TK8 PLUGIN For PHOTOSHOP: Color Grading Thru Masks (It's TK Friday)

hey everyone it's tk friday again today it's color grading through masks i'll be using the tk8 multi mask panel and the cx panel i'm going to show you some really great ways of color grading your images you don't want to miss this one stay tuned hello everyone and welcome to the joy of editing with dave kelly i look forward every week to tk fridays and today i have a special episode for you we're just going to really get into the new color grading tool in the tk8 multi mask panel let's go ahead and jump right into this i think i'll start out by opening up the new tk8 color grading tool which is found right here just click this icon let's just do a straightforward color grading first before we get into masking and things of that nature i'm just working with a stock image today i've made a few edits on this image here's the before my edits and here's after i'll just open up this group so you can see here you know i just made a few adjustments here just to balance the background to the foreground uh i felt the image was a little overall on the dark side so i wanted to darken up the background and lighten up the subject and then i did a little bit of dodging and burning through luminosity mass but this is not about that this is about color grading so then let's turn our attention to the color grading tool now we have these three icons here black gray and white representing shadows midtones and highlights and then we have this icon which represents all three shadows mid-tones and highlights to use this tool what you need to do is start out by clicking on this plus and when you do you'll notice you get a curves adjustment layer and it is labeled color grading and if i open up the properties panel here you can see i just have a linear curve with no adjustments on it whatsoever now i do want to point out something once you start working with this color grading tool do not touch the properties panel do all your adjustments through the color grading tool it's very important because if you start changing things out here you'll kind of mess things up and you don't want to do that so take that as a tip do all your color grading within this tool right here let me start out by selecting this midtones icon i'm just going to click it and then you can just take this and left click with your mouse and drag it so if i wanted to cool this image down i could move this to the blue section here and you notice how the image cools down in the mid tones or if i wanted to warm it up i could move it up into the warmer areas or i could you know if i wanted to turn it magenta looking i could do that and you know what when you're color grading like uh fashion photography or whatever sometimes you really want these kind of more exotic looks to your image but i think i want to reduce some of that warm looking flesh tone and make it a little more natural just by taking the mid-tone and dragging it more into the cooler tones which will counteract the extra warm tones let me click the eye so we can see it before see how warm the flesh tone looks and then after so the color grading actually helped me to get a more realistic flesh tone here also something to note is watch the properties panel change as i change things on the color grading tool for instance watch this linear curve here which is just a straight linear curve when i take the mid tones and drag this luminosity slider to the right watch how this midtone starts to move up as i drag this to the right and the image will get lighter but did you see how that moved up or if i move it to the left mid-tones will get darker but now that curve drops down so that's interesting so i can lighten up my mid-tones only which is really cool as well as add color to them any color i want on this color will something that a lot of photographers like to do is add some coolness to their shadows so now we can click on this shadow icon and let's just drag it down into the shadows a little bit and you see how i start to cool off the shadows now of course i can take this luminosity slider and drag it to the left okay and darken the shadows or i can drag it to the right but notice watch this side of the curve right here have you ever heard of the matte look and the matte look is doing nothing more than taking this curve and dragging it up a little bit on the shadow side watch what happens when i drag this to the right you see how that starts to move up and the image starts to get that hazy looking matte look which is very popular today here's a good tip when you want the matte look just open up the color grading tool and choose shadows and take that luminosity slider bump it to the right a little bit stop it the desired effect for the matte look and you could add color to it or not you can just get the matte look if you want now here's another tip if you need to reset anything for instance if i want to reset this shadow just come up to the shadow icon and right click it and it resets back to the center again the same with the mid tones if i want to reset it just right click it or i'm sorry you don't right click that you right click the icon and that resets it back so again i'm going to put it back to where i thought it looked good and let's go back here and this time i just want to add some matte look i'll leave this shadow point right in the center so it won't affect the color and i'll just you know move this to the right and you notice that curve starts to move up giving us the matte look if you want to see where your shadows midtones and highlights are sitting at in the color grading just click this icon here and you can see here's my mid tones cooled off a little bit here's my shadows i have no highlight adjustment but if i wanted to go ahead and adjust my highlights i could click on highlights and just start to adjust those highlights now here's a good point do you always have to touch shadows mid-tones and highlights no just touch what you want to affect like in my case i don't want to affect my highlights i just wanted to affect my mid-tones of shadows so i'm going to leave my highlights alone and again if i click here you can see i've only adjusted mid-tones and my shadows and if i click on my shadow here you can see this luminance slider move to the right so you can see i lightened up my shadows and gave me that matte look today's tutorial was not about a finished edit but it's about how to utilize this color grading tool so let me go ahead and take what i've just done make sure i'm on this layer and click on this trash can and let's get rid of it and now i'm going to show you some more ways of using the color grading tool but before i do that let's close the color grading tool and i'm going to show you what this my channels icon is all