Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you about
color grading in Photoshop.
So when you do this, you use a gradient map on a layer.
And this can really give you two effects.
First, it can give you a duotone look for your photo, or it can just also add some cool
drama effects.
So let's get started.
All right, so we're in Photoshop right now, and I've opened this image of a girl drinking
coffee, and I got this from pexels.com, so you can go out there...there are tons of free
photos to practice on.
All right, so what we want to do first...I want to make this kind of a duotone blue and
yellow.
So I'm going to come down here in my layers window and go to 'New Adjustment Layer'.
We'll choose the 'Gradient Map' option.
OK, so it automatically puts it...I'm not exactly sure even how they choose these colors...
but obviously it's not the colors we want.
So I'm going to go over here to the 'Properties' panel and click this.
And then we can get some different options here.
I'll click on this color stop right here, and then click 'Color' and we'll choose not
terribly saturated and maybe a little darker blue.
OK, and then we'll do the same over here.
And I think with this, maybe we'll try kind of a pinkish...no, I don't really like that.
Maybe something a little more natural looking...kind of a creamy white.
And that looks pretty good.
And we'll say 'OK'.
So this is your duotone option.
It's really quite a different effect than just taking a gradient, placing over top of
it, and then choosing multiply or something.
So let's try that real quick.
I'm gonna hit G for my Gradient Tool, and then I'll click up here.
And we'll do something similar so we can see how different it looks.
And I'll just pull this from right to left.
I'm going to hide this layer.
And then we'll just kind of put this as an overlay.
So really what you've got here is a blue to cream overlay instead of a gradient map, which
actually chooses the dark areas and makes them the darker color and the light areas
and makes them the lighter color.
So you can actually mess with your base picture too.
Right now she's kind of low contrast.
So I'm going to go up here to 'Image' and we'll just do >Auto Contrast.
So she got quite a bit brighter.
And now let's turn on that Gradient Map.
OK, so we get just a different effect.
There's the difference.
I'm just undoing and redoing.
All right, so that's one way to use the Gradient Map.
Now the other way I want to show you is how it can make it just a little more dramatic.
And to do that, all we have to do is change the Blend Mode.
You can kind of scroll through them to see what different effects it'll give.
'Soft Light' is pretty nice.
'Overlay' looks a little washed out, but I think that's because we increased our contrast.
So, if you want to try to use the 'Overlay' look, just keep your contrast low.
So we'll choose 'Soft Light'.
So now I'm going to make a copy of this and we'll put this back at 'Normal'.
So now you can see the difference.
So that 'Soft Light' version took our original photo and just made it a lot more dramatic
...kind of more contrast-y and kind of popped the colors a little bit.
Now our cup turned a little more maroon.
So if we wanted to keep the red, we could just click on this layer mask, but I want
to hide this maroon color.
So I'm just going to use black and hit B for my Brush and just kind of color that redness
back in.
If we hit SHIFT and click on our mask, you can see what happened there.
And obviously I did not do a very good job of staying in the lines.
But I wanted to show you that this is an option.
You can color on your mask, as you can do with any adjustment layer, and kind of remove
parts of it without actually messing with your layer itself, which is a nondestructive
way to kind of hide different parts of your layer.
We can also come back into our color grade layer, click on the color itself, and then
come over here and click on your gradients.
And if you go a little darker with this, it'll increase the contrast, so that's another way
to do it.
If you want to keep it saturated, you can come over here to this side and get more of
that blue in there.
So yeah, that's basically color grading and gradient maps.
All right, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please leave a comment in the comment section below and I'll see you
next week with another graphic design video.
Thank you!!!