(magical jingle)
Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial.
My name is Nathaniel Dodson, and today we're going to take a look at creating
this cinematic effect here in Photoshop. You see a couple examples, actually,
that I've put on screen. Because it's an effect that works with pretty much any
image. Now, depending on the type of image you input into Photoshop, it's
going to affect, obviously, just how cinematic and awesome the image looks on
the way out the door. But, it's a very, very, very versatile effect. The principles
stand true for pretty much any photo that you want to apply this type of effect
to here in Photoshop. And, well, I guess if you enjoy this tutorial while you're
watching through it, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss
any future Photoshop tutorials, or retouching type tutorials, and let's jump
into Photoshop right now, and check this thing out.
Alrighty, so here we are in Adobe Photoshop, and we've got this photo. It looks
fairly cinematic out of camera, and you know, the more cinematic your photos
are going to look, the more cinematic they will look after we apply this effect.
But, the effect should work for pretty much any photo. Alright, I am going to
right click on this background layer, the image, and convert it to a smart object,
just to get us going here, because we're going to go filter and choose camera raw
filter, right off the bat. Jump over into the camera raw editor, which is going to pop
up full screen here. Well, maybe not full screen, I stand corrected. And the first
thing I'm going to do, well, first I can try using the white balance tool, and just,
I don't know, selecting one of these colors. I'm really looking to just cool the image
off. So this -10 temperature, plus 30 in the tint, adding a bit of magenta, that's nice.
Now, this is a jpeg image that we're bringing into camera raw. If you're shooting with
a raw image, you're probably getting actual kelvin read out. So, I generally am going
to go with something that's more balanced against tungsten. Something like 3000,
or 3200, see how that's super orange, because this is jpeg? This would actually be
really blue. Like the slider would be somewhere around here for a 3000/3200 kelvin
read out. I'm going to with something that's, I don't know, -10, -15, and just live with
that. You just want it to have a slight blue tint, that's what I'm trying to say. I'm going
to cool off the highlights a bit here. I'm going to set these to -50, I just want to
tone them down a little bit, because we're going to be spiking some contrast in
other areas. Speaking of spiking contrast, we're going to bump the whites about
+25, it just gives them a kiss of strength. And we're going to lift the blacks, like +20.
Now, the fun begins. We're going to go over to the tone curve, and I'm going to
use the point curve. You may be seeing the parametric curve, you want to just
choose the point curve. Like this. And I'm going to cool off the white point. So, I'm
going to dull the white point down to about there. And I'm going to lift the black
point to probably right about there. Then I'm going to pull a point back into play,
right about there. I'm just looking to just make those shadows a little heavier.
Then I'm going to pull my mids back into line, just click and drag a point there.
And then I'll probably pull a little bit more brightness into my highlights, something
kind of like that. Then, I will come over into my red channel. Now here in the red
channel, this is where we get a bit of this retro-y, almost outrun-looking effect.
I'm going to pull straight up on the reds, right? So we're going to spike the reds
in the shadows, but then I'm immediately going to pull down, and contrast it
with some heavy cyan also in the darker tones of the image. And then I'm going
to work the cyans back as smoothly as I can, sort of back to the original image.
And then we're going to push additional reds into the highlights, kind of like that.
And then I'm going to pull down on the brightest point of red, something like that,
to add some cyan to the highlights in the image. So I'm looking for a curve like this.
And again, if you understand how curves works, and how the histogram works,
and the fact that red and cyan are opposites, basically when we pull down on this
curve, we're adding cyan to the image. When we pull up, we're adding red. So this
area here, where we're pulling down, away from that original center line, we're
adding cyan to that range of the image, based on the histogram underneath. So,
a lot of the darker tones of the image, but the very darkest bits are actually getting
a spike of red. And so on and so forth. It gives us this pinkiness. You can see those
pink track marks almost. That's what that effect is doing. Alright, we're going to move
along to the green channel. I'm going to edit the green channel just a little bit here.
We're going to push some green into the shadows, which again, looks pretty bad,
but we're going to counterbalance that by immediately pulling some magenta into
here. Now, magenta is the opposite of green, you can see we're getting a crazy
effect. Hang with me here. And it's really difficult, by the way, Adobe will hopefully
make a more contrasting line soon. It's a little difficult to see the line, but I'm going
to pull this back into line, like that. I'm going to adjust that point, maybe make that
cyan a little bit more subtle. And maybe pull down on the base green point there,
so it's not totally crazy. Then I'm going to pull down on the greens up in the very
highlights. - Whoop, I don't want to do that. I've got a little marker up there already.
