TK8 PLUGIN for PHOTOSHOP: Finding The Best Light (((It's TK Friday)))

welcome to tk friday the title of today's episode is finding the best light and that's just what we'll do today utilizing the tk8 plug-in for photoshop stay tuned hello everyone and welcome to the joy of editing with dave kelly it's that time of the week again tk friday i really love tk fridays and i know a lot of you out there love them too i thank you for all your comments and questions and your feedback i really appreciate that and for all of you that don't yet own the tk8 plugin for photoshop uh you can click on my affiliate link in the description below it'll take you to tony kuiper's website and then you can purchase it and use my promo code dk15 and you'll receive 15 off anything you purchase on tony's site that includes the tka plug-in for photoshop as well as any training videos that he has on that site i'll also leave a download link for this image it's a stock image so you can go ahead and download it and follow along with me it's a great way of learning how to use the tk8 plugin for photoshop the image may look a little different because i swapped out the sky i think the sky was replaced on this stock image already but i didn't like it so i just put a different sky on it from photoshop let's go ahead and find the best light for this image now right off the bat when i look at this image i see these deer they're very dark and the way i start processing i look for troubled areas and to me the deer need to be lightened up so that's what i do and then i'll look for the next thing that needs corrected but we're looking for the best light the first thing we're going to do is grab the object selection tool just click on it and i'm going to drag a marquee just around these two deer and that'll select the deer and next i'm going to go over to my tk8 cx panel and click s and m that stands for select and mask that'll bring up selected mask and here is where we can refine the deer if you're not using the cx panel you may be using combo panel but it will have that same snm button on it next i'm going to grab the refine edge brush tool and start to paint around the deer here and i'll get inside the grass on the deer and it should select this out pretty well so i'll just keep painting in here and making sure i get all the different areas but take your time and do it right once you're done make sure you have output to selection selected click ok and that sends you back to photoshop now that we're back in photoshop we can take a look and see how our selection looks so come up here and click this icon we can check the selection now i just look it over and you can see there's some areas that it missed and i'm going to use the dodge and burn tools as well as the brush tools to correct things i'm going to start out with the burn tool and just burn around these antlers here and then i'll grab my dodge tool and paint the antlers themselves and i'll work back and forth between dodge and burn and you see me getting the different tools and i'll even grab a black brush here and paint some of these outer edges here and then you know again i'll go back to the burn tool dodge tool i'll get the dodge tool and start to paint on the deer i sped the video up just to save some time once you're satisfied with your mask it's not a bad idea to save it as a channel click the save icon and then give it a name and click ok that'll save it as a channel in case you want to use it later i'll be using mine right away so i'm clicking this icon here which loads it as a selection and then hides the selection i'm going to go ahead and make this image full size or fit the screen now that we have the deer selected you can see the uh selection indicators we're going to go ahead and output it to a color grade tool click the plus that opens up your color grade tool and it attaches the layer mask click on the midtone icon and we're just going to drag the mid-tones to the right and lighten up the deer isn't that cool just like that and i think we're also going to warm them up so grab this block and drag it up into the yellow tones and just add some warmth to the deer and that's going to look nice and i think we have a great result here what do you think that was pretty easy now let's take a look at the before and after here's the before and the after before and after i'm happy the next thing i want to do is set ourselves up for success and that's with some mass so the first thing i want to do we have a sky so let's go ahead and select this guy by clicking this icon and we'll save that out as a sky selection by clicking right here and we'll just call this sky s whoops not d s k y and click ok and it'll save it down to our channels and now we can invert it and um click save and that'll be the foreground so we'll call this foreground and we'll go ahead and save that as a channel by clicking ok we have dear sky and foreground and now i want to save out these uh the tree line so i'm going to use my object selection tool here i'm going to go ahead and deselect what i have here for now and use my object selection tool and just click outside here click right like so we're going to go ahead and select that and now we need to refine it so we're going to go ahead and click s m and we'll go ahead and refine the selection i'll grab the refine edge brush and just refine along these trees just painting away i sped this up a little bit so it can shorten this video because this is going to be a long one you're going to learn a lot so stay with me to the end can you do it i'd really appreciate it and i think you'll appreciate it too because if you do you will learn a lot so i'm just going along the bottom edge here and once we're finally satisfied we can click ok and that brings us right back into photoshop and then