Color Grading In Photoshop For Beginners

1. Introduction: When it comes to the subject of creating art with photos, I believe that colors are an essential tool in order for you to be able to express yourself, conveying emotion or tell a story. Whats up you all. My name is Daniel Nwabucko and I'm photographer based in the Canadian prairies. I've been doing this for a few years now and I'm really excited to be able to share my knowledge as some of the things that I've learned with you all. In this course, we're going to be talking about color grading in Adobe Photoshop and how that can help you to express yourself through your art. I know that as creatives, we all want to be able to tell a story through our photos and colors are very essential part of that process. We'll be looking at tools needed for the process, talking about the differences between color correction and color grading, and as well as how to create color lookup tables, that way you are able to create a color scheme which I were to use in the future for different projects. There will be a project file provided that way you can have hands on practice and try out some of the newly learned skills. If this is something that sounds interesting to you, I'd love to have you aboard the class, lets jump right in and I'll seen you in there. 2. Project Video: Hey. Welcome back. I'm so glad you could join in. Well, while you're here, let's talk about the class projects. For the class project, I'll be providing you with a couple of different project files. The point is, so that you're able to follow along as we go through this process together. The project files would be the exact same ones that I use in the course. You can follow along exactly as I go, but feel free to do whatever it is that you want to experiment with. Remember, you're also creative and I want you to be able to explore that. I'd love to see what you come up with and I'm pretty sure others who are taking this class would also love to see what you come up with. Here's what I ask of you, in the project gallery section of this course, I'd like for you to upload a picture that you've color graded using lots that you have made out of what you learned in this class. I known that's a mouthful, but I'm really eager to see what you come up with. I'm pretty sure others who are taking this class would love to see what you come up with. The photo you upload does not have to be one of the ones that were contained in the project file folder. Feel free to use a photo that you or a friend of yours may have taken in the past. Let's have some fun together. You have some fun creating and don't forget to share. Let's jump right into Lesson One. 3. Importing File into Photoshop: Welcome to Lesson 1. So happy to have you here. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about opening up Photoshop and importing the photo that we're going to be using through the course. I personally have Photoshop saved here on my desktop and I'm going to be screen-sharing everything so that you can seen exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to click on the Photoshop icon and this is what you are supposed to get. Something similar to this, it's just a home screen and you can do some learning or with Adobe if you want to do that, but that's not what this course is about. We're going to go back to home and we're going to open up the photo that we're going to be working with. For that, I'm going to be clicking on the open button on here. It's going to open up a dialogue box and that opens up that dialogue box for us. I will locate the folder and the file on my system and open it up, for me that's the Skillshare project one.dng photo. That's what we're going to be opening and we're going to open that up, and it's right there for us. Now the first thing that happens is it opens up in camera row, which is like Lightroom for Photoshop. You get to do a little bit of editing here before you send it into Photoshop. Now the picture, it's a nice picture but as you can see there are some things I would rather have different in this photo, for example the exposure and the red balance and the color balance in this photo, that's a way is perfectly into color correction. We're going to be talking about that in the next lesson. 4. Color Correcting the Image: Welcome to our lesson on color correction. According to the Internet, color correction refers to the correction of exposure, contrast, white levels, black levels, as well as the white balance of the image. That would include the tint and the temperature of the image and that's exactly what we're going to be taken care of in this. For this image, one of the things I like to do when I have an image of my screen is identify the different parameters that are going on. I'm looking down here and I can see that these are the shadows and the blacks and I can see that they're, quite under exposed. I want to change that by bringing up the exposure. That is what I like to deal with first my exposure because when I see what I'm dealing with, then I know what I'm working with. Increase the exposure, that's good, I like that. Another thing is you can see right on this side here, you can see that the shadows and the blacks is still in the dark, so I'm going to increase the shadows as well. I think that looks good, maybe a little bit of the blacks slightly, plus eight, maybe not very slight, but slight enough. I'll play with the highlights just to see if I can get some more detail back in the Cloud, I think we're losing a lot from the general photo if we decide to get some more details back in the Clouds. Let me take a look and see what the whites. I don't want to do too much of that. I think that looks good. I do see that this photo is quite red, you can see it on the roads right hear. You can see that it's quite red and you can see it in the mountains on the left over here, also very red. Now, obviously, they were red when the pictures were taken but as I know, cameras have a way of over exaggerating things, especially if you don't have enough time to set your white balance. I am going to dial in someone green, it's just a little bit, not too much. Another thing I'm going to do is I prefer my images to be warmer, so I'm going to put some warmth in the temperature up here. Let's see what we get. I think I'm liking that. I'm going to turn on my exposure again. That's good. Just so you know, there's no one right answer or one preset or effect fix everything. Sometimes you might have to turn up your exposure now and then go ahead and turn it down later after you've maid sum changes so feel free to explore all those options, don't feel like you're tied down and you just have the one thing to do. Make sure you're exploring a different options. I think this is good enough. Turn up that exposure just a little more, I like it, and I think we're good to send it into Photoshop. Right before we do that, I'm just going to go ahead and play with my vibrant. Turn that up slightly. I think I like that. Just a little touch and I think this looks good before we go ahead and start color grading in Photoshop. Let's go ahead and open this up in Photoshop. I'm just going to click Open down here, and it's going to take me into Photoshop. Beautiful. This is our photo that we have. This is our starting point for our color grading, and this is where we're going to be starting from in the next lesson. 