Adobe Photoshop CS6 Exposure & Color, Part 3

Hi everyone, Michael Brown back with you.0000

Welcome back to educator.com's Adobe Photoshop CS6 course.0002

In the past two lessons: exposure and color one, and exposure and color two, we went over all of the auto and manual exposure controls that are available to you in Photoshop under the Image menu, Adjustments--you have brightness contrast, levels and curves.0007

We went over also (come back here) vibrance, hue saturation controls, color balance, the auto controls which are one more also on the levels and curves dialog boxes, as well as one of my favorites, shadows and highlights.0024

By the way, when you see something that is grayed out...does not mean that it's not there, it means that on the particular layer--we haven't got to layers yet but this particular image has a bunch of layers--they are unavailable for that layer.0040

If I go over to just an image all by itself and go Image, Adjustments you notice now that they're all available to you, and I also want to show you again, which we'll deal with in a few more lessons, this is my layers panel--in this particular image there's only the background layer, but at the bottom of that panel in the center is a dropdown menu--there's the same controls: exposure, brightness and color, levels, curves, vibrance, hue saturation and color balance--the only one that's not on there is shadows and highlights, and these create independent layers that are not actually affecting the pixels and can be turned on and off--a very valuable tool.0056

I may use those here to demonstrate the effect so that you can see everything that we did right in front of you rather than just piling it up on the image where it's already embedded.0101

OK, alright, let's go back...so we went over the exposure and color controls, I also showed you how to do some color corrections on your image with the eye-droppers and using hue saturation and so on.0114

In this one, we're going to take an image, add a couple of them from start to finish, and go all the way through the workflow into corrections, so let me start with these right here.0130

What I have done is I shot five identical images at my friend's house in her front yard, except I changed the white balance for each of these frames--in other words you have very good exposure with different white balance settings in the camera, so I can show you quickly how you can counter a problem.0145

For example, this particular image that's highlighted--I titled it Daylight--it was shot--if you notice that the white balance at the camera was set at auto, and the white balance settings on your camera--you have specifics; flash, cloudy, shade, tungsten, a few other ones in there, fluorescent, but each one of those is a finite setting.0169

The auto setting doesn't give you a complete spectrum of settings, it just picks the appropriate one that it thinks is the right one for the conditions and applies it, so the auto one is actually the same as the daylight setting because it picked that right on this spot.0196

Same shot with the tungsten...you notice we shot here it says tungsten--you notice it's very, very blue, because if you shot this actually under tungsten which is indoor lighting, you notice your bulbs at home are always this reddish yellow color, that's because the color temperature is very low down in the red range, so the camera needs to counter that by putting blue filters in--in this case we shot the daylight lighting with the tungsten filter so it became overly blue.0214

Shade is also overly yellow because shade is usually a higher color temperature--shade, if you're on a sunny day and you're shooting in shade your light comes from the blue sky, so the light instead of being like tungsten--very warm, runs very cold as a blue, cold light so the camera adds yellow to counter that when you set that white balance, that's why the sky is muted and the fence has a lot of yellow tone and the greenery is kind of yellow--the camera added yellow.0251

Our cloudy day...similar but not as intense a shade, it also adds yellow, and flash is very close to daylight, but it's a little bit on the blue side--a little bit colder, so let's open all of these up in Camera Raw...and right off the bat, it shows you exactly what happened here.0285

Let's start with the daylight, which looks just fine--you notice in the color temperature slider, it's 4950--approximately 5000 degrees Kelvin, that is standard daylight--about 5000 degrees, and everything is balanced.0314

The blues in the sky are right, you notice the fence is nice and white, the street is pretty gray with just a tinge of yellow because the sun was over toward the afternoon and it tends to get a little warmer in the afternoon.0327

But when I shot it with the tungsten setting you notice everything is blue toned, so remember the color balance filter.0343

let me show you something right away--we're not going to correct this one right now, we're going to go ahead and open it or we could correct it immediately and let me show you, we were talking about workflow.0354

The color temperature is 3000...all you have to do is take your temperature slider and move it until the image looks right--I'm not even looking at the color temperature--I'm looking at the image, it looks about right, and on the 4700, and the higher you get the warmer it gets so 4950, that's fine, it's a little warm, I could even come down just a shade, I like that, it's plus or minus and the...actually, this was set, I'm going to reset it.0373