we can save this as a channel let's type trees save it and now we have that saved as trees now i'm going to go ahead and deselect and the last thing i want to save is the foreground grass i'm just using the object selection tool clicking s m edge refine brush and refine the edge of this again i sped the video up a little bit when we're done we're going to output it as a selection click ok now we're back in photoshop we're going to save it as a channel i'm going to call this foreground grass click ok and now i have all my channels made i'll click this icon to deselect the selection now that i saved out a bunch of masks as channels it's time to do some work i want to darken this mountain so let's come up and get rid of this color grading tool let's click on my channels let's click on the foreground and that'll select the foreground now i want to subtract i just want the mountain so i can come to my mass calculator click it on and subtract and let's x out of here let's go back to my channels i want to subtract the trees from it let's click equals and now you notice the mountain is selected now i also have the foreground selected but i can do something really easy here and that is just get my brush tool with black paint i can subtract out those foreground grasses if i want to but you know what it's easier just for me to paint that out like that and now i have my mountain selected just like that now i'm just going to click on this color grading tool i'll put it to a color grading tool click on the mid-tone block and i want to darken up the mountain only isn't it's cool it's only going to darken up that mountain i just want to darken it up a little bit and let's just warm it up slightly just a slight bit of warming on it so here is the before and here is the after just like that next i want to darken the sky a little bit so let's get rid of the color grading tool let's come back to my channels grab our sky see how easy this is when you set yourself up for success click on the color grading tool click on the mid-tone block and let's just darken it up a little bit maybe something around there i might add a slight bit of warmth just a little tiny bit to the sky here's the before and the after yeah i think that looks good i'm happy with that next what i want to do is just warm up all the foreground area here i know i darken the mountain but i want to bring some balance to everything so let's x out of this color grading tool go back to my channels let's click on foreground there's our foreground let's load it to a color grading tool or output it to a color grading tool and now let's click on the mid-tone swatch again i'm just going to slightly darken the foreground but i will be leaving out the sky and i mean just slightly and i might give it a slight warming up i think right like that and here is this is going to be subtle here's the before and here is the after it kind of just brings it all together the next thing i want to do is tackle these browned uh evergreen trees which are not evergreen now i believe they're evergreen trees but they're brown here here and here i'm going to show you how we're going to fix this pay close attention here because this is something new you're going to learn now every image has its own set of problems and every time i work on new images we're going to learn new skills here as we come into something we've never had to deal with before alrighty ready here we go let's x out of the color grading tool let's come up to the color range mask and click this icon that opens up your color range mask now we want to select this brown color in here so i'm just going to give it a click and click ok and as you can see it's selected those trees now what i want to do is lighten those trees up let's just drag the slider the whole way over see how they get nice and light and now what we want to do is we can lighten them up even more by coming to the levels here and just dragging this highlight slider over a little bit not too much but right about there now we want to isolate these green trees around it so what do you think we can do here if you're thinking hey dave can you subtract green well i believe you're on the right track here so let's come to the mass calculator and let's click minus and now let's get this color picker tool right here and let's click on this green tree right here and click ok all right now my other trees got a little darker because there's yellow in these greens but you can see right here it's not perfect yet but watch what we can do here see this bar of different colors up here let's click on green and we also have these little circles that we can slide and play with here and i've done this when i was working out how i was going to do this video and these didn't really help me but what helped was when i clicked on this green here and when i do notice how those other trees go black now this tree is selected it's not easy to see however but watch what happens when you drag this slider to the right the whole way over it starts to lighten up do you see that and now we can come here and grab this levels adjustment and start to really drag it over okay and what i want to do is really make that light as light as i can get it let's just really drag it over somewhere right around in there and now let's click equals and notice what happens we have these two trees these brown trees are selected and this is black and we can further refine by clicking on levels again and i can drag this highlight slider make those a little lighter and i can even drag the shadows in a little bit and make that tree even darker yet maybe even just a little bit more so these trees are nice and light and i can even drag this mid tones a little bit to the left and lighten it up and that's all i need to do now what we're going to do