From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

Using the Spot Color effect

From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

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Using the Spot Color effect

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- Spot color or selective color is when you change the color of one area or leave that color and then strip away everything else. This allows you to have one color that is emphasized. It might be emphasized because everything else is turned black and white or emphasized by popping it and making it be more robust. Photoshop has some wonderful tools here that you can use to really bring things to life and it all comes down to blending modes. Let's take a look at this technique. What I'm going to do is apply the black and white adjustment layer. Now, we need to change it's blending mode. Let's try a different mode here, such as lighten. Now what happens is we can move the different sliders, so notice depending upon where we move it, the color is left behind. So there we've left the red but I can take away the green, just the red and gold remain, lift the blue and the magenta, and notice how we can dial in these different colors to create an interesting leave behind effect. Well, that's really pretty cool. Plus you can always add a regular black and white layer on top. Now, with your paint brush and mask, remember just paint in. If we paint here, we can subtract that black and white layer. This way, we've refined that just the color here around the eyes and the beak are left. Now, obviously there's other colors that we're peeking through here, but that second black and white adjustment really did the trick and it allowed just a hint to peek through. Plus if you change the stacking order there, you'll notice that you can get a slightly different effect depending upon how it converts. Well, that's quite powerful. Let's try this with another piece of footage. Same thing comes into play. If we add the black and white adjustment layer, we could change it's blending mode. This time instead of lighten, let's try darken. Now, as we move the slider here, notice we can choose what is left so I can leave the reds, reduce the golds, and pull the other colors down, leaving just the one that I wanted behind. In this case, this allows you to be very targeted with the colors that remain and remember, you can experiment, different blending modes give you entirely different options. So feel free to step through those and try them out. Each of these is going to change things. There's the lighten mode. I can leave the reds behind, but lighten up the golds, lighten up the greens and the other colors and you see how that just changes it a bit as well. So depending upon your subject, lighten versus darken may give you very different results, but as you notice, there's no selections to make. There's nothing to track. This little trick of using black and white plus blending modes gives you infinite flexibility to create dramatic spot color effects. With blending modes, remember, the key here is to experiment. While there are some good, fast rules of what should work, every piece of footage is a bit different as is every photo. So don't be afraid to experiment with those shortcuts. Remember, if you select a tool like the move tool, you can use the shift + plus and shift + minus combination to easily switch through different blending modes. Find the one that works for you, and then go forward and create.

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