Steal the Color Grading From Any Image With GIMP

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to steal the color grading from an image in this is version 2.2 endpoint 12 which at the time of this tutorial is the latest version of but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of help articles and video tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my best-selling kim 2.10 master class from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy which now has 2,000 students so thank you to everybody who's enrolled in this course and you can enroll in any of my skill share classes by visiting Kim school comm so here is the image I will be stealing the color grading from for today's tutorial this is a free photo found on pixabay and you can come over here and click free download I just went with 1280 by 1920 for this I'll also be using this photo which is going to be the photo where I will apply the color grading I took from the other photo so once again click free download and go with nineteen twenty by twelve eighty one so this is a great technique because it allows you to steal the colors from a photo as well as just the general mood of a photo and this is great whenever you have a series of photos you want to use and you want them all to have the same general look or if you have an aesthetic like something like Instagram you just want all of your photos to always look the same you can kind of apply this technique across all your photos of course how close those images look like is going to depend on the lighting and all your images and the general colors found in all the images so keep that in mind while you're using this technique so I'll start by coming over here to file open recent and I'm going to open up our first image and I'll just repeat that file open recent and open up our other image that we downloaded of course you guys will have to go to file open and search your computer probably your download section so I'll just click to open that so as you can see here we have two images that have vastly different color grading so this one is going to be much brighter overall it looks like a much happier image I suppose whereas this one is maybe a bit more dramatic it's a little bit darker so I want to take the color grading from this image and as best I can transfer that over to our other image the best way to start with this is we want to create a pallet of the colors in this image I'm going to keep it simple by only creating a palette of the highlights mid-tones and shadows so I need to reduce the total number of colors in this image down to three and the easiest way to do that is going to be to change the color mode of my image to indexed and don't worry this is really easy to do so for starters right now our image precision is sets a 32-bit linear floating-point I actually need to reduce that down to 8-bit so I'll come over here to image precision and I'm going to change this to a bit integer and here we have precision conversion I'm just going to keep everything set to the default and hit convert so now up here you can see this is an 8-bit gamma integer image and I'm gonna come over here to image mode and now I can change the mode from RGB to indexed grayscale is going to be just black and white so I'll go with indexed and here we have the index color conversion dialog box and here you can see we can convert our number of colors in here our maximum number of colors to whatever we want so I already have the sets of three the minimum you can go down to is two but here we're gonna go with three and I'm gonna keep all the settings the same and hit convert so now as you can tell our colors are broken down into the highlights mid-tones and the shadows so now we need to create a pallet from this image and if you guys have watched my tutorial on how to create palettes you probably already know what's going to happen here but I do need to open up my palettes dialog or my palettes tab here and I can do that by going to windows dockable dialogs and I'll come down here to palettes so now we have all of our palettes found in whether they are the default palettes or ones we've created in the past and what I need to do is right-click inside of here and I'm gonna go down to import palette and under select source I'm gonna come down here to image and this already has our image selected you can create a pallet from the other image we have opened up but as you can see over here in the preview there's only three colors in this palette because we only have three colors in the image so that's made it really easy to create this three color palette and now I'm just going to come down here to import and if you come up here you could see your imported color palette I'm going to change this to girl holding wheat that way we know that this is the image we're working with and if I double click on this it's going to bring up my palette editor and you can see here we have our three main colors before I convert this palette to a gradient I do need to come over here right-click and go to new color from foreground that's just going to duplicate that color I was clicked on there and then I'm going to drag it back here to the beginning and I'll come over here and do the same for the highlight and don't worry this will make sense in a second so I'll just click new color from foreground and once again we have this color here so I'm just going to drag this to the left a little bit and so this is actually created duplicates of our colors I don't need these two anymore so I'm just going to click the delete option now you can see we have five colors and this is exactly what we need for the next step it's actually three colors but we have to duplicate colors here so now I'm going to come back here to my palettes tab and here is our girl holding wheat palette so if I right click on here and go to palette to gradient that is going to create a gradient from our palette so if I come down here to my gradients tab which if you don't have this open here you could just go to windows dockable dialogs and click on gradients but here we have our gradient that was created from our palette and if I double click on this gradient now we have the gradient editor and you can see the positioning of our colors on