The POWER of Selective Color for AMAZING Colors & Tones

one of the most powerful tools I use in Photoshop is selective color if you're looking for a way to improve your tones and to give your images the rich colors that they deserve selective color is gonna offer an easy solution throughout this video I'm gonna give an in-depth look into a couple of photos using selective color and I'm gonna cover todo el pelo in this first image I'm gonna take my time because I want to show you the ins and outs of how selective color works because I want to show you the various options that you have from blend modes and layer masks to get that true color tone that we're trying to achieve here and this little folder I already have the final product so we're gonna take it from the before and then the after using layer masks and the blend modes so I'm gonna go ahead and take this off and let's go ahead and take a look at selective color my favorite method to get selective color is clicking this icon down here at the bottom and selecting selective color which is at the very bottom now once I have that you should be prompted with a dialog box and this is what it looks like if you don't have the properties dialog box you can go to window and then properties to make sure that it's actually showing up and then in the colors what's cool about selective color is that you have the options to choose which color you want to target so that you can mix and match colors within that range that you select and that's what makes selective color very powerful in other words you're kind of like making a selection and you can only target that specific color that you choose from the list here now for the why it's what you're doing there is you're gonna select the highlights the neutrals would be your mid-tones and the blacks would be your shadows when I drag this to the left you'll notice that the image gets really red and orange and if I drag it to the right it gets this kind of muted kind of cyan type color now why is that happening well when I select the Reds we have a lot of reds in this image because if we look at the color wheel here Reds is right next to orange so basically since I don't have orange as a choice reds and yellows is really going to be targeting that specific tone and as I drag it to the left the selective color uses the digital color wheel so when you drag it to the left you can do the opposite of what's on the color on the list so for example I have this little chart for you guys if I drag it to the right I'm gonna add more cyan or more magenta or more yellow into the image let me reset that and if I drag it to the left I'll get more red I'll get more green and I'll get more blue in my images now keep in mind that when I'm in selective color its mixing these colors so just because I drag it to the left doesn't mean that I'm gonna add a hundred percent a true blue it's gonna mix it with those Reds along with the other kind of adjustments that I'm making within this selective color the blacks will make the Reds a little bit darker or a little bit brighter so that's kind of just like the basic overall understanding of how selective color works because I think a lot of people get confused when they see the cyan magenta yellow and blacks now if you want this color wheel that I have here what you can do is you can go to window color and then here on the top right you can just change it to color wheel so what's cool about this feature is that now I can specifically let's say for example if I'm targeting the red so I added this little picture diagram here we know that this is the Reds as I'm manipulating the Reds you'll notice that none of the other colors in this little chart that I dragged in are being manipulated because I've told Photoshop through selective color as I'm mixing matching these colors you're only doing it to the Reds if I were to go into the blues which is going to have this sky over here and I drag it to the left or to the right and make it darker you're gonna notice that only the blues are being targeted which is super-powerful so let's get started with the actual color grading now so now the first thing that I want to do is we know in this image and I'm gonna take this little chart off is that this image is very orange dominant now on the list you don't see oranges but it's okay if we look at this color wheel over here orange is right in between yellow and Red's so that already tells me that I'm gonna be targeting the Reds and the yellows to really bring out the tone and really bring out the color in this image so what I'm gonna do is when I'm in the Reds I'm gonna have this little chart here to kind of show you what is dictating my decision here so for example I know I want these oranges or these oranges to pop a little bit more which is under reds and if I drag it to the left you'll see that it gets a little bit more orange but in this example I'm gonna go about negative 7 I do want to kick back just a little bit of the magenta and it's gonna mix that color in once again I have to emphasize is that it's not gonna then just make it magenta then on the yellows I do want it to add more yellow so I'm gonna drag it to the right now remember when I drag it to the right it's gonna add more of that color that's on this list if I go opposite it's gonna add these colors so when I drag it to the right it's gonna then add just a little bit more yellow and then on the blacks I do want these colors to be add a little bit more contrast to it I do want it to be a little bit dark so I'm gonna drag it to the right and you're gonna notice that the Reds are now getting a little bit dark so I'm gonna go about 23 now this leads me to my next point real quick is that as I'm making these adjustments you also get this little white dialog box so whenever I add an adjustment layer if I add another selective color automatically I'll get this little white box which is a layer mask so basically what that means is this adjustment that I'm currently making is on top of the entire image it's making that adjustment to the entire image but if we look closely and i zoom in pushing Z on the keyboard to zoom in I'm also a acting the skin tone because the skin tone has a lot of reds and it has a yellows so if I'm targeting that with selective color reds and yellows I'm gonna be manipulating the skin tone in this case I don't want to do that I just want to focus on the background so how am I gonna do that it's gonna