- Alright, so in this video, I wanna show you
how you can get the correct colours in your picture,
if you didn't use a grey card during the photo shoot.
(light melodic music)
Alright, so before we get
into actually setting the correct colours,
I just need to run past how the Difference Blend mode
is gonna really help you here.
Now, if we look at the screen,
here we can see a picture of my friend, Sam,
now imagine now that I had actually
two layers in the layer stack,
so let's just create a copy of this particular layer here,
two identical layers.
Now if I change the Blend mode of this uppermost layer,
if I change that to Difference, what you're gonna notice
is that the entire picture now goes black,
so basically what's happening there
is the Difference Blend mode
is looking between the top layer and the bottom layer
and looking to see what is identical between the two,
now when you see the screen go completely black,
that means those areas of the picture are identical.
So with that in mind, now look,
if I get my Move tool and I just use my arrow key
and I just move the top layer just off a couple of pixels,
can you see now how we're starting to see
some elements of the picture?
That's because they're not perfectly lined up,
so those parts of the layers aren't matching,
but obviously certain parts of the sky are identical
and they're completely black,
but if I get my left arrow key and just press it twice,
whoops, there we go just to there,
now it's perfectly lined up,
you can see the screen's gone black.
So how can that help us then,
when we're trying to get the perfect colours?
Well, that's what I wanna show you now.
Alright, so let's just delete
that layer there, that duplicate.
The first thing we're going to do
to get the colours just right,
I suppose looking at this picture here,
you can see there is a little bit
of a greenish kind of colour cast,
now that was a creative decision that I made,
when I was actually doing the retouching,
but let's just imagine
that we just had this colour cast on our picture,
that we want to colour correct.
So what I wanna do then, I'm gonna come over
to the toolbar over on the left-hand side
and the first thing I'm going to choose
is this tool here, the Colour Sampler tool,
then I'm gonna come over to the upper right-hand corner
of my screen here, the Adjustment layers
and I'm gonna choose a Threshold Adjustment layer,
now you can see now, it almost makes it look
like a bit of a drawing with this black and white
and in the Properties, we've got this histogram,
just like any histogram,
the left-hand side is gonna be for the blacks, the shadows,
the right-hand side is gonna be for the whites
and the highlights, so what I'm going to do
is I'm gonna take this little marker in the middle here
and I'm gonna drag it all the way
over to the left-hand side,
now you can see just a little bit
of kind of image showing through,
but don't concern yourself about that.
Now that I've taken that slider
all the way to the left-hand side,
I'm gonna slowly start to bring it in
towards the right and as I do that,
you'll notice more of the picture starts to become visible.
Now the parts that you see coming through first of all,
they are what's supposed to be black within your picture
and you can see now, if I zoom in,
certainly this bit here on the bike
and this bit here, if I turn off this Adjustment layer,
we can see sure enough,
those areas are supposed to be black,
so what I'm gonna do now,
because I have the Colour Sampler tool,
I'm gonna bring that in and I'm gonna press down
on an area that is now showing up as black
and I'll press it down just there,
now you can see, when I do that, if I zoom in,
you'll see now that it's placed down a number one
on this kind of little mark here,
this kind of like little target, alright.
So now that we've got that,
let's just close that down just there.
So that's the black, let's just zoom out a touch,
we'll now get this marker on the Threshold Adjustment
and we'll drag it all the way to the right-hand side,
so now when we start to bring it over to the left slowly,
the areas that are starting to show through,
let's just put that picture nice and central,
the areas that are starting to show through
are going to be the areas,
that should be white within our picture,
however, we do have to be careful with this one,
if there is metal in our pictures,
I'll show you what I mean by that,
if I just zoom in and I'll turn that Adjustment layer off,
we can see here, we've got the metal forks,
the suspension here of the motorbike,
now here this is kind of like a chrome,
so you're gonna get a hard, specular
kind of highlight on there,
now that isn't necessarily white,
that is purely a reflection,
so we don't want to say that that is white.