You can see, there it is. And I'm just going to pull this across, kind of something like
that. Now, it's, again, really difficult to see the line. But you can see I just pulled down
on the brightest parts of the greens, adding magenta to my very bright whites. And
then adding just a kiss of green to the highlight portion of the image. And then heavy
magenta cast in the shadows, and then just a little boost of green in the absolute
darkest bits of the image. So this gives the effect that we're seeing now. Now, we're
going to go down to the blue channel. And here in the blue channel, obviously a
little easier for us to see here. We're, once again, going to boost the dark point.
Which is going to just flood the shadows with blue tones. Again, that's a little too
heavy. So we're going to pull this down. We're going to contrast this. Yellow is the
opposite of blue; so we're pulling some yellow back into this thing. Maybe kind of
something like that. And then I'm going to try to stabilize things here. Pull this
point back into its normal orbit, so to speak. And we're actually going to add a little
bit of blue to the highlights. Something like that. And then I'm going to pull down
a little bit, just to warm up the absolute brightest parts of the image, by adding
a kiss of yellow to the very, very brightest bits of the image. And you can see what
we've got. It's an interesting-looking photo. It's not finished yet, though, because
we're going to come over here to our HSL sliders. I'm going to begin with hue.
You can try swinging the reds, and you can see the reds are going to do things -
the tail light especially will get very pink, or very orange, depending on what you
do. I tend to like this to head more in the pink direction. I think it's more of that
cool, synth wave, very 80's type style. I think that's cool. I'm going to boost the
oranges, make them a little bit more yellow. Maybe like +10, +13. Yellows, I don't
know that I'm going to mess with the yellows too much. Maybe just a little bit
of orange for the yellows, and the greens, I'm going to push any kind of greens
back toward yellow. I want a lot of those warm tones. And then for the aquas,
I'm going to push them more toward the blue. And for blue, I'm going to push
blue a little bit more towards purple-y color. And purples, I don't think I'm going
to mess with purple at all. There's not a huge amount of purple in here, I'm not
going to mess with it too much. The magentas, I'm going to push more toward the
red. So I'm going to push these up like +20-ish. These are all approximations, and
they may all be different for your image. The idea is: reds, we generally want them
to be more pink; oranges, yellows, greens, we want them to be more red and
yellow-y/orange; and then all the aquas and blues and purples, we want them to
be a nice blueish/purple-y color. Alright, we're going to come over here to saturation
tab. And here, I'm going to desaturate the reds. I'm just going to go -10. Oranges,
I'm going to -20. Yellows, I'm going to go -30. Greens, I'm just going to bump them
like -20, as well. Aquas, we going to really try to desaturate them. Maybe -50.
Blues, we're going to really take a lot out of blue, we'll go like -70. Purples, we'll
go, I don't know, -40, or -50. And then magentas, we'll go, yeah something like
-20. So you can see, we're really reining in the extreme color effect that we just
did before. I'm going to jump into luminance here, and what we're going to do,
is we're going to darken down the reds just a tiny bit. We're going to boost oranges,
maybe +30, something like that. Yellow, and greens, I'm not going to mess with
them here. I'm going to just cool off my aquas a little bit, -20. I'm just holding down
SHIFT, by the way, and using my up and down arrow keys. I'm going to add a little
bit of brightness to the blues. Maybe add a little brightness to the purples. And
then add a bit of brightness to magenta. Maybe +40, something like that I think
will work for us. Now, last but not least, here in camera raw. We're going to jump
over here to our camera calibration. And here is where you can really determine
the type of cinematic effect you're going to get. Do you want something that's more
influenced by green? Or something that's more influenced by purple? It's a subtle
change, but it is definitely a change. You can see the way it's changing. Kind of the
colors throughout the middle of the image. I think I kind of like the purple effect.
So, I'm going to go +40 with the purples. Now you can shift the reds, this actually
makes a big difference. You can see, you're shifting the hue of your primary
reds. I want to push these more in the direction of pink like we've been doing.
So I'll go -15, -17, that's fine. And I'm going to boost the saturation of this up.