is output this to a color grading tool you know it's the one i've been using all the time so let's go ahead and click it now we're not done yet we're going to go ahead and make these trees turn green the rest of the image is going to get ugly but we're going to do a technique it's an old technique called masking the mask and it's simple to do but first let's make these trees turn green so let's click on mid tones and let's drag this mid-tones block way up into the greens and you see how things are starting to turn green now let's darken those mid-tones okay somewhere maybe around there now let's grab our highlights let's drag it up into the greens and let's really darken those highlights because now we can really get it to to match in there okay and we'll come back and tweak this again i'll just play around with this a little bit more just to try to match that green the best i can now again the rest of the image looks ugly but we're gonna mask the mask and that is next to mask the mass all we need to do is come over to the cx panel or the combo panel whichever one you're using this icon right here for putting a layer into a group you want to go to the left this is two part here white and black you want to put this in a black group so click the left side and you'll notice this color grading layer is in a black group hiding everything so let's go ahead and really zoom into our image so we can see what we're doing here now we're working on these brown trees here so i'm gonna get a brush and we can come right here and get a white paint brush at 100 opacity i have a nice small brush and i'm just going to paint my tree and just paint that brown tree green and the in the mask is taking care of the trees around it so i i could be kind of sloppy here but i'm just going to take my time and paint down through here make sure i get everything in here and we can always come back and tweak that color grade if we need to a little bit it doesn't have to be identical to the other trees it just has to be close it just has to look kind of realistic doesn't have to be perfect i'm staying i'm trying to stay away from the tree trunks that's really why i zoomed in here okay so right here and over in here and let's get this this guy up in here okay and we'll just paint him in as well and some of this area over in here we can get in here that's good and now we have another tree over here now it's not real brown so i'm going to take my opacity and take it down let's try 30 and paint over this with 30 percent it's going to apply some of that green on here that's 30 percent let's go to uh let's go to 50 percent yeah i think 50 is better i feel like bob ross painting a happy little tree here and again i want to stay off my tree trunks but as bob ross would say it's your world you can do what with it what you want did you ever think you had this much power but you really really do isn't this cool but just like so now let me go ahead and click this icon to go back to fit the screen but check this out here is the before and here's the after now remember we can still come up here and we can tweak if we feel we're a little too green or whatever let's click on the mid tone and let's make it a little less green you see that how we can come back here and readjust and right there i think that's believable take your time and get it just the way you like it but here's the before we used to have ugly brown trees and now we have green trees wasn't that cool it's amazing the things you can accomplish with the tk8 panel and to me this is all part of the joy of editing next i want to add some highlight to these trees back here so let's come back let's get rid of this color grading tool let me close this group here and then i'm going to come to my channels and i got my trees because i want to work in the highlights in the trees here so what i'm going to do is simply get a mass calculator and i want to do an intersection and let's x out of here so i'm going to intersect i want highlights so what do i want to do here i'm going to use the zone mass i'm going to click on the zone mask right here and click on some of the highlights in the tree like right here and click ok and it's going to pick out those highlights now i could come here and narrow that selection down by dragging this and pulling this in like so and then i want to lighten everything up because remember the light areas are going to take the adjustment and all the light areas of the highlights right so i can drag this over and let me see how broad do i want that maybe somewhere right around there now i can also grab this levels adjustment and even make it lighter by pulling this highlights over making those highlights even lighter and we can even take the mid-tones and we just don't want to like lose texture okay that's important we don't want to lose any texture in there right layout don't worry about the rest of the image because watch what happens when i click equal isn't that beautiful if you don't want these highlights in these grasses down here you can just grab a brush i don't think they would really matter but i can just grab a black brush and paint this stuff away if i want to again you have all this flexibility and that's why tony has built all these brushes and stuff into here they're to be used okay you know he really thought this out when he made this okay i'm gonna leave those guys on over there now we're gonna output this to what do you think color grading tool yeah i love this tool click it and now this is highlights uh i'm gonna start with mid-tones though let's click on mid-tones and let's start to drag this to the right and watch the tree highlights magically start to light can you see that i'm going to overdo it a little bit and somebody out there is going to say man you really overdid that