From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

961 Color grading: Blending and balance

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

961 Color grading: Blending and balance

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Last week, we looked at the color grading panel found in the most recent versions of Camera Raw and Lightroom. This week, we'll examine two very important color grading options that tend to get overlooked, blending and balance. As in color grading is so awesome that it also includes blending plus balance. Aren't they wonderful? I'll let you discover those on your own. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to show you exactly how they work. I'm going to start things off inside Adobe Bridge at which point, I'll select this raw DNG file. It could just as easily be a JPEG or a TIFF. And I'll right click on its thumbnail and choose Open in Camera Raw or you can press Control + R in a PC or command R on a Mac. Now, just to make things as obvious as possible, I'm going to scroll up to this Edit bar right here and click on the BMW button to convert the image to black and white by which I mean the underlying image, which I can see by clicking and holding on the eyeball icon to the right of the words Color Grading. So this is the gray scale image and then if I release, this is the image subject to the color grading settings that I applied last week. And so I'll go ahead and click on Color Grading in order to expand these options and as you may recall, I've colorized the shadows purple, the highlights blue and the midtones yellow. And now I'll drop down to this blending option here, which works for all three of these luminance ranges, by the way. That's true for balance as well. And so notice, if I crank up the blending option, I'm losing my midtones. So at 100%, I'm seeing purple shadows and blue highlights with little in the way of yellow midtones in between. Whereas if I were to crank this value down to zero, I'm seeing a wealth of yellow midtones with fewer purple shadows and fewer still of those blue highlights. If you press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac as you drag that slider triangle, you're going to see all of your colors cranked up to 100% saturation. So at a blending value of 100%, we're seeing purple shadows, blue highlights, little or nothing in the way of yellow midtones. If I take it down to zero, I still have the Alt or Option key down by the way. Then I'm going to see a wealth of yellow midtones with less in the way of purple shadows and blue highlights. And so in the end, I'm going to set this guy to 25 at which point, when I release either the mouse button or the Alt or Option key, my saturation values will settle down. All right, now let's take a look at balance. Balance is going to determine what is treated as highlights and what is treated as shadows. And so if I crank this value up to 100, then I'm colorizing an awful lot of the image with the highlights color, which is blue. A little of the image appears in the midtone color of yellow and basically, nothing is purple. Whereas if I take this balance value down to -100, we get the opposite effect. So I'm seeing a wealth of the shadows colored purple, a little bit in the way of the midtones colored yellow and nothing in the way of the highlights colored blue. If you want to preview the colors at 100% saturation, then press and hold the Alt or the Option key as you drag this slider back and forth. If you want to reset either one of these values, just double click on its slider triangle like so and then I'm going to take this balance value up to 15 let's say and then to see the final version of the effect, I'll click on Color Grading in order to collapse those options and I'll turn off the BMW button so we bring back some of the original colors. All right, I don't want to mess up this image, so I'm just cancel out so that I can show you one more thing. If you have access to my exercise files, you'll see this guy right here, gradient mode. I'll go ahead and double click on it in order to open it in Photoshop and if you like, you can see how I put this file together here inside the Layers panel but basically, we have a black to white gradient. So black on the left, white on the right. Quite obviously. And we've got some warmth up here at the top and some coolness down here at the bottom. I've already converted this layer to a smart object in advance. So I can go up to the Filter menu and use Camera Raw Filter. So everything we've seen this week and last works with the Camera Raw filter inside Photoshop as well. At which point, I'll go ahead and click on Color Grading, not Color Mixer, by the way, Color Grading is what we want. And then let's say I decide to set the midtones to yellow once again. I'll set the shadows to purple and I'll set the highlights to blue just by clicking inside each one of these color wheels. At which point, you can see that we are infusing the shadows with purple, the midtones with yellow and the highlights with blue. I want you to notice that we are not affecting the blacks or the whites at all. And so our modifications are limited to the shadows, the midtones and the highlights. At which point, I can compress the midtones by cranking the blending value up to 100, just like so. So now we have purple shadows, blue highlights, really no yellow in between and I can take that value down to zero if I want to expand those yellow midtones. Once again, if you want to see the values at 100% saturation, press the Alt key or the Option key as you drag that slider triangle. All right, I'm going to go ahead and reset that value to its default of 50 by double clicking on that slider triangle and now let's check out the balance by just cutting to the chase. I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac so I can preview my colors at 100% saturation. So at a balance of +100, we're seeing a ton of blue highlights, that's in quotation marks, by the way. They're just being regarded as highlights, with just a little hint of yellow and purple over there in the far left side of the image and then if I take this value down to -100, I still have the Alt or Option key down, by the way. You can see that we've got a ton of purple, in air quotes purple, and we have just a little bit of yellow and then blue over on the far right-hand side. But notice throughout these modifications that the blacks on the far left and the whites on the far right are not affected. And that's how you take advantage of the blending and balance options associated with the color grading panel here inside Camera Raw 13 and later. Looking forward to next week? That's when we'll redirect our coordinated attention to Illustrator, which now offers new ways to precisely scale type that make way more sense than type size, which doesn't make any sense at all. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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