be with selective color with selective color with lévesque so now I'm gonna click the layer mask as little white dialogue box I was so confident when I said selective color so when I click this this white white basically means once again is showing up area where I'm gonna push D on the keyboard it's gonna reset the colors here I'm gonna hit X to invert them so I'm gonna have black so when I brush with black and I'm selected on this layer mask what this basically means is I am going to hide that effect wherever I brush and if you're curious as to where you brush and if you look down here you'll see in this little area and it has a little black circle where I brushed but sometimes it's kind of hard to tell like where exactly am i brushing so if I push the backslash key on the keyboard you'll notice that this is exactly where I brush or whatever is in red that's basically telling Photoshop as I'm making these adjustments of selective color don't be interfering with the face I'm gonna hit the backslash key again and if I hit the eyeball before and then after you'll see that the image now is only targeting the background so let's go back into selective color we only did the Reds remember we want to get the oranges orange is right between yellow and red so let's get into the yellows now and I'm gonna go a little bit faster I'm gonna add just a little bit of red back into it by dragging it to the left and then I'm gonna add a little bit of magenta going 2-5 by dragging it to the right and then I'm in the under the yellows I'm gonna add just a little bit more yellow and then on the blacks I'm just gonna add just a little bit more contrast so if I hit the before-and-after so this is the color that we've currently added and you can already see specifically look at the shirt I'm really adding these nice rich tones to the image now taking us to take it a step further I'm going to go all the way down to the blacks now remember when I select the blacks that is targeting the shadows in the dark areas of the image so if I go to the Black's section and I drag it to the right looking at this little diagram that I have worked for you guys it's gonna make the image darker okay only in the shadow and dark areas so why would I want to do that so as I drag it to the right I'm gonna kind of make it a little bit dramatic here on purpose is that by doing this there are not that many shadows on her face so by darkening up this area here she's now jumping out of the image because I'm darkening those specific areas now 44 is too much but I want to go maybe about 10 and if I hit the before-and-after arrow or before-and-after eyeball this is what we've already done with just one single adjustment with selective color now let's add a little bit more to that because I have some of this guy right here but it's not really showing up as much as I would want to so what I want to do now is I want to focus on the sky so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add another selective color layer here at the bottom and what's cool is I can stack these selective color layers as many as I want and I can adjust the layer masks if I choose so now that I have another color adjustment I'm gonna now target the sky which is gonna be predominantly in the blues so when I select the Blues I can decide now what I want to do so I want to make it darker so I'm gonna drag it to the right and you'll see that the Blues got dark and I want to add more blue so if in order to do that I'll go to the yellow section and I would drag it to the left and I'll add just a little bit more blue and I can add a little bit more cyan by dragging it to the right let's go to the signs and see if I can add more so if I want it to be darker over here I would drag it to the right I would add a little bit more blues into the science by dragging it to the left and it's going to the scions and drag it to the right so if I hit the before and after this is the before and then the after adding just a little bit more color to that little area now that we have kind of like a base tone in the image there are some issues is when I took this photograph if i zoom into the face what happened was there's a lot of orange around the face so there was the Sun was hitting off this wall was adding orange to the face the orange in the shirt is bouncing up and it's reflecting light so I want to tone down the skin so that it's not so heavy on the oranges so I'm going to add another selective color and if I go into the Reds what I can do now is I know that the skin tone is predominantly in the red so I'm gonna find that under the scions here now if I drag it to the left we know that that's not what we want we're adding way too much red so what I want to do is I kind of want to desaturate that red and in order to do that we're gonna go from red and we're gonna go the opposite and we're gonna go cyan now what's cool about that is scientists the complementary color of red so it's gonna kind of mix really well so all I got to do now is if I look at my little color wheel opposite of red is gonna be cyan and we're under the science section I drag it to the right and if I go +20 what it's doing is once again it's mixing this scions into the Reds and if I click the before and then the after you'll notice that the skin tone kind of gets muted and a little bit be saturated but the problem is is that this is a global adjustment remember that when we have this white box that means it's doing it to the entire image we don't want that we were specifically trying to target the skin tones so what I'm gonna do is we're gonna do the opposite now we're gonna do an inverted mask I just hit my microphone we're gonna do an inverted mask by pressing ctrl I on the keyboard so if I press ctrl I on the keyboard I'm gonna press ctrl and then I'm and you'll notice that the mask now turns to black and black basically means that this effect that we just did right now is not showing up anywhere so if I get the brush tool up here I can choose the size of the brush the flow opacity what I want to do is I want to set it to white because white reveals the effect black hides so now that I have right and I brush it over the face I'm gonna get that D saturated orange on the face so that her skin tone isn't so orange if I want to take a look at where I just brushed I hit the backslash and you'll see that right there is only where it's revealing so if I hit the backslash again and let me zoom in just a