Right now I'm going to show you the easiest way to grab a photo that has black or white
and convert it into any color you want inside Photoshop.
We'll colorize this photo in a minute, but why don't I start by just showing you black
and white? So I can explain exactly what's going on with this layer selected. We're going to grab
the adjustment layer and the adjustment layer that we're going to use is Hue Saturation.
So we're going to pop it open and you can see this. The settings.
Now we're going to choose the colorize.
Now notice as we look at this, no color is changing. And maybe this is something you've
run into. Even if we turn the Saturation all the way up or we adjust the hue, there's no color
showing through. And thats because, there's no color present in black or white to shift.
So the secret to all of this is lightness. I've seen some people use this to lighten or darken
images. Please don't do that. Use levels or curves for that. This is what lightness does.
Look at the black. For example, we can't add color to black because it's already 100% black.
So if we lighten it up a little bit now as we lighten it, look at this.
It's no longer black. And that means that we can change the color with the hue.
We can change the amount of color with the Saturation.
If we lighten it more, we get more shades of color.
Same thing with white. You can't colorize white because there's no color in it. Black would be
zero out of the 256 levels, white would be 255 out of the 256 levels. The reason it's 255, it
starts counting at zero. Then take colorize so its darkening the white so it's no longer pure white.
Notice now we can apply color in here. We can change what color we want.
We can change the Saturation or the amount of that color.
Okay, so it's all good and proper to do that on an example. Let's apply it in the real world.
Right now we have this picture of a woman and she has a white Tshirt, and we want to apply a little
bit of color. So let's select the layer and then we're going to choose a Hue Saturation adjustment
layer just like we did before. Now I want to make sure it only affects the layer directly underneath
and not the whole stack. And you can do that by hitting that little
icon (clipping) there. See, that arrow appears.
That means now it's just affecting the layer underneath. And of course,
in this layer underneath, I've actually cut out the shirt.
Hang around to the end and I'll show you how I did that. Alright, so
we hit our hue. Notice, we can change a little bit of the color in the shirt, see how it's changing.
And the reason for that is, not much in the real world is actually going to be pure black or pure
white is going to be influenced by the color of the light, the ambient light. So we can turn up
the Saturation if we want, but notice it gets really noisy and grainy and not good looking.
So we're going to hit colorize. First thing that's going to do is it's going to get rid of
all that weird color. Now we can hit the Saturation a little bit more.
Now, maybe you've done this before. You change the hue and you can adjust the colors.
Right? Pretty good. But you're super limited. What you're getting is these
pastel colors. You want good, strong, deep color. Remember what I showed you before?
Take this lightness, bring it down and look at this. Now we can find decent color, strong color.
Maybe we'll go to something like a red or look at this nice Orange
and nice red. Maybe it's a little too saturated. Pull back the saturation.
Just kind of keep things real. By the way, if you take the lightness back, you can get deeper
tones. Look at this. Just be wary with the Saturation when you do that. So look at that.
We can dial in a very beautiful red. And of course, the selections not perfect, like it
isn't here. This isn't a session on masking. All you do is just select the mask and grab a brush.
You know, I can just paint that in. What am I doing here? I'm just using a white brush.
But once again, you know, this isn't a session on Selections and masking.
I'm just trying to show you how to do the color.
All right. So as you can see, we can really go in and we can punch those colors.
Same thing with the skirt. If we wanted to do the Blacks, we could go in,
grab a Saturation, clip it. By the way, the other way to do that quicker is hold down
the alt/option key and just click in between the adjustment layer in the layer does the same thing.
It turns on that little option, and then we hit colorize. Now you want to lighten it a little bit
and, you know, and if you want to, yeah, you could put some different color in there. I don't
necessarily think it's going to look good for the skirt to do that. But I'm just saying,
if you wanted to do that, you know, you can get all these colors. They're all there.
Okay. I told you I was going to show you how easy it is to select things like white and black.
Let me do that right now to select the way. It's as simple as just going under select>color
range. I have other tutorials on this, so I'm not going to go in depth,
but I'll just show you what I did and you can just choose highlights, take the fuzziness down
the range as you increase the range, it gets more as you decrease it, it gets less.
Essentially, this is what we do. We just dial in the white area, use the fuzziness to clean
up the selection. Essentially, we've got our selection there. Click. Okay.
And then you're just going to create a mask.
And then what I did is I just grabbed a lasso tool here, around that area.
Select inverse.
Fill that with black.
There we go. We've cut out the shirt. It's as simple as that.
And to select the black select color range. Instead of highlights, just use shadows
and do the same thing and it'll select the dark parts of the image.
So hope you found this useful.
Let me know in the comments if you learned anything new here, and if this helped you
dial in those colors, you've been trying to get in Photoshop that have been difficult.
As you can see now, it's really not difficult at all. So anyway, guys,
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Alright, until next time. I'll see you at the cafe.