From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Creating stylistic color with Photoshop

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Creating stylistic color with Photoshop

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- [Chris] Hello, friends. This is Chris, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Photoshop, and we'll be doing a little project where we will take a window-light portrait that I captured last week, this one here, and we'll explore how we can create a more modern or commercial look so that we can make the image look like this. Let me zoom out a little bit so that you can see that from a distance as well. Here's kinda the before as it appears out of the camera, and then after has more of that snap, or kind of a modern feel to it. Well how do we create a look like that? Well let me delete that layer, and let's create it ourselves. One of the ways that we can begin to do this is to think about the image. One of the things I see in the image is it feels a little flat. It needs more contrast; it needs more brightness. It needs some modification with color. So here, we'll use curves and a couple of hue, saturation adjustments as well. So with curves, what we can do is we can even just bring in our endpoint to kind of brighten up the image here. And then also add a touch of an S-curve. And S-curves are the curves which give us this nice contrast and color pop, so we'll go ahead and apply that there. And if we look at our before and after, we can see, yeah, great, it's looking better, right? It's more kind of alive and has more of a snap to it. One of the downsides, though, of S-curve, is that you can oversaturate certain colors. And what I wanna do is I wanna remove some of the reds and oranges from the image, and to get really specific with color like that, often we'll use hue-saturation. So if you click on the icon and use their targeted adjustment tool, you can sample different colors. This shows me I'm now working in my reds, and let me exaggerate this for a second. Can you see how I can increase and decrease those reds? So I can just take a little bit of the reds out, and maybe bring a little brightness back into those there too. Then, we can use this tool again, and we can click on another color. Let's see, actually, maybe manually. We'll just go into our yellows, and we're gonna bring some of the yellows down, and then bring back a little brightness there as well. So what this is doing for me, this layer here, is it's allowing me to have all of the contrast, you can see the before and after, without that overdone color in certain areas. Now, if you feel like you took out too much, kinda like I feel here, we'll just go ahead and take this back a little bit, and I'm gonna drop this back just a touch here, and bringing out some of that, I want a little more of the color, so it looks like I needed about half of that intensity, there. Then if you wanna even remove more color, you can get specific. So use, create another adjustment, say the hair is too bright, too much yellow there, maybe too much red in certain places, and then go to your mask, invert that. And then just paint that away in certain areas. So grab a brush, soft edge brush, tap the right bracket key to make the brush a little bigger. Opacity, drop below 50. I'm just gonna take out where the hair color just looks kinda fake. It just went almost too colorful there. And around the edges in the shadows, sometimes those will have a lot of red or yellow in them. I still want some of the color in the skin, but just not everywhere, so I'm just painting through the image, making sure to cover any little area where I feel like it might be nice to just knock this back a little bit, all right? Kinda like that. These adjustments are subtle, but sometimes they can really help. And so, so far, we can see here's the before, and then there is the after. Loving it. Now if you wanna fine-tune your contrast, just go back to that adjustment, and now that you've done all this work, you can always go and modify these endpoints here and add a little bit more or less. As I add more, it increases color saturation, so I might go to this one and then boost that up. And because I know how these work together, what I can do is find the combination of all of these values here, and I can go into this one too and go back to my yellows and drop the yellows down even a little bit more, there. And the reds, too. So I'm just gonna remove a little bit more from that area, like that. All right, now so far so good. We have this new look in the photograph. Here's before, straight out of the camera. We've seen that look a million times. Now here's a look that has a little bit more of that modern kind of feel to it. And with all of this, I like to go back and modify my adjustment layers as needed. And so I'm just gonna try to find a good mix with all these values. Sometimes it's just about kinda combining those together. All right, well if I zoom back in, you can see how we have crafted this look using multiple adjustment layers, going from ordinary to something with a little more pop or snap in it. And on that, it wraps up this week's episode. Hope you have a great rest of your day, and hope to see you next time. Bye for now.

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