Lessons

Lesson Info

Colorizing and Make Metal More Shiny

Let's look at some adjustments that aren't very common but are sometimes useful just so you're aware of them if you feel that you need them so let's see let's add some color to a black and white picture so first it was truly a black and white picture if somebody gave it to you it might be in gray scale mode and if that was the case you'd need to switch to our g b mode before you had color because if you're in gray scale mode you can't have any chains of color so uh if it was grey scale I'd bring it over here is a first step then there are many different ways to colorize the picture I don't want to concentrate necessarily in the exact technique used for colorizing what I want to do is show you a way to refine the end result once you've already colorized so I'm just going to pick one method which will be to do a adjustment layer called human saturation in inhuman saturation you'll notice that there's a checkbox in there called colorize and if I turned that on it's going to add color to m...

y image then we have a hugh slider which determines the basic color that's being added and so I could move it around and make it blue or green or whatever color I want but I probably want to choose a color that might be somewhat appropriate for skin if I really want to get the best color, I would just open a normal full color photograph of a human put it next to them and I'd move this slider until it looks similar then we have a saturation slider which determines how strong that color is going to be at it it's going to be a tremendous amount or is it going to be barely perceivable in with this particular technique I'm going to use? I'm going to put this up a little bit higher than you think would be meaning just move it make it a little bit higher than you think it needs now in this particular case it's being applied in the entire picture and know that you can always paint on the map or you could have made a selection before creating the adjustment and then it would have only affected whatever area you had isolated this castle point of the whole thing with a problem that I find with colorizing a black and white picture with just about any method that used in photo shop is it puts way too much color in the highlights and way too much color in the shadows. Missy, I'm sure you're just a normal picture here's a picture of my wife karen and if you look at it, look at the highlights and notice that they have nowhere near is much color in them as the normal part of the skin also look at the shadows when you get down in here and notice that it also doesn't have anywhere near as much color as the bright part of the skin. And so if you move around here when you get into the shadowy areas do you notice that right there there's just not that much color especially when compared to over here so as you get to the extremes of brighter in darker, less and less color shows up whereas when you colorize something it adds color everywhere the dark areas, the bright areas everywhere what I want to do is limit it so we see less color in the dark areas less color in the bright areas and most of the color shows up in the mid tones because I find it usually looks better here's how you accomplish that we have our image under here are adjustment layer on top I'm currently working on the adjustment layer that's what I need the bottom of my layers panel there's a pop up menu that's it has letters fx on it usually that's used for adding effects like drop shadows, beveling and bosses and things like that but the top most choice gives you some special options it's called bling blending options when I choose that this comes up lots of settings in there but what we're going to concentrate on is only this part in here with these sliders were going to ignore the rest what does this do? Well, when it comes to a black and white adjustment first you could use either one of these two bars they're going to do the exact same thing if instead of having an adjustment sitting in this layer it was a picture and there was a different picture underneath, then these two slaughters would act completely different from each other, but when what you have in the layer you're working on is an adjustment, then you could use either one of these two and it wouldn't matter, so I'm just going to pick one of the two I'll pick the top watch what happens when I pulled this towards the middle. Did you see if you can see anything changing the image, I might have to move it quite a ways before you really start to notice. But do you notice what's happening near her eyes what's happening near her neck and near her lips? The colorizing effect is starting to go away we'll be back down you see the colorizing comeback in, move it back up. Do you see that color rising starting to not affect those areas? Here's what's happening right now? Whatever's in this layer which happens to be an adjustment is no longer affecting this brightness range within the picture I had to move it up quite a distance because it wasn't all that much in the picture of that was noticeable that was this dark this face and the eye sockets were in this general brightness range but once I got this past it it says no longer applied to these brightness levels the problem is it stops abruptly there's a hard transition between where it's applying and where it's not and I need a soft transition so you can't see that ej how do we do that? Well, here's, how you do it if you actually look get this slider, you see little vertical line down the middle most sliders and photoshopped don't have that vertical line that vertical line means that this is actually two sliders stuck together and somehow we need to separate him we can't just pull on it to separate it though we have to hold down the option key