Compositing with Saturation Maps in Photoshop - Match Saturation
Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me in Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can use a Saturation Map to Help you create
more realistic composites.
This is one of the many compositing techniques that I show on my Photoshop Compositing Course.
If you haven't watched it, then you can click on the link down below in the description
to check it out.
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Okay, let's get started.
We're going to be working with this document that contains two layers--a model layer and
a background layer.
The model has already been masked out.
She was originally in a gray background.
That is not really that important for this tutorial.
And what we want to do is make this composite more realistic.
There's obviously a lot of things that are going to make in a realistic composite, but
in this tutorial, we're only going to worry about saturation.
So how can we make sure that the foreground matches the saturation from the background
or vice versa?
One of the things that you can do is create a Saturation Map.
You can create one by clicking on the New Adjustment Layer icon and selecting Selective
Color.
I'm going to rename this layer Saturation Map.
Then, from the Properties panel, you'll be able to adjust the colors and luminosity of
the colors that we select from this drop down.
By default, you should see Reds.
We'll start with Reds.
First, click on Absolute, then bring the Black slider all the way to the left to -100% and
you're going to need to do that to all the colors from Reds, all the way down to Magentas,
so I'll do that really quick.
Once you set all the colors to -100%, you need to go into the Whites, Neutrals and Blacks,
and set it to +100%.
Once you do that, you're going to have a black and white image and this is the Saturation
Map.
Before I explain how this works, I want to quickly mention that when you create your
first saturation map, you should save it so that you don't have to recreate it ever again.
To do so, you can click on the fly out menu and select Save Selective Color Preset and
give it a name.
Once you've saved it, you should see it under the Preset dropdown.
I have one here called Saturation Map, of course, and that's how I usually create my
saturation maps.
So how does this work?
We have this layer here that turns the image black and white, but the black and white image
represents how much saturation is found on the composite.
To better see how it works, I'm going to create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer right above
the model layer.
Then, I'm going to click on this icon here to clip it to the layer below it, so that
the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer only affects the model layer.
If I bring the saturation down to -100, you'll see that the model now is completely black.
The saturation map is telling us that there is no saturation on that layer.
If I disable the saturation map, you'll see that the model layer has no saturation.
If I enable the saturation map and click and drag the saturation slider all the way to
the right to +100, you'll see that she's very bright, that is because she has a lot of saturation.
If I click on this icon here to reset the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer, you'll see
that the background is slightly darker than the foreground, that is because the background
has less saturation than the foreground.
So, we can either adjust the foreground to match the background or adjust the background
to match the foreground.
In this case, we'll work with the foreground, which is the model.
So I'm going to click and drag the saturation down to about -35 in this case, and now you'll
notice the Luminance values of the model are fairly close to the luminance values of the
background so they have similar saturation.
We could, of course, bring the Hue and saturation to the background, enable the saturation map,
and increase the saturation of the background to match the luminance values of the foreground.
And now we have a more realistic composite because the saturation is similar.
So you can use your saturation maps as a way to visualize how much saturation there is
in an image and make sure that all the elements in your composite have similar saturation
so that the composite looks more realistic.
And that's it for this tutorial.
If you like this technique, then check out my Photoshop Compositing Course, where I go
through a lot more techniques that will teach you how to create more realistic composites,
and, of course, don't forget to subscribe, click on that Like button and share this video
with a friend.
Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again soon.