Selective Color For Better Tones

hello Blake root is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 lead and today we're gonna be talking about how to make your tones more rich through color yeah we're gonna use this selective color adjustment layer to make our tones better how in the heck are we gonna do that I'm gonna show you here in just a couple seconds [Music] so I'm gonna teach you something pretty awesome today and that's actually using colors to manipulate the tones in our image to make those colors more rich and more vibrant and more saturated through tone but do it in a way that actually has some class not like the old school way that I used to show you this with the HDR stuff where my images dislocate is because the colors were pushed to places they shouldn't go so what this is gonna give you is it's going to give you the ability to control the tones in your image through the use of colors which will make our colors more rich and vibrant at the same time making our tones more natural with a governor style process now when I say a governor what I mean is that if you've ever seen like a Mack truck that's going you know 65 miles an hour on the highway and it can't go any faster than that that's because there's a governor on the engine that says okay you can't go any faster than this we want to make sure that you maintain this speed because if you go any faster that stuff can happen the same thing can happen in Photoshop that'll give you a governor so that you don't take your tones and your colors to places that they shouldn't necessarily go so I'm going to show you this with one adjustment layer and one blend mode and then I'm gonna stack that on top of itself and you're gonna see how some crazy stuff can happen here you gotta follow along with me because I'm gonna be teaching a lot of really nerdy dorky stuff that you can really let go in one ear and out the other if you want however if you let some of its stick and rattle around in there you'll see exactly what's happening on these and be able to predict what's happening when you make these tonal color adjustments okay so this is a pretty crazy method I've done a lot of stuff in Photoshop with tones and colors through my zone some Express and palate effects panels and you know that if you've been following me for the last couple months however this method is very powerful and very effective and can make everything that you do after this even better so follow me here well the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make a new adjustment layer that's gonna be a selective color adjustment layer now if you don't know what this adjustment layer does I'm gonna give you a little bit of insight on it first things first the radio dials here the governor that I'm talking about that's not gonna let you go too far is by putting this on relative if you put on absolute it's going to allow more effect to happen if you put it on relative it's only going to use the relative color that's available in the image in order for the effect to take place so make sure that's set to relative now let's look at how this works I'm gonna use the blues because I know there's a lot of blue in here basically the way the selective color adjustment works is you select a color first so I have blue selected here and then after you select that color you get to decide how much of a color is present in that color which sounds really confusing but check this out if I move the cyan up that's gonna make blue overall more cyan it's not gonna be a human like you'd see in HSL so in HSL I'll just do that will open up an HSL adjustment layer and we'll select the color blue we'll just use the target adjustment tool to do that if I move this over that's a huge that is telling that color hey I need you to get more like this color so that's saying blue we want you to be more cyan we're selective color is different it says okay blue there's a present value of cyan in you I'm gonna make that present value stronger or I'm gonna take that present value of cyan out and when we remove cyan from that color blue we make that blue in turn more red so basically the way this works you have to know a little bit about color theory the opposite of cyan on the color wheel is red the opposite of magenta on the color wheel is green the opposite of yellow and the color wheel is blue the digital color will not the painters color wheel okay let's not let's not go down that rabbit hole but the digital color wheel the opposite is red so if I move this down I'm gonna get more red present in the color blue if I move it up I'm gonna get more cyan present in the color blue let's do this with magenta if I move the magenta up we're gonna add magenta more magenta percentage to the color blue if I remove a percentage of that magenta we're gonna add more green to the color blue if I go to the color yellow here I'm gonna add more yellow to the color blue or if I move it down add more blue to the color blue so if I want to make these blues more rich and more natural I'd probably add remove some of the yellow from them add some magenta to them and then maybe add a little bit of cyan to them and that's how I would get a more natural bluer richer looking sky and that's all fine and well they aren't that far they aren't taken too far but there's that governor place anyway so I can't take them too far even if I wanted to so now I said at the beginning I'm going to teach you how to use color to manipulate tone so how in the world are we gonna tell a selective color to be a tonal adjustment and not just a color adjustment well the way we do that is I'm just gonna go ahead and move this down here and delete this we're gonna make a new selective color adjustment layer we're gonna change this to the luminosity blend mode now what that says is it says okay I'm the selective color adjustment I'm going to make color adjustments to this image but because you're telling me restrict my adjustments only to the luminance values that are underneath me that means I'm not gonna let any color go on the image so what that means is that we get some really refined tonal adjustments through color sliders it's a really powerful trick so check this out we are in the color blue watch what happens if I add magenta to the color blue now the color blue doesn't actually change the color itself actually isn't changing here perceptually it looks like it is but it's not what's happening is the tonal values in the color blue are increasing making it appear as if it's a different color but it's just a more intense version of that color blue and we know this because if we increase the black here look at that we're just making that blue more of an intense or higher value richer and value richer and luminance blue now if we go here we move the yellows we can move that up that's gonna make it a little bit darker or a little bit brighter if we move it down now what you'll see is that the cyan slider and the yellow slider are not quite as intense as the magenta slider and why do you think that is well it's like that because as I told you before we have to think about this in terms of RGB and see my so red and cyan green and magenta blue and yellow now what's happening here is you have to think about the Bayer matrix sensor the bare matrix sensor that records our images actually is 50% green pixels 25% red pixels and 25% blue pixel so the slider that's gonna have the most effect on these tonal values is going to be this magenta slider why because it's counterpart on the color wheel is green which if there's 50% more pixels here in the green channel then we're gonna have more of an effect with the magenta slider okay so follow me I said that this was gonna be some nerdy dorky stuff but it's really powerful if you just want experiment and throw selectively color on there with a