We're gonna look for other areas of the picture,
that are starting to show through,
so let's just turn that Adjustment back on
and we can see up here in the top left-hand corner,
there's a big patch of white here,
so it's telling me that this should be white in that picture
and sure enough, when I turn that Adjustment off,
we can see that it's an area of cloud,
so we'll say okay, that's gonna be white,
I bring my Colour Sampler,
let's just get my Colour Sampler tool
and now I'm gonna click down just once
in that area of the sky just there
and when I do that, if I zoom in,
you can see that's now placed a number two just there.
Alright, so now then using the Threshold Adjustment layer,
we've set what should be black
and we've set what should be white,
but how on earth do we get the grey?
Because if we want to set the colours to be perfect,
we wanna be able to tell Photoshop,
this should be black, this should be white
and this here should be 50% grey
and that'll give us a perfect,
correct colour within our picture.
So here's what we're gonna do,
this is where that Difference Blend mode comes into it.
So let's just turn off the Threshold Adjustment layer,
now when I delete that Adjustment layer,
you'll notice that those markers that we put down
with our Colour Sampler are still there,
so nothing to worry about there.
So now what I'm gonna do to get the grey within our picture,
how can we find the grey?
I'm gonna add a New blank layer above my picture
and I go to the Edit menu and choose Fill
and from the Contents dropdown,
I'm gonna choose 50% Grey and click OK.
So now, if I change the Blend mode of this 50% Grey layer
from Normal to Difference, anywhere that is identical
between the top layer and the bottom layer,
in other words, what is 50% grey on both of those layers,
that's going to go black and you can see
that there's not that many areas however,
this patch of sky around here,
that's gone pretty black just in there,
so why don't we just choose that?
So I'm gonna say that there should be 50% Grey
and if I just turn that layer off,
you can see that area of cloud there
is looking like it should be around about the 50% grey,
so I'm gonna click down just there.
Alright, so now then, let's just delete that 50% Grey layer,
let's just zoom out, now this is where the magic happens,
'cause now what I'm going to do
is choose something like a Levels Adjustment layer
and when we do that, we can see here,
we've got these colour samplers,
we've got the black, the grey and the white,
so what I'm gonna do is this,
I'm gonna choose the black sampler first of all,
I'm gonna zoom into my picture
and with this black sample point,
I'm gonna click right in the middle
of the target area that was number one,
that was what Photoshop told us should be black
and I'll just click down just once in there like that.
Then let's go to get the white sample point,
now the white sample, if I remember rightly
was up in the clouds up here, so we'll zoom in,
here we've got that little area here,
that we clicked with the Colour Sampler,
so I'll put my cursor right in the middle
of that little target and press down there
and then finally we'll click on the grey
just so we get the perfect colouring,
so we'll come over to here now,
that was in the sky just over there,
there you go, there's number three
and with that one, we'll just click down
just right in the middle just there,
alright, so what has that done?
Let's just double-click on that Hand tool to zoom out,
so we can see our picture,
so now we've set the black, the white and the grey,
we've told Photoshop these should be exactly black,
these should be exactly white
and this should be 50% grey.
So now that we've done that, look at the difference,
when we turn off this Levels Adjustment layer,
there's before and there's after,
there's before with the green cast
and there after, perfect colour.
Now the great thing is we've corrected the colour here
using an Adjustment layer,
so we don't have to stay with it exactly as it is,
we can just lower the Opacity
just to bring a little bit of that colour cast in,
if you want to do purely a creative choice for you,
but I'm gonna actually leave it at 100%
and say that is how I want it.
So that's just a very quick tutorial
to show you how just by using Blend mode,
a little bit of knowledge about the Blend modes
and how we can use those in a different way
to compare layers to help us with our colour,
getting it nice and correct in our pictures,
but that's it, I've had a bit of a break
from doing videos for a while, but I'm back,
I'm doing a few every now and again now,
it might not be every week,
but when I do, hopefully it's a good one.
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But thanks for tuning in, leave a comment,
I'll get back to you and I'll see you next time.