about because i'm going to need to use it for what i'm going to show you here and we're also going to get into saving channels and selecting subjects so we'll be using a couple of the actions on the tk8cx panel or the tk8 combo panel whichever you prefer but i'll be using the cx panel let me go ahead and click this icon to fit this to the screen i'll go ahead and close my properties panel the first thing i want to do is select my subject now you'll notice i'm on this group right here and if i come up here to uh select you'll notice select subject and select sky is grayed out what that's telling me is photoshop will not allow me to select the subject when the group layer is active all i need to do is either go to any layer that is not a group or i can go to the background layer and i can click this icon here to select my subject and just like that my subject is selected now the next thing i want to do is save that as a channel so we're going to use this icon right here so click this give this a name right now it says my my selection i'm going to call it subject okay because it is my subject i'm going to click ok and then right under this icon is this invert icon so to select the background it's very simple at this point click invert to invert the subject selection and now i'll select the background and now i'll click on this same save icon and call this background and that's how easy it is to save your background and your subject into channels click ok and now you'll notice here's my subject in channels and here's my background now i can deselect the selection by clicking this icon right here now let's say i just want to color grade my background make it a little bit blue so here's what i can do i can come up here to this icon my channels icon select the background click on the color grading tool right here now remember i've selected the background so let me go ahead and click shadows and just drag this into the blue tones like that you see that and if i want to get that matte look i can drag this to the right a little bit so i can do that or maybe i want to darken the background so whatever you feel like and let's in this this time let's darken the background a little bit here's the before and here's the after so we utilize channels by selecting the background by itself and we use the uh color grading tool as well let's try something else let's go ahead and delete this layer and let's get out of the color grading tool let's try something different this time we're going to work with a zone mask see back here this gray area back in here what if i wanted to color grade that more of a warmer tone because i don't like the gray now to select this area i could either use a luminosity mask a color mask or a zone mask but i think a zone mask would be the way to go but let's try it let's come up here and click on our zone mask icon let's select some of this gray area right here and click ok now it's too broad of a selection right now so let's take this slider and narrow that selection down a good bit so i'm just encompassing that gray area right around there and i can even make this a little lighter make everything a little bit lighter but i have a problem right now you'll notice my subject is selected as well and i don't want that but remember i have in my channel spell it a subject and a background channel we can utilize those and we can do a calculation and if you've never done a calculation before now you're going to see how powerful they can be so let's do this let's click on this calculation button right now so we'll just click it and you'll notice my calculator comes up in this area right here now i can close down the zone mask by clicking this x and we're going to click the minus button and you notice when i do it turns green so at this point what i can do is come up here to my channels icon and let's subtract the subject out and now we'll click equals and now you'll notice what has happened here my subject is no longer selected but all these light areas in the background are that same zone that i chose now if we look around my subject you can see some artifacts that are around her hat and her body here i can get rid of those very simply by clicking on this black brush tool and simply paint on this mask with black paint and i can just simply get rid of that i don't really think that would really bother anything to be honest with you but i can get rid of any of this stuff that i feel might give me a problem like up around in here i have a nice soft edge brush on here so no big deal here but let's just get rid of some of that okay even this area right here i can get rid of if i want to now here's our next step we need to output this but look we can output this to a color grade so let's click on here and our color grade tool comes up and you'll notice it has that layer mask attached to it now i have a choice of using shadows mid-tones or highlights but i find that the mid-tones adjustment is one where i get the most bang for the buck in other words it'll pretty much encompass anything that i need it to do but if that doesn't work for you you also have shadows and highlights that you can work with but i always like to start out with the mid-tones and that's just a little tip for you so i'll go ahead and select mid tones and i want to warm up this wall so let's start to take this and drag it into warmer tones and you see that just like that i've warmed up that wall it's no longer just a gray wall pretty cool and any of the other zones that were in that same zone we'll get that little bit of warmth to them as well now if there's areas that i don't like like if i felt that's too warm right there here's what i can do or on this car right here if i don't want this car to have that warm tone on it all i have to do is select a group we'll group that inside of a white mask group and i'll take a black brush and if you don't have a black brush you can just click your icon right here i'll paint with a nice large soft edged brush at a hundred percent opacity i'll just paint off that adjustment off this car right here and if i don't want it back over here i can just paint it off anywhere i don't want it i can paint it off through that group mask just that simple now here is my before and here's my after i just color graded the wall and i've stayed off my subject so again here is the before and here is the after pretty cool right but let's move on now i'll go ahead and delete this group here click in the trash can and we'll try something else let me go ahead and close out the color grading tool again for this next scenario what if i just wanted to color grade the light tones of my subject and not the background how could i do that here's what i would do i would come up to the luminosity icon here let's click it and by default