dan for a fantastic presentation thank you lori oh that was fun i really like this i mean i love giving any of these webinars but this one was particularly fun for me because i'm not i don't usually think in this way in terms of you know put a group of sunrise or sunset images together and then put some you know talk about those particular filters that you might use for it so this was a really fun webinar for me and hopefully that translated for you as well but have an absolutely fantastic weekend ladies and gentlemen enjoy your software if you can get out and shoot um do get out and shoot maybe get up and shoot um dawn tomorrow if it's already past your dusk time we're here in new york it's only four so we've got a couple hours um to shoot for dusk and i'm actually headed out to photograph with um a student who just graduated from the fine art program so before he leaves we'll do one more shoot together and then he moves off to notre dame to get his graduate degree but anyways ladies and gentlemen have a wonderful weekend and enjoy your software thanks a lot

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 4,217

Keywords: Nik Collection, Color Efex Pro, Editing software, sunrise sunset photography editing, editing sunset, editing sunset photos, sunset editing, sunset editing tips, sunset editing tutorial, how to edit sunset, how to edit sunset photos, how to edit sunrise, editing sunrise photos, how to edit a sunrise photo, photo editing, sun editing photos, control point editing, dan hughes, dan hughes photo, sun picture edit

Id: VjuCLBUjorE

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021