well yeah because i want to make sure you see it on the video okay i'm going to make them a little more on the green side not too green maybe somewhere around there that might be too light let me just back it off a little bit okay let's see here's the before and here's the after but i just want to put a little bit of light on those highlights this is a little bit of finessing here okay just a little bit of highlights on there next i'm going to darken some of the shadows up to add a little contrast here so let's exit out of the color grading tool go back to my channels let's get our trees again i'm going to do another calculation i'm going to intersect this with i'm going to grab the zone mask here and grab some of these darker tones in here and click ok and i'm going to narrow that down just a little wee bit maybe somewhere right around in there and i'm not even going to touch this lightness slider or yes i am going to lighten it up just a little wee bit just like that and i'm going to go ahead and click equals and right there i've selected my shadows put a color grading tool on there uh mid tones i'm going to drag this to the left and see how i can just darken up those shadows and add contrast here is the before and here's the after the next thing i want to do is darken some of the lighter areas of the mountain and the lighter areas of the sky so i need to select the sky and the mountain together so this is going to be a wild calculation ride so follow me here let's x out of this color grading tool and let's come up to my channels we're going to select the foreground and now we're going to go to the mass calculator and we're going to minus out the let's see what do we want to minus out here the trees and say equal okay and now i want to add the sky so let's come back to mass calculator let's add go back to my channels let's add the sky click equals and now let's get a white brush tool and let's just see this little edge here not a big deal we can with white paint at 100 opacity let's just paint all this in here this bottom area down here is going to be perfect for us we don't have to worry about it this area down here i need to go black so let's get a black brush and let's paint this all in black let's make the brush bigger make it go really quick just like so and now i have the mountain and the sky selected one more calculation let's click on the calculator and let's do an intersection and this time let's x out of here let us come to the luminosity masks and let's see we want to get light areas let's try lights one let's try lights two it's between lights one and lights two so it's like like lights one and a half here's a tip if you need to be between two luminosity zones any of these particular zones for that matter go to the higher value and click on levels in my case i want lights one and f so i'll click on one click on my levels and on the midtone slider type in point seven five and when you do that you've now achieved lights one and a half it's just that simple now all i need to do i'm in intersect right just click equal and now i have my mountain and my sky and i'm looking at lights one and a half now all i need to do is i'll put that to a color grading tool again and now just click on the mid-tone block again and let's just darken those lights down a little bit just like that not much just a little wee bit here's the before and here's the after very controlled through this luminosity mask hitting just the lights lights one and a half and if you click on these double arrows you can see what that mask looks like the final thing i want to do is lighten up some of the darker foreground grasses so let's exile the color grading tool come back to my channels let's click on the um foreground grass okay very important now there's deer in the grass that we don't want to affect so come to the calculator click on it and we want to subtract let's x here come back to my channel subtract out the deer click equals and like that we have the deer in the foreground grass now we need to intersect that so let's click calcul the calculator let's intersect it this time i want to get a zone mask and i want some of these darker grasses up in here like right here click ok and now we need to finish the calculation so let's click equals and now you'll notice we have the dark grass selected without the deer it's a perfect mask click on mid-tones and let's just lighten up those grasses see how nice and easy that is just to lighten them up a bit and the other thing i want to do is uh change the color grade a little bit and through experimentation and sometimes it takes time to figure things out i tried different things like one into the blues but i found out when i went up into cyans it made my grasses a little bit greener and i don't want to go too much there but maybe somewhere right around in there here is the before and here's the after but take your time and get it right that might be too much let me just back it off a little bit again here's the before and here's the after now let's take a look at the overall before and after here's the before and here's the after well there you go everyone and congratulations to all those who stuck it out to the end you learned a lot in this tutorial and this is something that you may want to go back and watch again in case you forgot something if you enjoyed this 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 and i'll see you all right here next time but until then happy editing

Channel: The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Views: 4,885

Keywords: TK8, TK8 Plugin for Photoshop, Photoshop, Luminosity Masks, Layer Masks, Photography, Photo Editing, Tutorial, Training, DK15, Promo Code, Zone Masks, Color Masks

Id: gi1-4pmzVDU

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021