+25, +30, something like that works. Then here, for greens, you can also make
a big change. So again, the opposite of green is magenta, you can really start to
shift the image in more of a magenta/pink direction. So I'll make this +40,
something like that. But I think I'll just chill out the saturation a little bit, take
that to about -10, something like that I think works for me. Then for blue primary,
you can see, we can make things more yellow, or make things more red-y/pink-y/blue
by adding blue. So I'm going to shift it more toward the teal end of my blue primaries,
just like that. About -15, or so. And I'll just kind of cool down the saturation of that,
as well. And you can see, we're getting this very cool-looking effect. So I'm going to
hit OK. And part of the reason that we used camera raw, was, well, by the way, we
can shut off the filter. There was our original image, and there's what we've done to
it. But we can also double click here on camera raw, and get back into it, and continue
editing it, if we needed to do that. Alright, I'm going to add a selective color
adjustment layer here. And I'm going to come down to the blacks, and with the blacks,
I'm going to try to lift the blacks a little bit. You can see what that's going to do,
it's actually going to give us some nice, really tight, low-end contrast. I'm going to +5,
but what I'm also going to do, I'm going to boost the magenta a little bit. I'm just
going to use my arrow keys. I'm going to add a couple drips of magenta to the
shadows, and then down here, remember blue is the opposite of yellow. So if
I remove some yellow, I'm going to get a little bit of blue. So, I'm going to add just
a couple little drips of blue, I don't want to go too extreme, you can see just one
little effect is making quite a bit of difference there for us. Then I think I'm going to
come into here, and I'm going to go to the whites, and I'm going to boost the red.
So red is the opposite of cyan; so I'm going to add some red to absolute highlights.
Maybe I'll a little magenta up there, as well. Ooh, not too much. Just a couple drips
of magenta. And then I'll also add some yellow up there. The general idea behind
cinematic grading is you're, in general, going to be contrasting opposite colors
in the shadows and highlights. It's part of the reason why you see a lot of this
blue in the shadows, yellow in the highlights thing, when you're looking at cinematic
grading. Because blue and yellow are opposite colors. Enough banter, let's create
a new layer here. I'm going to name this layer "flares," and what we're going to
do, is set this layer to blend mode of color dodge. I'm going to double click on the
layer, just the blank area out here. And I'm going to shut off transparency shapes
layer. So, I'm going to click on that to shut if off; hit OK. And then I'm going to grab
my brush tool. And I'm going to right click here, and you might want to go online,
brusheasy.com, wherever you find flare brushes; and just find some nice flare
brushes. You can see, we've got some flare brushes here. What I want to do is
hold down my ALT/OPT key and sample. So I can sample a nice, pink color. And
then I can begin adding and influencing the pink here in the tail light, for instance.
I'm going to make just a giant flare. It's almost 5000 pixels, this brush. Something
like that looks cool. Maybe add a little bit down here. I can add a little bit off in the
distance, and over here. Then I can go and get some of this greenish color, and I can
really just add a little bit of that light coming through there. We can get a little bit
of this light blue, steel-y blue color, and add some kind of something there on the
exhaust. That looks cool. And you can just go through, maybe add a little bit over
here in terms of yellow, over there. So, it's just a little effect along the way, but you
can see it just makes a little bit of a difference there when you're adding some flares,
layer on some of the effect that we're working with. Now, we can merge all these
layers to a new layer by hitting CMD+SHIFT+OPT+E, that would CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E
on the PC, and I am going to - well, I'll convert this to a smart object, first and
foremost. I'm going to double click and I'm going to name this "blur." And before
we blur, we're going to go filter, I'm going to choose pixelate, and I'm going to choose
mosaic. And I want to just choose a big mosaic. Something like 150 might actually
work for the size image I have. You might need to go a little bit bigger, or smaller,
depending on how big or small your image is. I'm going to go 500. I'm going to hit OK.