little bit more pushing Z on the keyboard so the before and then the after so I hope you guys are getting the idea of using layer masks and then also using multiple selective color layers to your benefit the last thing I want to cover is how to add a blend mode to selective color to really give you some more options to set the tone for your image I'm gonna add an additional selective color layer and this time though we're gonna set the blend mode to luminosity and what luminosity is gonna allow you to do it's gonna allow you to adjust the tone and the luminance tones in those colors so now we're not worried about adding color now we're just worried about setting the tone for those specific color choices that we choose so in other words if I go up here to colors and I switch it to red because we know that this image is dominantly red and yellow what I can do now because I'm under luminosity ignore all of these little color choices all we have to worry about is knowing is if I drag it to the right it's gonna make it darker if I drag it to the left it's gonna make that tone a brighter now the tricky part is is that you kind of have to mess around with these options here and order to get the look that you want but I think the easiest thing to understand is just play around with it right we'll make a darker left we'll make it brighter so in this case I'm gonna enter in the settings just so you guys can see the before and after so I'm gonna go here and we're gonna go negative six and then three and let's take a look at this so before and then the after just a small subtle effect we know that when I adjust the blacks its targeting the shadows so I am making the tonality of the shadows in the blacks just a little bit darker that's also going to the yellows and let's adjust the tonality of the yellow so I'm going to go negative eight we're gonna go seven thirteen and then five we're also gonna go into the blues to make some adjustments to the blues we're gonna go twenty seven twenty four and then we're also gonna make these blues a little bit darker by increasing it to 32 okay so if I hit the before and then the after and let me just move this off to the side so you can see the Blues so before and then the after now the most important one and I think this luminosity works really well when we get into the blacks is now I can kind of target these tonality x' and the colors to either make a brighter or darker so I'm gonna go three I'm gonna go one I'm gonna go five three and I like what it did to the overall tonality of the image and what really helped is this area in here to really make her pop and I don't like what it's doing to the face so what I'm gonna do is get the brush tool we're gonna set it to black and we're gonna erase it this adjustment on the face now an extra option is is sometimes maybe you're looking at an image and then you decide like oh you know what maybe I went a little bit too far you can always decrease the settings but you could also decrease the opacity so if I go into the opacity I feel like the effect looks nice but maybe we can tone it down and let's go to maybe around 80% opacity and all the opacity is doing is it is just diminishing the effect by 20% because I went to 18 so if I click the before and then the after now let's take a look at the overall image I'm gonna hold shift' grab all of these images pressing ctrl G and this is the before where it looked very flat the colors are not really poppy and with selective color this is the final image that we get for this specific photo I hope you're seeing the benefits of how selective color works and if you guys want to get a more in-depth look into phone shop I want to talk about today's sponsor which is a skill share skill shares an online learning community for creatives Skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative people on topics such as photography productivity business and more make great use of your downtime and check out skill shares online classes which include a combination of video lessons and class projects they offer a wide range of categories from photography film and video and graphic design one of the classes that I watched was instagram-worthy photography shoot edit share with brandon woeful and what I really enjoyed about that class is the structure you really get to see from beginning to end his process as to how he composes the shots how we edits his photographs but what makes it awesome is that it's only about an hour long so it's something that you can simply just dive into it get straight to the point and that course really inspired me to want to start shooting natural light again especially during Golden Hour for everything Skillshare offers it's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a two month free trial of Premium Membership so you can explore your creativity back to the video now that you have a basic understanding of selective color I want to show you a couple more images but this time we're going to go a little bit faster so I already have some preset layers already set up but selective color and I've used a layer mask because I didn't want it to target the white in the outfit but what I want to show you is how you can color grade the specific shadows in an image so if I go to Black's we're on the normal blend mode what bait which basically means I can adjust colors now because I'm in blacks we know we can now color grade the shadows and the blacks so when I do that what I can do now is I can then come in and add a little bit of blue to my yellows so when I do this what's going to happen is I am going to add blue into my dark areas now obviously that's too much so maybe I would go about negative four and what's cool about doing the Blues in the shadows is that that's the opposite color of orange which is the complementary color since we already have orange in the pants and oranges in the skintone it would make sense to have Blues in our shadows and I'll add a little bit of contrast here so I've collaborated the shadows so that we can get a complementary color scheme but what I really want to show you is how we can color grade this guy back here and what I'm gonna do is obviously that's going to be in the science in the blues right now the sky there's really not a lot of richness to the sky and we're going to use selective color to our advantage so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to now go into the science and I'm going to quickly add