the gradient and we can adjust these positions using these arrows and that is going to play a key role here in this next step so we have all the colors from our image the highlights the shadows and the mid-tones now we need to properly assign the position of those on the gradient based on the brightness value of those colors again this is going to make sense in a second so bear with me so what I can do is I can grab my eyedropper tool and I can choose my highlight color here for example and now you can see my highlight color has been added as my foreground color and if I click this button right here I could save this color to my color history so I'll just click OK I'm going to do the same for the shadows so here's my shadows color and once again I'm going to save this to my color history click OK and lastly I've got my mid-tones color here so I'll click on this and just save this to my history and click OK so now that we have all three of our colors saved we need to figure the brightness of these colors so that we can assign these to our gradient and that way the gradient will map properly to the brightness levels on the other image where we're going to transfer this color grading on so come over here and click on this and I'm gonna start with my highlight color so if I click on the highlight color you can see we've got RGB LCH I'm actually going to switch over here to hue saturation in value and value is basically the same as brightness so we're gonna use this V value here and right now this is set to sixty five point one so what we need to do is we need to adjust our gradient here so that the brightness value which is going to be this slider right here this triangle matches up to sixty five point one in terms of its position right here on the gradient so when I click and drag to move this you'll see the handle position there will give us a number and we want this number to match up with the value number here so I want this number to be sixty five point one I'll just drag this over until we hit sixty five point one or something really close to it so sixty five one seven is going to be close enough so leave that right there don't worry we're gonna adjust this white slider here which is basically the midpoint of our two colors right here in our gradient alright so we have the values set up for the highlight value now we need to do the mid-tone value so come over here and click on my mid-tone and here you can see this is 36.1 so this needs to align to thirty six point one so I'll just click and drag this and if your mid-tone here or your midpoint gets in the way you can just move it over but I'm just going to drag this until I hit thirty six point one or something close so thirty six point five is close enough and lastly we need to do our shadow value which is going to be this triangle right here so come over and click on my shadow and you can see this one is set to twelve and a half so that is what we need to set this one to and we'll probably have to move the mid point out of the way we'll get as close to 12 and a half as we can twelve point four is close enough all right so our shadow mid-tone and highlight have been aligned based on their value number so let me just cancel out of this we don't need it anymore next what I need to do is I just need to reset the midpoints here so that these are properly line so you can see right here this segment is highlighted and I can click between all the segments here so I'm just going to start by clicking on this first segment right click and go to recenter segments midpoint that'll recenter that up and i'm just going to go down the line and do the same so recenter segments midpoint and I'll do it here as well and lastly on this one alright so now our gradient has been properly lined up now I can take this gradient and I can map it to our other image and that's going to allow us to introduce some of the colors from this first image here that we're looking at into the second image where we are transferring over that color grading so come over here to our other image and I'm going to come over to my layers panel and for this one I'm going to duplicate our main image and let me just change this to Beach so it's a little easier to read and for this one I'm going to name this Beach copy so on our beach copy layer we want to create a gradient map so first of all make sure you are still clicked on this girl holding wheat gradient then you're going to come over to colors map gradient map and that will automatically map your gradient to the colors in your image so as you can see because we repositioned where our highlights mid-tones and shadows were on that gradient they've matched up pretty well here to this image and it's made our image take on some of the coloring from this image there's obviously a lot more highlights in this one than there are shadows so it's going to look a little bit different but what I want to do is come over here to mode and I'm gonna change the color mode of this to soft light and that's going to help this blend in a little bit better so here's a before here's an after so it's already changing our color rating a little bit here you can always adjust the opacity of this if you want to turn down the effect this is only the first step in stealing or transferring the color grading from our first image over to the second image the next step is we need to exchange some of the colors out so that they all match up a little bit better with our original image so for example we want to swap out the highlight colors in this photo with the highlight colors from our other photo and we're going to do the same for the mid-tones and the shadows and so there is a built tool we can use to exchange colors in I can come over here and go to colors map color exchange and so now we could choose our original color and then add the color we want to exchange it with so I'm going to grab the eyedropper tool here and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and I'm going to click what I think is the highlight color in my image which is going to be this bright color here on her skin so I'll click on that color there and you can see that's been added as our from color now come over here to the two color click on that that'll bring up my color