it chooses lights one okay so that's lights one let's try lights two now i think i'm going to stick with lights one so we got lights one now let's click on the calculator again so we click the calculator what i want to do is subtract the background so we'll click the minus and you notice the minus has the green around it notating that i've selected minus now i can close out the luminosity mask panel and now i can come to my channels where i have the background stored i'm going to subtract the background so click background click equal and now you notice that i only have the light tones of my subject selected and the background drops out now all i have to do is click on the little color grade icon and i can get started and i have a layer mask attached to this color grading curves adjustment layer now again i'm going to start with my mid tone so let's click mid tones and let's see which way we want to go what if we wanted to warm up the flesh tones a little bit so we could do that maybe warm up warm them a little bit and lighten them up okay and it's only dealing with lights remember that okay so here is the before and here is the after so we lightened it up and we added a little bit of extra warmth to it or if we wanted to take some warmth away we could drag this into the cooler you see that and now we're taking some of that away now here is the before and here's the after and it's only dealing with the light tones so we have our choice here we can do whatever we want with the tk8 color grade tool we could color grade our entire image or we could just color grade through a luminosity mask a zone mask and coming up i'll show you how to color grade through a color mask on this model's hair so let's color grade the model's hair i'm gonna leave this uh color grade that we've just done on where i've just kind of took some of the warmth out of our flesh tones but now i want to just color grade the models here so let's get rid of this color grading tool and let's open up our color masking tool and let's select some of this hair color click ok and now we can go ahead and lighten up that selection so we can select more of it something like that and let's click on our calculator because i want to subtract out the background so let's click the minus and let's get rid of this and now let's open up our channels here and let's remove the background by clicking on background and we'll click equal and now we've selected the hair color here now don't worry selected some of the face as well but that's not a problem so let's go ahead and select our color grading tool and we will get started now again i'm going to select mid tones and let's drag it way into the red you see that let's get it really red and what if we wanted to darken it darken it up a good bit or what if we wanted to take it more into magenta type tones and i don't know i think i'm going to stick with really red like that now it's affecting her face and a little bit of our hat up here but that's not a problem because remember we can do things like masking the mask to mask the mask come to this group icon now it's split in two sides white with a white reveal all mask and black with the idle mask in this case i want to use a black hideaw mask so what i'm going to do is click the left side of this group icon and it hides my entire adjustment now with my paintbrush and make sure you're using white paint because you're painting on a black mask i'm just going to click on this icon to give me a white brush and i'll use a fairly large brush very high opacity 100 and very easy uh soft edge and what i'll do is just paint on my hair color just like this very simple very easily paint it on paint it on over in here up into here and just like that i'm good to go and if i over paint into some other areas where i don't want red i can just paint with the opposite color of black and get rid of it but there i go so let's take a look here is the before and here's the after so we've color graded the hair utilizing a color mask pretty cool stuff right now i want to give you another tip whenever you have multiple color grading layers and you want to go back to a certain one of those color grades and see what you've done to it here's what you need to do let's go to this one right here let's click this layer make it active now you have your choice you can either come and click this icon which will show you if you've changed anything in the mid tones shadows or highlights or you can click on any of these squares if you know you've used like midtones there you could click here and you could see you've color graded your mid-tones and you've cooled them off and you can see where your luminosity slider is as well now if i click on this one and say for instance if i click on this icon it'll let me know that well hey i used my mid-tones and i've colored them red and i pretty much uh just darken my uh tones just a little wee bit but that's how you can go and see what you've done on different layers and then at this point you can come in here and make other changes or maybe add highlights to this whatever you want and also don't forget i'm going to open up my properties panel do not touch the properties panel do all your adjustments from within the color grading tool that's very important you will not be happy if you mess that up now i know i threw a lot of stuff at you today so you may want to go back and watch this tutorial maybe several times but i think this tutorial will help you to get a good understanding of how powerful the color grading tool and the tk8 multi mask panel really is you can use it by itself just to color grade shadows mid-tones and highlights or you could use luminosity masks zone masks color masks and color grade through those masks it's super powerful you can use it on landscape photography any type of photography actually i used it on a fashion photograph today but it is amazing what you can do with it but i hope this tutorial really helps show you what can be achieved using this color grading tool if you enjoyed my tutorial today please give it a like and share it with your friends and if you're not yet a subscriber to my channel please subscribe click that bell notification icon then every time i upload a new tutorial you'll be notified about it i want to thank each and every one of you for joining me today in the joy of editing with dave kelly i'll see you all right here next time but until then happy editing [Music] you

Channel: The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Views: 5,917

Keywords: TK8, TK8 Plugin for Photoshop, TK8 Multi-Mask Panel, TK8 Combo/Cx Panel, Photoshop, Luminosity Masks, Color Masks, Zone Masks, Color Grading, Photography, Photo Editing, Tutorial, Training

Id: dCq3JRr3CeM

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021