By the way, if you want to reset a bunch of settings that you've made, go to this little dropdown menu in the corner, down at the bottom: reset, Camera Raw defaults, and it goes back where it was.0404

The cloudy day, which went yellow--notice it's 5100...cloudy, think of clouds--they block the sunlight, which means you're still getting the yellow from the sun coming through, but it also blocks the blue sky, and daylight is really the mixture of yellow from the sun and the remainder of the blue size, so it's kind of a balance, so it cuts more blue out than it does yellow, so it becomes just slightly cold, and there's the 5100--daylight's 4950--it's very, very close in this case.0420

Shade would be pretty blue, and in this case you see when I do that...oh I'd already set that one, the shade back to--let me reset that...shade is 7750 because again, as we talked, shade is under an awning protected from the yellow and you're getting all of the blue, so the camera puts a lot of yellow in to counteract that--you see how much yellow came in?0459

The sky's almost gray, and everything else is overly yellow.0489

That cloudy day--let me go back, I think I must have corrected that...there, the cloudy day is colder, it's like 6000, and if we set that back and cool it off a little bit, there it comes back to normal, but I want to take the tungsten--and now you understand, we can come right in here and the first thing is to correct your color temperature if you have a problem--right off the bat you can probably solve it, but if you can't, let's say somebody sends you an image from a client and you don't have the option--it's a Photoshop image, not a raw or a jpeg, so you can't take it into Camera Raw--and here you've got this blue thing, so we're going to go and use these layers again--we're going to try that color balance, remember, that is a filter.0495

So, we're going to try this...it's very, very blue so the first thing we're going to do is just add yellow, and see what happens...it's coming down...it's not too bad actually...but I still see some cyan kind of look--it's kind of very cold, so let's add a little warmth in the red...and see what that does...and right about there, I see maybe a little magenta...there, that's not a bad balance.0543

Let's save that...as Tungsten Balance With Color Balance, and let's compare that to the...0589

Let's go back to Bridge and open up that Daylight one--I want to make sure it's set at neutral...Daylight...come on now...oh, open it up in Camera Raw, make sure that it's at its defaults.0595

Open it up, and let's put the two of these side by side--Command All, copy, let's get that tungsten color balance--we're going to go to our canvas size and we're going to double the width to 14...0610

Whoops, try that again...double the width to 14, oh, 27, silly me, and we're going to paste in this other one, and just to make sure that you understand which one is which, I'll put a little piece of text on it to say that this is daylight...OK, and we'll put over here tungsten...corrected...there.0630

Now let's just set this on black, move it up one, and compare the two--whoops...here's our tungsten that way originally very blue, that we've corrected with the color balance filter, then we added the other image in next to it, and this is the uncorrected daylight versus the tungsten corrected.0698

We could actually probably have been a little yellower on this but overall this is not too bad--we could go back to our color balance layer...and add just a little more yellow to that image, and there you go.0727

We corrected it, in this case, by using the color balance filter, but we had to--I want to show you--it wasn't just, in the case here the filter was just blue.0746

But when we added yellow it affected other colors so we had to correct the blue by adding yellow, we had to add a little magenta and we had to add a little red to counter this.0759

So the three colors involved to rebalance this image to get what we needed and we could even use still a little bit more yellow in this image, but it's pretty close, so that shows you how you can correct an off image.0777

You can either do it in Camera Raw (let's just go ahead and close this out and go back to Bridge) and here's our images here.0793

You can take any of these off color images, open them in Camera Raw, use the color temperature slider, and that will fix it for you right away, or if you get one from somewhere else when you can't use the Camera Raw, you can use the color balance.0801

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, it's a little tricky sometimes.0815

OK, so let's go back to Photoshop and open up this image right here and I'll show you one more example of working on our color and exposure corrections.0819

Here I have an image I took over in Palace Verdes which is on the coastline, it's an average exposure, the land is dark and the ocean is over-exposed--if I exposed it for the ocean the land would be really black...I suppose for the land it would have washed out the ocean, so we need to counteract everything, so the first thought I have here--we have a high contrast image.0833