dialog box and I can choose that highlight color we saved earlier and I'll click OK so now it's taking this color here the highlight skin color and it's changing it to the highlight skin color from our other image if I hold ctrl and zoom out you can see nothing has happened yet and here's the preview option that I can check or uncheck to see what's going on so nothing has happened yet let me just recenter this image up what I need to do is I need to turn the threshold values all the way up to one so you can see that as I do this especially on the blue threshold you can see the changes taking shape so you want everything set to one and right now this is really dark but don't worry it's going to be fixed here in a second I'll click OK so now we've swapped out the highlight colors next we need to swap out the mid-tones so again I'll come over here to colors map color exchange so we need to do the mid-tones and this is sort of the difficult part you need to figure out which colors are the mid-tones that's going to be the colors that are pretty dark but not super dark so not quite black maybe like a darker brown so I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and this part is really up to you you can go with maybe this color right here or maybe the color on her belt and we could try a couple of colors and see what it looks like so I'll grab my eyedropper tool again let's go with the belt color here which right now it's almost black so maybe that's too dark so let me go actually with this color right here on her arm and I can change the two color to this mid-tone color that we saved from before and click OK and now I'm going to turn all of our values up once again and you can see that'll swap out all of our colors I'll hold ctrl and zoom out and you can see now we have this sort of green tone if I go back to the other image you'll notice the other image does have a little bit of green in it so this is not totally surprising it will get corrected a little bit when we do the shadows portion but if you think this is too green you can choose the from color and change that to whatever color you want I'm just going to stick with this color for now and click OK so now we have the mid-tones swapped out the last part is we need to swap out the shadows so I'll come back to colors map color exchange so I'm gonna hold ctrl and zoom and her glasses are pretty much the darkest part of this photo you can argue that maybe this part is it doesn't really matter it's up to your preference so I'm just going to choose the eyedropper tool hold ctrl and zoom in and get a nice black color from her sunglasses here I will go with this color right here and then the two color I'm going to change to the shadow that we selected earlier or that we saved earlier and I'll click OK and now I'm just going to turn all of these values up again to one and I'll hold ctrl and zoom out so as you can see a lot of that green has been toned down now that we've switched the shadow colors up so here's a before here's an after so I'll click OK and let me just hide that top beach copy layer which was our gradient map and let me just rename this to gradient map so here's our current image this is what our image look like before so as you can see this image is a little bit darker and that allows it to look a little bit more similar to this one here we're not quite done yet let me unhide the gradient map so I'll come over here to our color exchange layer and I'm going to change the mode of this one to soft light as well and of course we can decrease the opacity and that allows us to adjust the intensity of this effect I think that looks good around 75 so if I come down here and I shift click you can see this is what it looked like before and if i shift-click again here's what it looks like now so if I open up our original photo by going to file open recent and here is that first photo we started with I can compare the color grading of this so it's a lot more similar now and again let me shift click on this so you could see the before here's what the two photos look like so not very similar at all and then shift-click here's what it looks like now so the color grading is a lot more sim so once I'm finished with the color grading I can adjust the relative brightness of this image to try to help it match the other image a little bit better if I want to so to do that I'll make sure I'm on my color exchange layer and I'll come over here to colors curves and I can adjust the shadows here and bring them up so that there's a little bit less shadows that'll brighten this image up a bit I don't want to overdo it because it will start to look just like the old image so here's before here's an after this can help you recover some of the details in the shadows if you lost them on the other hand if the image is too bright you can bring the highlights down a little bit but I don't really need to do that here so here's what before here's an after and I'm just going to tone this down a little bit and I'll click OK now that we're finished with the color grading I can export this photo as a JPEG image so I'll go to file export as and I'll just name this beach with new color grading and you can choose the file location on your computer where you want to save this I'll just hit export and I'm going to adjust the quality here and by the way I have dot jpg at the end of my file name here that's why this is exporting as a JPEG so let me actually just adjust the quality down a bit you know hit export and there you go alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you can visit my website at Davies media design.com you can roll in my best selling 2.10 master class from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and you can enroll in any of my skill share classes by visiting Gibbs school comm so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 37,070

Rating: 4.9255123 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2.10.12, color grading, mood, lighting, image colors, color exchange, photoshop, piximperfect, curves, gradient map, color map, change image colors, match image colors, photo colors, photo editing, photography, photoshop alternative, free photoshop

Id: 8oZ5xOegS-s

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019