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- Hello, and welcome to this episode of Denny's Tips.
In this quick tip Photoshop tutorial,
you'll learn how to intensify the colors
of sunset photos, using just one adjustment layer.
And that adjustment layer is the channel mixer.
The channel mixer is a powerful tool,
especially if you're trying
to make your photos more vivid and vibrant.
It's also one of the most underrated adjustments,
simply because people don't know how to use it.
In this video, you'll learn how
to use the channel mixer in Photoshop
to make your sunset or sunrise photo look super intense,
without the artifacts that you get
with the saturation adjustment.
This is a quick tip tutorial.
And if you're interested in learning about this magic,
then keep watching, and you'll see how it works.
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First, let me show you why the vibrance
or saturation adjustments don't work.
Let's say that we want to intensify the sunset,
and make it as vibrant as we can
before it becomes obviously fake.
The first thing that we would try is
the vibrance and saturation adjustments.
The vibrance looks natural when it's weak,
and it can push the colors as far as we want it to,
even at 100 percent.
To push it even further, you can increase the saturation.
But it's going to quickly look over processed.
So what's a solution?
It's the channel mixer.
And here's a preview of the results.
As you can see, it gives you super intense colors
that also look more natural.
Most people don't know how to use the channel mixer,
but trust me, it's incredibly powerful.
If you want the most vivid colors possible,
the channel mixer will give it to you.
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To use the channel mixer,
you need to understand how it works.
First of all, in case you don't know what channels are,
color photos are made from three channels;
a red, green, and blue channel,
that, when combined, forms a color photo.
The channel mixer adjustment lets you recreate
the individual red, green,
and blue channels using a different formula.
It'll make more sense later when we put it into practice.
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Go to the adjustments panel
and add a channel mixer adjustment layer.
If you don't see this panel,
you can open it by going to Window, Adjustments.
Looking at the dropdown menu here,
you can see that we're currently adding the red channel.
Set the green to minus 50 percent,
and the blue to minus 50 percent.
But now the total value is at zero percent,
which means that your red channel is darker than usual.
You generally want to keep this number at 100 percent.
So, to do this, increase the reds to 200 percent.
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What this did was tell Photoshop to recreate
the red channel using 200 percent from the red channel,
minus 50 percent from the green channel,
and minus another 50 percent from the blue channel.
We're going to repeat this with the blue channel.
In the dropdown menu, select the blue channel.
Set the red to minus 50 percent, green to minus 50 percent,
and blue to 200 percent.
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For the green channel, we don't need to touch it.
You can if you want, but I find that for sunset photos,
you get better results if you leave it alone.
We're done with the settings,
and the next step is to save this
as a preset so I can conveniently access it next time.
To do this, go to the panel menu on the top right corner,
and choose Save Preset.
Give it a name, hit the Save button,
and now you can access it from the presets dropdown menu.
And we're done.
You can adjust the intensity by changing
the layer opacity.
But I'll leave mine at 100 percent so it's easier
for you to see the difference.
Here's how the image looks like before, and after.
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And to end the video, here are more examples
of photos processed with this technique.
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Hey, thanks for watching this video.
If you liked it, please remember to hit the Like button.
Also, if you liked this video,
definitely check out my video on vibrancy masking.
It's super useful.
It'll let you bump up
the saturation really high.
It'll keep the gray stuff gray,
so your rocks, stones, gravel, anything that's neutral,
it'll keep those colors neutral.
Anyways, I hope you guys have an amazing day.
Let me know what you think in the comments below,
and I'll see you in the next video.
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