ultima windows I have that key held down right now and now when I pull on this the two separate but you have to have option held down to get him to separate. So now what the heck does that mean? Well, what that means is now it's no longer going to apply the adjustment at all to this brightness range in my picture up until it gets to the first little slider it will apply the adjustment to all of the brightness ranges over here, but then in between these two things it will fade out so if it's not applying it all across these brightness levels once it hits here it'll start to apply but only the tiniest amount and then it'll start ramping up applying mohr and more and more and more until once it gets to hear it supplying at full strength and it does full strength from then on so when I split it apart I get a soft transition let's see it so I'm gonna put these back together and I'll move it so we can see it just starting to get out of the eye sockets and such in here you know zoom up so it's easier for us to see but you can see that it's a hard edge it's it looks like you're using an exacto knife to cut out where the well know that it doesn't sound over the face but it looks like it's a really crisp ej you're taking the adjustment in cutting it uh now watch what happens when I separated by holding option and splitting them you see more gradual transition and we just need to get these stretched out really far to make it so it's a subtle change into the shadows more like that if I turned the previous check box off before you see all the color in the shadows after you see less color in the shadows now we needed to the same thing for the highlights like up in here and I do that with this slider here when I pull this in, it means don't apply to any of the shades there to the right of this, so therefore the colorizing wouldn't affect my highlights, but it would have a sharp transition, so I'd have to use the option key and spread it apart so it means don't apply across these shades, then start applying just the tiniest bit and ramp up more and more and more until I get right there where'd applies at full strength, so let's use that, but I'll do it one looking at the picture, I'm going teo double click on whenever you have an adjustment layer you khun double click right here and that means show me the settings for the adjustment there, and actually I don't need the settings for the adjustment I need to get back to those sliders. How did I get to those sliders to begin with? I went down to the bottom of my layers, pal, but I find the letters affects and I chose planning options, okay, that'll get me in, so now I'm gonna start pulling this in watch what happens in the bright portions of the picture like the edge of her glasses or this bright area here or the veil or whatever she's wearing, I'll bring this up until I start seeing it go away. I'll back off on it so I still see it and then I'll spread this apart with option and I'll just find tune this so that it's not overly obvious that the colors disappearing and get these far enough apart and it'll look a little more natural now I don't know that I picked the best color for her I probably find to that and as I said I would open a picture of another person put it next to them and that's how I picked the color is probably too saturated and such right now but let's come in here and see the difference I'm gonna go back in here and just set these back to default settings click okay and then I'll just choose undo so you could see before and after you see the difference when it comes to how much colors in the highlights in how much colors in the shadows and now it's just up to me to pick a good color for her skin and then mask it so it doesn't apply to everything else and then pick a different color for outfit and mask it so it only applies they're in a different color for other areas and so it's a matter of spending time being more careful with colors you're choosing if you really want to make color similar to something else, what you could do is you could come in here and open the info panel in the type of adjustment we used to apply, our color was human saturation. It has sliders with hugh saturation of in lightness. What you could do is get the info panel to read out hugh saturation in brightness you could do that by clicking on this little eyedropper. Then you could go on open any photo you wanted and you could move your mouse on her forehead and look in the info panel I can see a hue of thirty two in a saturation of twenty nine. I could just write those down thirty to twenty nine then I could go to a different picture, put it on her forehead and see the difference. I see the number twenty four for hugh in twenty one for saturation. So that means if I want a color similar to the other photo I need to increase the hue from twenty four to thirty one. If I did the math twenty four twenty five twenty six would be six, seven, eight. I think I could move this you up by eight and I would have a more similar color to the other photograph. Um, right now I'm not thirty four some a little bit high, but then I could adjust the saturation to be similar as well, so you could use those numbers to get a little bit closer to the color in it different photo so just remember, this can be used with any adjustment you ever applied, not just colorizing photographs in. Sometimes I use this on a normal photograph we'll all end up doing is I'll find a photograph in sometimes I think the shadows are just too colorful, like down here in the dark areas are in here sometimes I just see too much color, so I'll do a human saturation adjustment layer, I lower the saturation, then I'll go to those sliders and I'll say, don't apply all the bright stuff, leave the right stuff alone on ly apply into the dark shadows, and I could make