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Hey everybody! I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com,
Welcome right into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, where today we're going to
take a look at three ways - three steps to quickly make basically any photo pop
in Adobe Photoshop. What do I mean by pop? Well, it's like a nice, sort of subtle,
flat and faded contrast boost with some tonal color adjustments that just take a
photo from being "mm?" to "mm!" Something kind of like that.
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thank you for that! Let's jump into Photoshop and check this thing out.
Well, here we are in Adobe Photoshop, and let's just get right to the point.
The first thing I want to do is make sure that my adjustments panel here is wide
open, and I want to grab a curves adjustment, right there. It's going to drop
a curves adjustment layer in place. You really want to know how to use curves,
especially if you're going to be editing your photos in Photoshop. It's just such an
incredibly powerful tool. I've got some tutorials that I've made on it, that I think
you might really like. Here's what we're going to do - whoop! we're not going to add
a point there, that was a mistake. I'm going to grab this black point here, and I'm
going to drag it straight up just until the image really kind of loses a bit of contrast.
Then I'm going to click somewhere out here and I'm going to add a point, and I'm
going to drag down to kind of redarken the photo, but obviously, it's a bit dark
overall. But we're getting these like soft, faded, almost milky shadows. Even just this,
seems to be increasing the contrast quite a bit, but I'm not finished yet. I want to add
a point somewhere right out about here, and just push a little bit more light into those
middle tones. Middle into high tones, it's really going to boost up the color of her skin,
and the shirt, and the highlights in her hair, stuff like that. And then I might even pull
the white point down a little bit, just kind of fade some of that a little, so we're not
getting quite the bite on the highlights that we were before. So there's before,
there's after. This is the first step. Next, we want to change some of, sort of the color
and the color tone in the image. We're going to do that by using a color balance
adjustment layer. Now, I'd be remiss if I don't add, we could do a lot of this using
red, green and blue channels here in curves; but, I'm trying to make this a little bit
more friendly for the masses. So, sometimes just throwing a quick color balance
adjustment layer on is so quick and easy, and you're like, you know what? Hey,
I want to add - let's add a little bit of red to this, right? We're going to add some red
to the midtones. Let's go +20. That looks pretty good. Let's add a little bit of green
in there too, it'll be very subtle here. Maybe we'll go +7. And I think, let's try to add
some blue as well, that looks kind of nice. So we'll go +20, +7, +7, and then I'm going
to go over here. Let's hit the highlights - normally, I hit the highlights last, but I'm
feeling a little rebellious today. Let's add some red to the highlight. Again, because
I know that her skin is primarily the highlight, adding red to the skin rather than this
cyan blue, it just makes sense. Because your skin's - the pigment in skin is generally
going to have reds and yellows, pretty much regardless of ethnicity. You're going to
have a high color count of reds and yellows in the skin. So, pushing some red and
yellow into the skin is usually going to be a nice way to go. I'm not going to mess with
magenta or green here. I kind of like where that's sitting, and I don't want a crazy like
magenta or green color cast. That just looks hideous. Let's add some yellow here,
so we'll go - yeah, I think that's kind of nice! Just we'll go -10, we'll keep it nice and
rounded off. Just like that. And then, last but not least, we'll hit up the shadows here.
Now, in the shadows, if I add a lot of red, you can see, well, the darker parts of image,
or the shadowy parts, red is really going to darken things. Whereas, if I add cyan,
it's giving me that nice, aqua background. And that aqua blue - well, remember,
aqua and blue, see, the opposite of cyan is red, and the opposite of blue is yellow,
and what did we put in her skin? We put a lot of yellow and red in her skin.
So, if the background behind her has a high cyan and blue count, it's going to have
a very beautiful contrast with the colors that we're sort of pushing to dominate in
her skin, in her hair, and even in the shirt that she's wearing here. So, let's go like,
I don't know, right around -15 or so with the cyan. And I would prefer to go magenta,
because magenta is a little, you know, more in the cyan and blue family than green.
