B&W, Tints & Isolated Color Effects in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Black and white, tints and isolated color effects in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Black & White, Tinted, and Isolated Color Effects in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at black and white tints and isolated color for photos in Photoshop. We'll start by taking a photograph and convert it to black and white using a custom black and white adjustment that we can adjust to suit. Then we'll look at an isolated color effect and then tints and muted colors. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you, who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. If you're ready, let's get started on black and white tints and isolated color in Photoshop. 2. B&W, Tints & Isolated Color - Part 1: The image that I'm going to be using for this project is from Morguefile and it is free for download, you just have to do something with it and of course, we're going to be doing something with this image. So I've just selected this cupcake image. When you go to the link that I'll give you, you just click to download the image. That will download it to your computer and you can go ahead and open it up in Photoshop. Now, I've already done that, so let's go and see it. Here's the image in place in Photoshop. Now the first thing that we're going to do is look at a black and white conversion. This Black and White tool that we're using was brought in to Photoshop in Photoshop CS3. So it's been around for years, so you should have it in your version. We're going to apply it as a Adjustment Layer. So I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer", and we're going to "Black and White". I'll click "Okay". Now, the importance of applying this as an Adjustment Layer is that it's then going to be editable. So once we convert it to black and white or adjust the conversion, we can turn this on and off, and we can also mask it. This is a good way of working with Black and White and it's certainly a lot more sophisticated than using they Desaturate option. I'm going to double-click on the Layer Thumbnail here because I want to show you this Black and White panel. The "Properties" panel for black and white has a number of sliders, red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta. What this allows you to do is to customize your Black and White, so you can have a look at the reds in the image and you can take them in either direction towards black or towards white. Now, I know that the icing on the cake here was a sort of cyan color, so let's see what happens when we go to the cyans because we'll really see it working here. Well, we've lost all the data in the icing, but you can say that we can take it towards black or we can take it towards white and obviously we wouldn't want take it all that distance, but we can lighten the icing or we can darken it. This gives us a little bit of control over the fundamental black and white that we've created. If you're unsure about these sliders, just drag them to one end or the other, because sometimes you may find that the image doesn't even have this color in it. Doesn't appear that there's really much in the way of magentas in the image, so trying to drag on that slide is not going to give us much effect. There's a little bit of blue down in the corner here. We can lighten it or darken it. Now we're going to see in the skin color some impact in the red channel, so you can see that you can darken the skin, which is not very attractive at all, and you can lighten it. This way, you want to find some sort of balance point there. Here is a way of crafting a black and white image so it looks the way you want it to look. Now, I'm going to take down the cake a little bit because I don't want it to be quite as dark as it is. Let's go back to the "Layers" panel, and here is the "Black and White" effect removed and now it's added to the image. So there's a very simple starting point for converting an image to black and white. Before we leave our exploration of Black and White in Photoshop, I went and grabbed this image from unsplash.com. I just looked up the word "color" and I found this one from Burano in Italy, so I downloaded it and I've had it open here in Photoshop. I'm just going to add that same Black and White Adjustment Layer to this image, and we're just going to note, before I click "Okay", that we have a blue house, a yellow one, and a sort of reddy-brown one, so I'll click, "Okay". These houses have now all been converted to black and white, and this one, which was the darkest, has been rendered in a dark gray. The yellow one was the next dark, if you like, and that has been rendered in a sort of mid gray, and the pale blue one was really quite light, and so it's been rendered in a light color. Now, if we wanted to change the colors of these houses in terms of their shades of gray, it's going to be very easy to do so. The middle house was a sort of yellow color, and so it's going to respond to the yellows. The end house here was blue, so it's going to respond to the blues. Actually, it looks like it was a bit more in the cyan area, so we can drag it down. We could create a very low contrast image here, where all the houses were pretty much the same color, the same shade of gray or we can go completely the other direction and we can make the houses different colors. Now, as you're working on this black and white, you also have this little adjuster here. It is an option that allows you to click and drag on the image to adjust the slider. So I'm going to click and drag here, and this is going to lighten this area or this will darken it. So I can come in here and lighten this, because this is responding to the yellow slider and this one, very clearly, is responding to the red slider here. Here I can just drag on this left or right to make it lighter or darker and as you can see, the color in this house is very definitely in the cyan area. If you're ever unsure as to where a particular color is in an image, clicking on this slider and adjusting the area under the mouse will very clearly tell you what color you're working with. This area here is also in the yellow, still; before and after. In the next video, we'll look at creating an isolated color effect, and we're going back to our cupcake image. 3. B&W, Tints & Isolated Color - Part 2: The effect that we're going to create now is an isolated color effect and you've probably seen this in photos from weddings where the bride's bouquet is in color and the rest of the images in black and white. Well, we have a good starting point for that in this image because we've crafted a black and white image. All we need to do now is to do something with the cupcake to bring it back into full color. To do that, I'm going to start on the cupcake layer. Because I'm going to make a selection based on this layer. The simplest tool for me to use because this cupcake is reasonably well-defined, is going to be the quick selection tool. So I'm going to go here and select the Quick Select tool, and it has the size. At the moment, it's set to five pixels. I'm just going to start to drag over those areas of the cupcake that I want to included in this selection. You can see that of these three icons here. I have the middle one selective which has a plus sign beside it. That means every click and drag that I make over this image is adding more detail to the selection. I want to go all the way out into this white area. Now as I go, occasionally Photoshop is going to be a little bit enthusiastic and take too much. You can get that back. You can remove the area that Photoshop added by holding down the Alt key as you drag over that area. But I'm going leave that for now, because I'm going to try and get the most of the white cupcake liner that I can. Then I'm going to clean up my selection. I'm going to zoom in