And then we'll go Filter>Blur, and I'm going to choose a motion blur. Move the motion
blur dialogue box out here. I do want to blur this straight up and down, a distance
of four to five hundred is going to work just fine. Maybe we'll go - eh, let me see
what 400 looks like. I really want to make sure I'm not losing too much of the pinks
and blues and some of those colors. I don't want it all to blend together. I think 400
works nicely. I'm going to hit OK. Then I'm going to set this layer to the blend mode
of soft light. Now, this adds this racing-looking effect; especially around the lights,
it adds this very, almost 8-bit effect, which is kind of cool. However, it's too much. It's
darkening everything way too much. So we want to double click out here on the
blank area of this layer. We're back into our layer styles dialogue box. And what I want
to do, is split the black handle here under the blend if options for this layer. So I'm
going to hold down ALT/OPT, click on that handle, and then I'm just going to drag
this over, and I really just want to pull this effect out of all the darker areas of this
layer. You can see how we still have the kind of up and down stripe-y effect
happening around all the bright areas of this layer. That's fine, I just don't want
it doing too much in the shadows. See, there's before, there's after. So we're just
brightening everything up a little bit. I'm going to hit OK for that. And then the
last thing we'll do here, in order to add a little bit more midtone punch, is merge
all those layers to a new layer, again, CMD+SHIT+OPT+E, CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E on
the PC, then we'll desaturate this layer. CMD+SHIFT+U, that'd be CTRL+SHIFT+U
on the PC. We'll go filter, we'll choose other, and we'll choose high pass. And I'm
going to go with, yeah, something like 15 pixels. 10 or 15 pixels high pass is going
to be great. I'll go 10 pixels in this case. And I'm going to set this to soft light, and then
I'm just going to reduce the opacity, maybe to like, I don't know, 45 or 50. Something
right around there. We're just looking to add a little bit of bite to the image, it's a
subtle effect, but it's definitely there. And then the last thing we need to do, is add
our cinematic bars to this. Now, the cinematic ratio that I like is 239 to 1. So I'm
going to add a shape like that, and what I'm going to use to create my crop is my
rectangle tool. It's kind of a cool, little effect, or way we're going to do this. However,
I want this snap exactly to my document. So, we can go view, make sure snapping
is turned on. But you're going to see here, as I draw this, it's not going to snap to the
edges of my document. I'm going to undo that. And I'm going to come up here to
the view menu, and we're going to choose a new guide layout. And I'm just going
to go with kind of the default here. Two and two. Two columns, two rows, I don't
need a margin. I'm going to shut that off. And I'm going to hit OK. The nice thing about
these guides is, our shape will snap to the guides. Now this is not it. We want to come
up here to the cog menu, and we want to choose to make this a proportional shape.
And you can see here, I want to set this to a width of 239, and a height of 1. That's the
ratio that we want. So I can just simply click, and I can drag it across my document. It's
going to snap to my guides, just like that. And I made a mistake here, because I don't
want to draw a path. I want to actually draw a shape, so from the little dropdown
menu, I'm going to choose shape. This is all good, right? We'll make sure that we're
still going proportional 239-1. Great. I don't need a stroke. I do need a fill. In fact,
we'll change the fill to black, because that's just what's going to work for us. And I'm
going to drag this shape out now, and there we go. But you can see here, we're getting
everything except the bars that we want. Don't worry, we're going to fix that here in
just a second. Let's align this to the middle of our document. So I'm going to come here
and choose my alignment. I'm going to say, look, align to the canvas. And then align the
vertical edges, great. And I'm going to open up my properties panel, and here I'm going
to change this to the subtract, or minus, front shape option here. And when I do that,
you can see that I'm going to get this nice, automatically created cinematic bar effect.
Really cool. I can go view, I can just shut off the guides, and if I deselect my cinematic
bars, you can see what it looks like. Now, the advantage to this is, if we group
everything underneath this, so if I select my high pass layer, hold down SHIFT,
select my bottom layer, hit CMD/CTRL+G, and we can just name this "image,"
or whatever. Then I can drag this, and create the crop that I want. So I can say,
you know what? I want to see the top of his helmet, right up there near the top
of the frame. And there we go, we have our cinematic image, cinematic effect,
cinematic bars, cinematic stinkin' everything! In fact, I'm going to duplicate this
effect back here, and I'm going to set it back to the way it was. Let's do a quick
before and after. I'm going to set this up here. I'm just going to shut off my smart
filters, and all I need to do is ALT/OPT click on this eyeball. There's the image
before, and there is the image now. And yeah, there you have it! That is that
cinematic effect. We kind of made it a little bit more outrun-y maybe there at
the end with the flares, and the color scheme we ended up going with. But the
principles remain the same when it comes to applying a cinematic effect to a photo.
A lot of those principles stand true no matter what the image is that you bring into
Photoshop. Now, if you did enjoy the tutorial, make sure you - well, pick up a copy
of my course! That's what I'm trying to say. It helps support the channel and what
we're doing here. And it's all about retouching images in Photoshop, so I think you're
really going to like it. For working with camera raw; and the different adjustment
layers; and the whole red and cyan, green, magenta, blue, yellow, opposite color
curve nonsense that we covered to create this very cinematic looking photo here
in Adobe Photoshop, ladies and gentlemen, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.