And again, remember, just trying to get that nice blue, cyan contrast background to
foreground. And then we'll push some blue in there, as well. So we'll go, I don't know,
+5, +6 in the blue department. So, there's before the color change; there's after the
color change. And you can see, that just sort of makes it look like we've changed the
contrast a lot. We can shut off both of these layers. There's the photo we dragged in,
here's where we are now. We've really just added a lot to the photo, and we're not
finished yet! Because the third step, is, don't sleep - well, don't sleep on the color
lookup tables layers, but we're not going to use that here. I'm going to go with a
selective color layer. I'm going to click on this. And I'm actually going to end up
dragging it down, above the photo. But let's try just applying it overall and see what
it looks like. And then we'll drag it down there, and maybe readjust, if we have to.
So, I'm going to start with the blacks. These are literally the blacks, the very darkest
of shadows. If I say, take a bunch of yellow out of them, you're going to see just the
very darkest areas of the hair. The highlights are almost totally unaffected, and all
the darker stuff gets this super heavy blue color cast. That's not what we're going for
here. What I'll do, is I'll leave cyan magenta at zero, I actually want to push some
yellow into it. So I'll push yellow up, and you want to be really careful here. You go too
far, and it really starts to look bad. So let's push some yellow into there,
and then I want to remove some of the black. This is going to give me kind of a heavy
faded look. Now, this is a little too heavy. But I know that I'm going to be dragging it
down beneath these layers that are adding contrast. So, I'll just - I'm going to leave it at
-10, and we'll readjust if we have to. In fact, I might even push it a little further, let's
go like -15, right? And you can see, it legitimately kind of looks bad, right? Or, at least,
it's not the look we're going for. I'm going to pop up here to neutrals, and for the
neutrals, let's push a little bit of cyan into it. Maybe 5, 6, something like that. With
magenta, we'll push - just a kiss of magenta. I don't want to go too far on the magenta
and then with yellow, we'll push just a little bitty bit of yellow into there, as well.
Not too much. You can see, it's almost giving us this green/yellow shadow effect,
and I'm not going to mess around with the level of blacks. Now, I'm just going to
drag selective color down beneath my other layers, right above the background.
And if I shut that off, there's what we had before. Here's what we have now.
It's - there's a little bit too much of that black fade going on. So let's go back to our
blacks, and I'm going to just pull that back to, I don't know, 8, 9, 10. Something
like that. -7, that looks kind of good. Right? There's before, there's after. See how
it just kind of mellows things out? Now, you may be asking, why didn't you just
start with selective color and then add curves and color balance, wouldn't that be
more straight forward? Well, yes, and you could do that. Here's why I didn't though,
the selective color adjustment layer is going to be more of like, the finishing touch
type effect, and if I add it to the image right off the bat, you can see, it's almost sort
of like, what did that do? It just kind of sucked more contrast out, began color
influencing the shadows, and things like that. When I'm working with an image,
I tend to like to begin infusing the contrast side of my tonal and color adjustments
first. That's why curves is almost always my go to. So I begin with that, then I say,
you know what? Let me add some color to this. This is a beautiful sharp image now,
and now I can go back and try to stylize and maybe fade some of those shadows
a little bit and give my image a little bit more of that kind of textured, crunchy
depth that I'm looking for. And maybe even if the selective color is still too much,
eh, just pull back on the layer opacity a little. Maybe go back to 50%, something
like that. There's before, there's after. Or, if you straight up don't like it, the beauty
of this is, you can stop any point along the way. But, with these three steps, you can
take any photo, and if you apply nice color, and nice contrast, you can really make
anything look pretty decent.
Ah, yes! I knew it would be quick, I knew it would be easy. See how simple that is?
And the difference is so drastic. I think you're really going to like it. And the technique,
and the way I go about applying this stuff - it really - we used a studio shot photo,
but it really applies to anything. A landscape photo, product photos, just general
location, lit portraits of kids running around the park. There's always color and
tone that can boosted, affected, changed that can just take that photo and mm!
Give it that extra va-va-voom! And if there's something I like, it's a little more
va-va-voom! Ladies and gentlemen, for covering these features, and these three
simple adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one!
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