using the zoom tools, and I'm just going to click on that and zoom in so I can have a look as to what's happening here. Here's a bit that is clearly incorrect so I'm going back to my quick select tool, holding Alt or option and just dragging inwards to encourage Photoshop to have another look at that area. There's another area here too. You might have to work backwards and forwards between the Alt key to add and to remove areas from the selection. If you don't get it perfect that's fine, because I'm going to show you in a minute how you can fix up obvious problems later on. It is a little difficult for Photoshop to make this selection here. That's actually very difficult for me to see the cupcake liner here and where it ends and this person's hand begins. I've made a reasonably good selection here. I'm going to press Control or Command zero to zoom back out. At the moment, I've made my selection on this background layer. That's important because there's really no detail on the black and white adjustment layer. All the detail in the image that we can use to base our selection on is on this background layer. But what we want to do with this selection is we want to poke a hole in the layer mask here. The layer mask is automatically added by Photoshop. Whenever you use an adjustment layer, it comes with a layer mask so you didn't have to create it. It's already there for you. I'm just going to click in the layer mask. I'm going and make sure that it has this little border around it telling me that it is selected. Now, I have black as my foreground color here. The mask is white and that tells me that where the mask is white, I'm going to see the black and white effect. Where the mask is black, I'm going to be able to poke a hole in this black and white layer and see through to the colored layer below. So with black as my foreground color, I have my selection made. I have my mask selected. I'm going to press Alt backspace option delete on the Mac to fill this selected area with my foreground color which is black. That brought back the cupcake into the image. At this point, you just want to go around the edges of the cupcake and make sure that everything is looking good. So I'm going to zoom in with the zoom tool, and it's going to move around the edges of the cupcake and see where I might have problems. It's a little bit bumpy around here so I'm going go and get the brush tool. I'm going to select a soft brush but I'm going wind its hardness up for this particular image to about 75 percent. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush. I'm using the open square bracket key to do this. For this, I want to add this area to the black and white area of the mask so I want to be painting with white. I'm just going to paint with white. I'm going to make sure that I have the mask selected, and I'm going to deselect my selection and just paint over this area to remove it from the color area. If there's any other part of this image that is in color that I want to be in black and white, I can just paint over it with this tool. Now if I see something here that is black and white that really should be color, I'm going to reverse my colors and just paint it in. At this point, you'll probably want to learn the x key. The x key flips these to colors, most between black and white by just inverting these. So I want to add some black and white in here. So I'm going to press x, the white is now my foreground color and then press x to add this little bit in. It can be handy to continue to work around your masked area and just improve the mask. Now if this were flowers and a bride's bouquet then you probably would have quite a bit of work to do here but it's just around the very edges, and of course as you work you can increase and decrease your brush size. So I'm pretty happy with the result, I'm going to press Control zero to zoom back out, and there is my isolated color effect. What I've done is I've poked a hole through my black and white adjustment to see the cupcake on the layer below. All of this has been done in a non-destructive way because if I just click here on the eyeball icon for this black and white layer, you can say that the original color image is just sitting here. We haven't done anything to that image except added to it a black and white adjustment and then poked the hole in the adjustment layer mask, so that we can see the color underneath. 4. B and W Tints and Isolated Color Part 3: Now before we leave our black and white and isolated color effects, let's have a look at tints. I'm going to make a duplicate of this black and white adjustment layer because I want to keep my mask, but I also want to get rid of it. I'm just going to make a duplicate, so I have an exact copy. On this one, I'm going to remove the mask, so I'm just going to drag it onto the trash can. Then I'm going to click "Delete" because I want to delete the layer mask. Now I have a black and white adjustment here and here is the black and white adjustment with the isolated color effect. Let's go to this black and white adjustment that's affecting the entire image. I'm going to double-click here to open up the Properties again. These are the black and white adjustment layer properties. Here is a Tint option. This allows me to add a tint over the black and white image. We're tinting the black and white. If I click here, I open up a color picker that lets me pick whatever color I want to use. If I want to use a sort of bluey green or turquoise look color, I can go and select a turquoise color and then apply it as a tint over this image. This Tint option is just sitting there in the black and white adjustment. Let's go back to our layers palette because I want to show you another possible effect. I'm going to turn off that black and white adjustment. Let's go to this one. This one is of course, our isolated color, which is being controlled by this mask. But say we wanted this isolated color effect that we didn't want exactly black and white in the background. What if we wanted to say a little bit of the original image color? Well in that case, by selecting this adjustment layer, we can adjust its opacity. If we start reducing the opacity down to say 90 percent, you can see that we're seeing some of the color in the underlying image, we're seeing a lot over here, less over here because it was less colorful. I'm just dragging on the word opacity because that's what's called a scrubby slider. In Photoshop, if you drag on the words, it's the same as dragging on the slider. It's just that you don't have to make the slider visible. You can just drag on the word and you're making the adjustment. I've taken the opacity of this black and white adjustment down to 74 percent. We still got a full color here in the isolated color effect, but we've got a tint of the image happening underneath, not full color. This would be the full color image. This is the sort. In this case, it's being tinted with the original colors. Your project for this class will be to create one or more of these effects. Take an image and convert it to black and white using the black and white adjustment layer so that you can tweak the black and white to give yourself the best possible result. You could also try the isolated color effect to find something in the image that you want to keep in color and render the rest of the image in black and white doing that using a layer mask on the black and white adjustment layer. Then you may want to experiment with the tints. Now you can use the image that I've used and I've given you the link to download it or you can use any image of your choice. Unsplash.com and Morguefile are really good places to find images that you can use. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I hope that you've learned lots about black and white, tints and isolated color effects in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.