hi guys welcome welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to talk
about something that most photographers really dislike and i don't quite know why but i kind
of get it at the same time today we're going to talk all about how to tone greens so if you're
new here and you've never been here before well basically on fridays nearly every friday
not quite all of them we do a five minute friday where i've got five minutes to explain a different
tip technique or tool to enable you to improve your photography or your retouching work so today
obviously we're to do a little technique to help your retouching work i have five minutes to go
through this if you find this video useful even just like a little bit a little tiny weeny bit
then all i ask you to do is please hit the like button drop why it was useful in the comments
below and hit the subscribe button all of those things really really help me out i can't stress
it enough it's really really useful if you don't know who i am i'm Jessica McGovern international
multi-award-winning portrait photographer and basically i do all things kind of photography
but i'm mainly known over here for my animal stuff although that's not all on the screen
right now you can see a picture of little beanie this was shot last week earlier last week over
at the digitalab residency of the north which is an educational few days all together crammed
with amazing tutors arguably far better than me and i had the pleasure of being invited to
speak and teach and i took beansprout with us this is Bryt we call her beanie or bean sprout
whatever you want to call her now i shot this when i was doing a little walk through of the
location earlier on so i'm going to use this image as an example because the greens in this
shot are quite overpowering so basically we've got five minutes let's get stuck in
this is straight out of camera apart from a slight white balance tweak so let me show you
the before and after right there is another change that i'm going to go through
but the first thing that i want to do when we're looking at greens is bring your attention to the
camera profile if you're in lightroom or adobe camera raw now in lightroom this little profile
has the largest impact on your colour your contrast your levels everything
than anything else that you want to go and tweak after so what i would ask you guys to
do is just check when you bring an image in is it on adobe color right is it on adobe vivid
is it on camera standard in which case it is probably gonna be a little bit overwhelming too
or is it indeed on something that you set up yourself to match your style and workflow so first
thing we're gonna do is go into browse and when you have your camera and your camera is one of the
models that lightroom recognises you will have in this little list camera matching now if you got
into here you can see all of these camera profiles which come basically straight out of your camera
these are sony profiles and what i want to do is go ahead and get the ones that most adequately
suit my workflow and press the little star next to them so for me it's neutral and standard for
most things so either those two and if you look at the greens there's a large shift between neutral
and standard anyway when you hit the little star that appears next to them you can then close that
and the profile will be saved here okay does that make sense so that's like tip number one
the next thing that we want to do is try and get a real bearing on why you don't like the greens
sometimes most of the time they're heavily saturated kind of yellow in a tint and really
really bright and overpowering and that's why most photographers don't like greens so you need to
decide for yourself what would you like the greens to be would you like the greens to be desaturated
and richer or would you prefer the greens to be more orange yellow in which case a color change
might be the right way to go so changing colors is really really easy and we do have a photoshop
tutorial on how to change the colors so i'll go ahead and link that above so if we're in lightroom
a really simple quick technique that you can apply to make the greens easier to handle and this is
down to personal preference anyway what we want to do is come straight to the HSL colour panel so
this is hue saturation illuminance or colour if you click colour it changes to a different kind of view
i prefer to use it in HSL and i prefer to have them all individually split out rather than having
all of them in a list now i always always always start with luminance and what i want to be doing
is pulling down the green and the yellow because green is quite heavily made up with yellow you
need to be careful that your subject does not have this colour on them if they are a golden labrador
for example or a palomino horse they're going to have a lot of yellow in their coat so you need to
be really careful so i personally just eyeball it and pull but you can go for a little bit more of a
subtle option which uses this little clicky drippy dropper here if we go ahead and click onto that we
can hover over the areas of the image that have our offensive greens and what i want you to do is
just click and drag downwards and you'll pull the luminance down because we're in luminance
and you'll see it perfectly matches the amount of each color that's in that sampled section
perfect so what i want you to do is pull that luminance down and then i want you to go ahead
and go into your hue so within hue you can again use your little clicky drippy dropper or you
can eyeball it it's completely up to you i'm going to click off of my clicky drippy dropper
and eyeball it so for my hue with these we've pulled the luminance down i want to make these
cooler greens so i'm going to take a little bit of that warmth out of it that overpowering bright oh
my goodness this is bright green right and change that to be something that's going to be a little
bit more palatable so i'm going to grab hold of my green slider and i'm going to pull to the right
and what i'm wanting to achieve is a decent enough shift in the colour so that it almost looks kind
of actual green instead of yellow green kind of like this right and then remembering that we do
have some yellow in that section i am also going to pull the yellows over to the right hand side
so we're left in this situation now i feel like her muzzle here is included in this yellow shift
so i'm going to really back off on that i don't want to be affecting the colour of the subject
at all and then i'm going to go into saturation and this is the key i'm going to go to green and
i'm going to just pull down the saturation until it's at a point where it doesn't look
washed out we want it to still look rich enough but it's at the point where it just kind of calms
it down and i can do the same with my yellows too just to get a bit of a handle on them so now that
i've done those adjustments i can go back and alter other little bits and pieces just to get
to a stage where i'm kind of happy with them i don't want to really change anything overly so
and then that's a happy place for me to continue with my retouch so this is the before and this is
the after quite a change right so then i can add to that by vignetting because we've got so much
green all the way around the edge i can go and add a radial which has got a nice soft edge around her
and invert that so that we're using our lightroom masks if you're new to lightroom and lightroom
masks i've got a video on the new lightroom mask features i'll go ahead and link that above so
now that we're here i can also tone the outside of the image by messing around with this tint and
temp slider so i can go ahead and just either add some of that yellow back in cool it down even more
don't want to stretch the pixels too far i'm quite happy with here and then i can work on my
saturation and my toning to get to a stage where i'm actually really really happy with how the
outsides of the image are looking so what i want to achieve by this adjustment is i don't want to
overly change too much of the greens but what i do want to do is kind of end up in a happy situation
whereby the subject really pops through that middle and because this is a yellow green bit
in the middle of my radial i'm going to have to push back a little bit more towards my brighter
yellows so that's kind of getting a handle on the greens really really nicely now if you did want to
tweak the hue and cool everything down outside the subject just an extra little one thrown in
here we're going to do a select subject on the mask and then invert that so we're selecting
everything outside of the subject now it's not got her ear so we do need to be careful when we
do this but we can put a fine adjustment on or if you want to be brave you can go for a
solid adjustment there and move the greens to be exactly where you want them to be don't let
anybody tell you how the greens really should look it's completely personal preference and you're
able to make that decision as the creator as the artist as the photographer for your artwork so for
me i'm quite happy with this i'd be quite happy to move forward and continue my retouch of this shot
and see where we end up from there so we've gone from the before which is quite blinding
and terrifying almost until the after which is much more controlled and considered and i really
like how this is looking so that's an example of how you can tone your greens utilising the HSL
section in lightroom classic lightroom mobile and also in adobe camera raw so wherever you edit you
can do this hopefully that was useful for you if it was drop it down in the comments because
like i said anything that you say is really really useful for us and i'll see you back here
next week for another one of something to do with this kind of thing that's five minutes long and
we get stuff done nice to see you i'll see you again really really soon that was a long one dan