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- Hello and welcome to another episode
of Denny's Tips.
A lot of you have shown great interest
in my tone chart tutorial,
and I'm so happy you guys found it useful.
So, before I start creating other types of videos,
I should expand on the tone chart technique,
and show you guys another one of my secret tricks.
In this tutorial, you're gonna learn how to take
a bunch of layers and compress 'em down
into a single tone curves adjustment layer.
This is a very efficient way of color grading,
and if you're interested, keep watching,
and I'll show you how it's done.
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Before we begin I'm gonna create a color grading effect
using a lot of layers.
This is a very amateur way of doing things,
but it's also very common.
Now you don't have to follow along.
I'm just going to speed up the video,
and when we're done, I'll show you how to turn all
of those layers into a single tone curves adjustment.
(speech fast forwarding)
That clip is something that I hope not a lot of people do
because it's very inefficient.
And it's also dangerous to your image quality,
and I'll show you why later.
Now I'm going to show you how to convert all of these layers
into a single tone curve adjustment.
Keep in mind that the tone curve
can't do stuff like changing the saturation,
shifting the hues, adding vignettes or noise, et cetera.
It can only make changes to the tone
and add tints to different tonal areas.
So now that you know the limitations of the tone curve,
let's start the tutorial.
First add a tone chart to your image.
There's a Photoshop action that you can download,
and you can find the download link in the video description.
Select the tone chart action, then hit the play button
on the bottom of the panel.
This action will create a tone chart for us automatically.
If you want to learn more about the tone chart,
click here to watch a tutorial.
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We don't need the curves adjustment layer,
so delete the layer by selecting it
and hitting the backspace key on your keyboard.
Drag the tone chart layer group sides
below all of the layers that you used to create the effect.
So now you can see that this tone chart
is already telling us what color is in the blacks,
shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites,
and we're gonna clown this effect
using a curves adjustment layer.
Go to your actions panel
and play the tone chart action again.
It should automatically place the tone chart
and curves adjustment on the top of your layer stack.
Select the tone chart group,
then use the move tool by pressing V,
and then drag the tone chart up
so it's above the other chart, like this.
Make sure that there are no gaps in-between the two charts.
If there is, just press the down arrow key
on your keyboard until the gap is gone.
Now we're going to make the top chart,
match the bottom chart with the curves adjustment.
There's already a curves adjustment layer created for you,
and it's the top layer, so select this layer.
Now when you make changes to this later,
it's going to effect the entire image.
So to make it so it only effects the tone chart layer below,
click on this button.
Now your adjustments will only effect the tone chart.
For the curves, we're gonna use the red,
green, and blue channels.
We're not gonna use the RGB channel.
This is called a three channel curve,
because they're only using three of the four channels.
Compared to a four channel curve, it's less proper
and harder to understand when you're just looking at it.
But you can get the same results, and it's easier to do
when all you're doing is copying an effect.
Anyways, here's the secret trick.
Open the channels panel, and if you don't see it,
you can find it by going to window, channels.
Select the red channel, and now you're looking
just at the red channel.
Now go back to your curves and switch to your red channel.
Select the auto-select targeted adjustment tool,
then drag vertically on the upper tone chart
until it blends in with the tone chart below, like this.
Do this for all five tonal areas.
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When you're done, do that same thing with the green channel.
So in your channels panel, select the green channel,
then go back to your curves adjustment
and switch to a green channel.
Use the auto-select targeted adjustment tool
to do the same thing and make the upper chart blend
in with the bottom chart.
Finally, we're going to match the blue channel.
So in the channels panel, select the blue channel,
go back to the curves adjustment
and switch to a blue channel.
Do the same thing, make the upper chart
match the bottom chart.
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And we're done.
So switch back to your RGB mode in your channels panel,
and your upper chart should look like your bottom chart.
If it does, congratulations,
because you just learned an awesome new trick
with the tone chart.
Now before we finish, it's a good idea
to save your curves as a preset.
Click on the properties panel menu
and select save curves preset,
give it a name then click okay.
You can now access this curve at anytime
from the presets dropdown menu.
Here's how the image looks like before and after.
Now we're gonna compare the results
between the two techniques.
The image on the left is made with many layers.
The image on the right is made
with a single tone curves adjustment.
One thing to notice is a symmetry histogram
which obviously shows better image quality
on the tone curves adjustment,
is to look at the color transition here.
You can see that there's a much smoother transition,
and there's less of the posturize effect.
And there you go guys, that's how you compress a bunch
of layers down into a tone curves adjustment.
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Hey guys thanks for checking out the video,
if you found it helpful click the like button.
So there's several ways you can use this technique,
for example, maybe there's a camera app
with a filter that you really like.
Well what you can do is,
you can save an image of the tone chart,
process it in your camera app,
and then bring that image back into Photoshop.
Now you can use the same tone chart matching technique
to create a tone curve out of it.
Now the tone curve won't do everything.
You might need to use a hues saturation adjustment layer
to finalize the look.
But with those two layers,
you can create nearly any color grading effect,
and if you're interested in that,
check out one of my earlier videos.
It'll teach you how to create your own film looks
from scratch, and it'll use the same two-layer approach.
Anyways, thanks for watching my video guys.
I hope you have an awesome week.
If you haven't done so already,
make sure you hit the subscribe button below.
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