in some settings to really make that bump twelve to get that really cyan look we're gonna add five for the magentas we're gonna add a little bit of blue and we're not gonna mess with this one we're gonna go into blues and you're gonna see a big effect when I increase the blues to cyan I really added that cyan look there so if I hit the before and then the after we're really adding that's that tone inside then we're gonna go negative three if I wanted to I can add more bloom and about 29 looks pretty good and then I can make it a little bit darker by going +5 but what I really want to do is that right here we know that this little sky area here is really bright but there's not really a color that's really making it stand out and pop so what we're gonna target instead instead of the science and the blues is we're gonna target now the whites because we know that selecting the whites is gonna target the bright area so if I go to whites this is where we're gonna see a dramatic effect so if I drag it to the right it's going to add more science into the bright areas so pay attention to this sky over here in here then I'm gonna add a little bit of green to it because I want to stay on this side of the color wheel right so blue cyan and green and then here obviously I want more blue in there and my highlights I'm gonna add it to negative 22 and I want it to be a little bit darker so I'm gonna go into the 34 range 32 so let me emphasize when I added that green in you're probably like what the hell is this guy doing that's why I love to use this color wheel as I'm color grading because it makes sense I'm on this same side here which I believe is analogous if I have it wrong I'll definitely put it on the screen but it all stays on the same side so let's basically take a look at the before and after look at that sky difference beautiful beautiful tones by just using the selective color by targeting the Blues the science and the whites and the whites can't even say it pen whites oh my gosh I want to show you one more example because I really want you to see the true power of selective color because on this photo I got a lot of feedback on my colors and I definitely want to show you what I did to achieve the colors so the first layer that I did with selective color was I changed the blend mode to luminosity and as a reminder when you're on the luminosity blend mode you're adjusting the tonal values so that basically means if I drag any of these sliders to the right it's gonna make it darker if I drag it to the left and I make it brighter and I am NOT gonna be adjusting any colors whatsoever so on this one I went to the Reds and I wanted the stuff to be a little bit more dark and a little bit more rich to bring back some of that detail so that's why you're seeing a lot of them shift to the right and the same thing with the yellows because we had a lot of red and yellows in the background I don't think I went into the scions I went a little bit to the right and that's going to target kind of like the jacket here the blues and I think I went into whites and I made them just a little bit darker and the blacks I didn't do anything so let's just look at what this kind of tonality did a nice this lies like a base so that I can get ready so I can start pushing some colors so on this next one this was an overall color adjustment on the normal blend mode so now I'm manipulating colors and what I did on this one was I went into the Reds and the yellows because this image has a lot of red and yellows we have this skin tone and that we have this magenta type background here so reds and then the yellows and then on this one if I wanted to I can go into magenta so if I really wanted to push the Magento's and make them a little bit darker I go to the magenta section I go to blacks and I drag it to the right and you're gonna notice I get a little bit more detail back into that sky so let's just take a look at the first two that I've already said so this was tonality color and then I really wanted to push that sky that sky I really wanted to mesh everything together so what I did is I made another selective color but this time I didn't want the color to be manipulated here at the bottom so I used a layer mask now we learned that at the very beginning of the tutorial I'm gonna hit the backslash key to show you basically where I cultivated it now I know some of its not like perfect here but I can go back in there and I can brush it in if I need it to so let's do that just for examples sake so here we go we go there yeah a little bit of the hair backslash that's good enough so what I did is I added an additional one to really make those magentas pop and I think this is the one that really made the overall image really shine here so if I go into selective color some of the adjustments I made were in the Reds and in the yellows and let's kind of recap the Reds real quick because I'm on the normal blend mode and I'm adjusting the color so I wanted it to be more red so I dragged it to the right I wanted it to be more magenta so I dragged it to the bright I'm sorry I went to the left here and then on the yellows I did wanted it to be a little bit more yellow so I'm mixing all of these colors into my ribs and then I went into yellows of course I added more magentas into those yellows and a little bit more yellow and then I went into the blacks and I added just a little bit more dark to the overall image a little bit more contrast and let's take a look at the before and after here with the Selective color saw before and then the after now that concludes my in-depth look at selective color we talked about how selective color uses the digital color wheel to adjust the colors we looked at blend modes and layer masks now if you guys enjoyed this tutorial and want to see more in-depth intermediate tutorials I have full edit tutorials on my youtube channel I have skin retouching tutorials as well so check those out thank you guys for watching and I'll see you guys on the next one peace out

Channel: Eli Infante

Views: 32,704

Keywords: Photoshop 2020, Photoshop Tones, Photoshop Color Grading, Photoshop Color, Photoshop Selective Color, Photoshop Selective Color Adjustment, Selective Color, Tones and Color Photo Editing, Photo Editing Color, Photoshop Retouching, Photo Editing Tones and Color, Color & Tones, Color Grading, Photoshop Beginner Tutorial

Id: qxb90LHmdc4

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020