it less colorful in the dark shadows, that kind of thing, so the sliders are available for any layer you can also use them, tio remove the backgrounds on things. If the backgrounds are dramatically different than the subject, I often use it for removing the backgrounds on clouds on a blue sky, because if you move this slaughter over you, khun say, make all the dark parts disappear, but we're not gonna get into that today. All right? So we're looking at adjustments and we found that we have these things they're actually sometimes referred to as the blooding sliders, and we could go to the bottom of the layers panel we click in the letters fx and the top most choice and that menu is called blending options that's where you find them and they take the layer you're currently working on and they make it so in the case of an adjustment they won't affect the bright or the dark areas if it was a picture instead it wouldn't show up where it's bright or it's dark it would make him disappear in those areas now let's look at one adjustment that I only used on occasion but it's good to have in your mental tool kit and I use this technique any time I have a shiny object, especially a metal object like chrome and I wanted to look shiny er also add in a little bit more about quick mask mode um uh, because it might help me here, so here we have a trailer I want the trailer look shiner than it is right now I'm going to try to select the trailer so I don't affect the rest of the image, so I'll use the quick selection tool and I'll come in here and paint on our trailer now unfortunately, trailers really chinese in general, which means it's like a mirror and so it's gonna look very similar to its surroundings and so the quick selection tool might start messing up, especially over here where it's reflecting what is really close by I'm amazed it didn't script there just so you know, a lot of these images I've never opened before I just throw in a folder, so when I get to the quick selection tool and stuff, I make assumptions because I haven't really used a lot of them some of my half though, so here I'm just getting the edge of my brush to get up near the edge of the trailer over here it's screwed up so that's where I'm going to hold on the option key option means take away and see if I can get it to take away right down there is where I think it will have on the most trouble because it's hard for me to visually tell the difference between the trailer and the uh ground so that's where I might type a letter q for quick mask mode and just grab my paintbrush in manually do that part is coming here and maybe click like looks get the other color, click hold shift and having to kind of straight lines where I kind of worked my way around this shape and down here I'll switch colors by heading the letter x no touch that up memory you can always change this afterwards because of use an adjustment layer it's not permanent and it's got a mask attached to it this is going to end up being in that adjustment layers mask sitting time of the future afterwards I could come around in paint some more so I might want to just make the adjustment before I find to this because who knows if I'd notice the selection was off because these particular areas might not be changed all that radically in the adjustment so you might never notice when I'm done I typed letter q to turn off quick mask moves quick mask is what I use is a quick way of refining this election I just want to remind you that now let's make our adjustment in my layers panel I'm going to go to the adjustment layer icon in this case let's see what I'm going to use it I think we can use selective color selective color is an adjustment that I don't use all that often, but on occasion I find it to be useful and here's why there are other adjustments that will allow me to isolate red, yellow, green science blue and magenta like the human saturation dialog box it has choices to isolate these colors but what's unique about this is it has choices for whites, neutrals and blacks and not too many other adjustments could isolate whites, neutrals and blacks. If I choose whites, the brightest part of the trailer is probably going to be considered to be white. Most chrome objects were shot polished metal objects the brightest area will be close to a white, then it offers me sai in magenta yellow and black sliders and what I can do is take the black slider and bring it down to say, use less black and I don't if you can see what's happening or not, I'll turn off the eyeball for this adjustment layer here's before here's after it's it's starting to look shiny er yeah, and so with chrome objects, I find that oftentimes doing a selected color adjustment isolating the whites on just saying they pull out some of the black ink that would usually be use print. This is going to try to make that look shiny. Er the other thing you can try to do, but you're not one always be successful with is to change it to neutrals and if you want to change the ah overall feel of that area, you could choose neutrals in, adjust the sigh in and see if you can make it just a little bit more sayin or you can adjust the yellow and say a little less yellow because the colder you make chrome objects look ah, usually the more crummy they look um so here's my adjustment but that's selective color not used as often, but when it comes to shiny crummy objects, then I sometimes had there all right, any questions, any technical, technical question from potter pals? Very technical is that an airstream no, that is not an airstream. Not that I know of. An airstream would have curved edges here, let's, see if we can figure out what this is. I've written down somewhere. Oh, it was restored by it. It looks like a perry. Does that say perry, you're terry something or other mcgee.