Lesson 8 - Objectives 6-7 (Wednesday)
B08-06 Skill: Use the hue/saturation, color balance, black & white, photo filter, channel mixer, and color adjustment layers.
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Hue/Saturation: This adjustment layer allows you to change the hue, saturation, and luminosity of an image. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself. In this example, I've increased the saturation quite a bit, and I've moved the hue slider to the left to give the boy more orange-blond hair.
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Color Balance: This allows you to adjust cyan, magenta, and yellow balances in your image for shadows, midtones, and highlights. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself. In this example, I've adjusted all three for shadows, midtones, and highlights. I've also used the mask to bring back some of the yellow range in the center of the image.
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Black & White: This allows you to turn a color image into a black & white image. The real power of this adjustment layer is that you can adjust the luminosity of any color range separately. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Photo Filter: This allows you to add a nearly transparent layer of color over an image to adjust it warmer or cooler, and to unify the colors. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Channel Mixer: This allows you to modify a color channel and make color adjustments not easily done with other color adjustment tools. You should try to have the three channels total to 100% when finished. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Color Lookup: Color Lookup Tables are a more advanced feature we won't be using in this course. The new Color Lookup Adjustment Layer in Photoshop has several options (3DLUT File, Abstract, and Device Link) that are used to load different “looks”. These looks are achieved by remapping every color in the image to a different one using a lookup table (LUT). I think that many photographers and designers will find their resulting color shifts quite interesting.
Because this feature was designed for the film and video industry that have their own LUT files, there currently is no way to create LUT files in Photoshop. You can currently create LUTs in products such as Adobe SpeedGrade CS6. (Source) Watch the video, "Color Lookup Tables in Photoshop." |
Video: Color Lookup Tables in Photoshop (4:18)
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B08-07 Skill: Use the invert, posterize, threshold, selective color, and gradient map adjustment layers
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Invert: A simple adjustment layer that non-destructively inverts the image. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Posterize: The posterize adjustment layer allows you to reduce the number of color levels in an image. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Threshold: The threshold adjustment layer turns an image into strictly black and white pixels. The slider under the histogram allows you to choose the level of grey between white and black where the divide occurs. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Selective Color: The selective color adjustment layer allows you to selectively work with a number of color ranges, adjusting the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black for each. In this example, I've toned down the reds and yellows, and lightened the shadows. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself.
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Gradient Map: The gradient map adjustment layer allows you to apply a gradient, mapping the gradient's colors to the luminosity of the image. Click on the public domain image at left, download it, and try it for yourself. Hint: If you click on the down arrow to the right of the gradient, you'll see thumbnails of all the gradients you can choose from. To the right of those is a gear icon - click on that, and you can load other gradients. I've loaded the photographic toning gradients for the example below. You can also make your own gradients. Watch the gradient tool videos in the Resources -> The Photoshop Tools - Tutorials About Each Tool and How They Work.
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Adding Multiple Adjustment Layers: One great feature is that you can add multiple adjustment layers to an image. In the example at right, I've added the Posterize adjustment as shown earlier, along with the Gradient Map adjustment layer demonstrated just above. It makes a completely new effect. Here I started with a gradient map adjustment layer. I then added a color balance, curves, and Hue/Saturation adjustment layers.
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Gradient Map
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