luminosity move things back and forth you can do that really simply stated check this out you have that selective color luminosity whatever you move to the right is gonna make those tones in that color more rich what have you move to the left is gonna make them brighter without the nerdy dorky stuff move it to the right it gets darker moved to the left it gets brighter so let's go to the yellows so yellows are actually present right down in here so we are still in the luminosity blend mode which means as we increase this we're gonna get more value or more intensity in the color yellow if I move up the magenta you see that that gets a lot more rich there look at that the yellow slider is not gonna do much because there's not much data there and there's not gonna be much effect in the cyan slider either okay but look at what happened here we have a much more tonally rich image much more tonally rich it actually looks really refined and we're doing it with that governor in place which says hey I'm gonna take this to a certain degree but even if you move all of these things all the way up as high as they can go I'm not gonna give you something that's bad alright because you put this governor in place that says hey this is as far as I can go now if we duplicate this by pressing command or control J it's gonna start to get more rich because we're doing the same thing twice to the colors that exist underneath there let me go ahead and delete that copy here so this is still selective color for the tones I'm gonna move this down a little bit get this back to where we were that looks pretty pretty good right there not too bad so if we go into another color like maybe the science what happens here well we're still in we're in the color cyan we've got the luminosity blend mode which means that the settings that I use here are only going to affect the tonal values of the cyan color so let's increase the magenta in the cyan let's maybe increase the amount of cyan on the color cyan and yellow in the cyan which is basically just gonna again make it more intense and make it more rich look at how much more rich and intense that blue sky is that's incredible that's really powerful this is some really powerful tonal adjustments I've done a lot of things with tone in color you know that my workflow is toned color artistic effects right well I'm telling you what I'm doing here with this selective color adjustments set to the luminosity blend mode is very effective for every photo and you've got that relative adjustment in there that makes it so that there's a governor built-in what I mean by that is even if we were to take something like the curves adjustment layer and turn this to the luma City blend mode and then start moving this around there's no governor here you can get some pretty good tones in there right but it's there's no governor there's no limit as to what's available there and the curve doesn't say okay you've got a certain percentage of the color blue in here because of that I'm only going to do XYZ no it's not smart enough to do that the curves adjustments like hey you do whatever the heck you want on this and I'll give you that result whereas elective colors like hey hold on a second buddy there's not that much presence of the color blue so I can't do that which is awesome here's the next level thinking on this one now we've got this let's call this SC or selective color for tones let's take this another level and we'll put a selective color adjustment on top of there and now we're gonna work with both tone and color so we have this set two tone in color when we go on something like the color blue and we remove some of the yellow from the color blue and then maybe add some cyan and some magenta there look at how color rich that now is and it does it in the classy way that's not like taking the HSL adjustment layer and telling the saturation to become stronger in the color blue but if we don't have that tonal adjustment underneath look it practically does nothing isn't that really wild so this this tonal adjustment is also helpful to build a base in a foundation for increasing the quality of the colors in our image as well so reduce some of this stuff here because it's a little bit powerful okay and then let's go into the color yellow so now that we increase the richness of the colors of yellow in here look what happens when we start doing some stuff like this look at that look at those yellows and how rich and beautiful they're getting it's really starting to look like half dome there when I was up there in Yosemite so look at that those yellows are really nice but look this basically has no effect on those yellows so we needed to boost up the tonal quality of those colors in order to get more out of the color that was in there again my workflow is tone color artistic effects why do you think I always tell you to do tone first then color because when we increase or decrease the amount of tone that's available in our image especially when you do it globally it's also going to increase or decrease the intensity of the colors in our image so then when we go to modify the colors in our photo guess what we've are got the tonal base built when we go to modify the colors it looks even better here's a really crazy part though if we were to go into this that we did four tones and we were to change this to normal look what happens to this it is not good and these colors look hideous when we changed it to the luminosity blend mode here we are literally stripping away the color adjustment and saying you selective color adjustment are not actually going to do anything to the colors I just want you to affect the tonal value of the image again this is some nerdy dorky stuff but if you just take it from me and say okay selective color adjustment with a luminosity blend mode whatever we move right and the color is gonna darken it whatever we've left is going to brighten it and call it good and you're done you don't have to think about them in art nerdy dorky stuff and what's happening with the barometric sensor and all the other stuff that's happening when we are doing this tonal manipulation in our colors this is some powerful stuff have been exploring with this a lot lately with some of my images and I have to tell you this probably of the hardest tutorials that I've ever recorded because of the nerdy dorky stuff that gets in the way of thinking about what's happening with these sliders as we move these sliders to get different tonal values it makes no sense at all it really doesn't until you actually break it down and think about it we're telling the selective color adjustment to now be only a tonal adjustment by using the luminosity blend mode and getting all the power of the governors and the real naturalistic effect of the selective color in place but doing it for our tones all right Blake root is here signing off if you liked this tutorial please comment on it like it share it subscribe tell a friend I guarantee someone's gonna benefit from this if you let them know like hey and if you haven't gotten one of your photography buddies a Christmas present yet just go ahead and send them this video they're gonna thank you for it okay they might not even want anything after you send it to them thank you very much for taking the time to watch this I sincerely appreciate it [Music] you

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 31,068

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Adobe, Selective Color Adjustment Layer, how to use selective color, Photoshop Tutorial, Advanced Photoshop Tutorial, Color Theory in Photoshop, Color Theory Photography, Photoshop, photoshop editing, Best way to edit tones, edit tone sin photoshop, How to make better photos, Aaron Nace

Id: wYz1d5CK56Q

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019