Two ways to deal with it: curves or shadows and highlights--let's try curves first--I'm going to do it over here so that we can preserve it and show you...here's our curves, so what I'm going to do is reverse curve it--let's start by doing a...there is no decrease the contrast--we'll do it this way--put a point in the center, open up the shadows and bring down the highlights, and it go really flat, didn't work really well at all--it's just too contrasted even for curves to handle.0858

So we're going to delete that layer, so we're going to use the magic...we'll duplicate this background...Image, Adjustments, shadows and highlights, remember that one, it was just the magic tool...set the shadows and highlights to zero at the moment, and let's start with the shadows and open them up to start with--looking pretty decent here--play with the tonal width a little bit...that looks pretty nice.0902

Notice the highlights are unaffected in the water, but that looks pretty good on the shoreline--now let's play with the radius and see if anything happens here...snaps at contrasts just a little bit...there, that looks pretty good doesn't it?0936

Now we're going to go with the highlights, drop the amount down on the highlights--the ocean's coming in--let's play with that tonal width...see how it's affecting the land--I don't want to mess with that, try the radius.0950

Come down on the radius and up on the amount...up on the radius--see it's starting to get that 'haloing' so we'll pull that back and leave it just about like this--it's a little flat, so we'll snap mid-tone contrast just a little bit, and there you have shadows and highlights...we'll name that Shadows, Highlights...we'll turn that off...text layers, we don't have text layers...off and on, so we went from there to there in the first shot but we're not done yet.0963

Now let's try curves...we'll open up our curves because the image flattened out a little bit.0998

Let's open it up overall...there, see how the mid-tones are coming in?1005

We've got--I'm ignoring the sky for a moment, just going to open it up--you could also have done this with a pre-set for a lighter...and adjusted the way you like it, and now I'm going to snap the contrast just a little bit...there we go, that's looking pretty nice--I'm going to pull the highs down just a hair...and snap those just a little if I can--not too much I can do with that.1011

Alright, so there we go with that.1038

Now, we need to play with the color--I want to play with vibrance to start with because vibrance usually works on the non-dominant colors.1041

Notice these colors in the land are the predominant color, vibrance should pull up the blues, let's see what it does--there it's coming...the blues came up pretty good right here, so now we're getting there, so now let's go hue saturation...and what I want to try to do is isolate the cyans and blues and see if we can pull those up.1050

We got plenty of color in the land, I don't want to use master saturation increase--see if I do that it just goes berserk, but we'll pull down to the blue, and we're going to pull that up and see what happens on the blue--not too much, see what's happening inside the cove, right about there still looks pretty decent--let's try cyan, see if that comes...not too much more that we can do right there.1079

That pretty much takes care of it but what we can do (that's actually a little too much, we'll leave it right there) we can bring down the color of the land and then increase exposure which will change everything so let's go and take the yellows and move them down just a little...take the reds, pull those down a little bit and play with the hue on the reds--see if we can get it to go more green...that's not too bad, we'll leave it like that...what other options--the greens, increase, decrease...it's mostly the yellows.1108

We've got a little improvement there--we got a pretty good overall, I'd just like to see what I could do up here in the top, now, normally as we move forward in Photoshop we could select this and deal with that separately but this is an overall, so let's go back to our curves again...let's see what happens if we drop--ah, there it comes...right about there, and then snap those plan details--there we go, not too shabby.1146

OK, so I want to show you now all we did.1177

Here's the History panel--we opened the image--it was right here, we got it to here, but we started with curves...actually we didn't even do--went through the Type tool, Type tool, Type tool, shadows and highlights got us to here.1182

The difference between Shadow, Highlight to the end, we just played with that.1198

Then we went with curves...modified it again to brighten it up a little vibrance...more vibrance, that's bringing up our blues.1202

Hue saturation to try to adjust--there we did--adjust the land tones, and there's our final one, so we went from here--we utilized curves, shadows and highlights, hue saturation and vibrance, almost every control we have, and we took the image start, to finish, right there and we came up with a pretty nice product in the end, so there is how to take an image right from the beginning and we worked some in Camera Raw if you remember for initial, but if you don't have the option go right back and here you go--once again open, and with all our controls overall we got to here using the exposure and color correction controls in Photoshop CS6.1212