5. A Brief intro to Photoshop Layers: Let's talk about layers in Photoshop. Simply put, layers are stacked papers on top of other papers, so for example, let's say the picture we have on the screen right now is a piece of paper. Adding a layer to it by clicking the new layer button down here would put what feels like a piece of paper on it, and I'm just going to show you an example here. If I take the pen tool or the brush tool and I write on that piece of paper, whatever happens stays on that piece of paper, so I can take that off and turn it back on and it does not affect the picture itself. Now obviously, if this is a transparent piece of paper we can see what we wrote on it, but we can also see what is underneath it, but the pixels below it and not necessarily effected by it. Layers are wonderful in the sense that we can have multiple different layers and do multiple different things, in this case, I'm just going to draw with different colors, on different layers and I can take them off and the picture is not destructed, so I think that's a beautiful thing that layers are able to do. We are going to be working in layers today, I'm just going to delete these layers by selecting them. What I did is I clicked layer one, I hold the shift key and click layer two that's selecting two layers, and I'm going to drag them to the recycle bin here or to the bin I guess it's not really recyclable. Drag them and we're going to be working in layers today, the type of layers we're going to be working in are called adjustment layers. 6. A Brief Intro to Adjustment Layers in Photoshop: According to Adobe, adjustment layers applies color and tonal adjustments to your image without permanently changing the pixel values. Now, that sounds like a lot of words. Let me explain it this way. When you have an adjustment layer placed on top of your picture, for example, I'm going to pick a random adjustment layer, a hue and saturation layer. When you have an adjustment layer on top of the photo layer, what happens is that adjustments that are made on that layer stay on that layer. For example, I'm changing the hue in this adjustment layer, and you can see what is happening is changing the hue on the picture indeed, but what happens is the adjustments stay just on the hue and saturation layer. That means I can turn that off, and I still have my photo all intact. It's not destroyed by the changes that I made. Now one of the things I usually tell people to do just as a precaution is always and always make a duplicate of your background layer because your background layer is the foundation to all the layers that you have on here. I'm going to go ahead and do that right now because I forgot to do it earlier on, but it's okay, we've not maid any changes yet, so I can still do it right now. You do that by taking your background layer and dragging it to the New Layer icon, and it would make a background copy. Another way you can do it is by using the command J button on a Mac or the control J button on a PC. I'm going to do that hear by hitting "Command J" because I have a Mac, and you can seen it duplicates my layer again for me. That's exactly what you want to do to get a duplicate of your layer. Now, I need just one, I'm going to hit the "Delete" button on background copy two, because I don't need that. I do have my background copy ready for me. I'm just going to leave that won there, and this is just for safety, just in case you make a change to the background copy layer, you still have your background layer, you still have your photo intact. 7. The Selective Color Adjustment Tool : For color grading, we're going to be using a lot of adjustment layers. Now, I do have a few preferences of mine which I'll be using. But just so you know, if you do not found your adjustment layers right here, go into the Windows, click on ''Windows'' and make sure you have it checked here. If I checked mine off, you can see that it takes it out, but I need mine back on. I'm going to go ahead, hit the adjustments and it's going to put it right back there for me. Now I do have my histogram on the side and I have my libraries on the left. That's just how I liked the arrangement of my Photoshop to be one of the tools that I love to use when I color grade is a selective color tool. You can seen it right here. It's like a rectangle with triangles on the inside of it, or depending on what you see, it looks like an envelope as well. You can click that right there, and it will give you the option of the selective color. Now another thing you can do is you can click the ''Adjustment button'' at the bottom right here. Click that and you can see that it gives all the options that are above and you can hit selective color and it would do the same exact thing for you. I'm going to delete one of them, selective color two, I'm going to hit my delete button, takes that out. We're going to be working in the selected color one. What the selective colors adjustment lets you do is, if you click on the "Colors tab", it will show you the different colors that just about any picture would have or most pictures have, I should say some pictures avoid some colors, but it will show you those pictures and you can make selective adjustments to those photos. The first thing I like to do in every photo before I start using my selective colors is I like to figure out the different colors that are in the picture. That way I can make good decisions on what I need to change for the photo to look, how I need it to look. We're going to be talking about identifying colors in the next lesson. 8. Identifying the colors in the photo: Let's identify the colors in this picture. Now, for the sake of this picture, I'm going to go into full screen mode, and I do that by hitting the F button on the keyboard. Now, I know that some of you may not know some of the shortcuts. So I'm going to be talking about every shortcut that I use as I go through this because I think they're such goods time savers. So I go ahead and hit the F button and the first thing it does is it takes out sum of the tabs. If you notice here, the first time I take it, it takes off the Adobe Photoshop 2020 tab. The second time I hit it, it goes into complete full-screen mode. I'm going to zoom into this photo. I do that by hitting Command and the Plus button, on Macs, Control and Plus on Windows. I'll be looking for what colors do we have in this photo. Let's start off from the color of that looks like it's pretty much everywhere. We have lots of reds in the mountains here, on the side, right here. Those are reds, reds and oranges. We have the same going on here, same thing with the road. You can see lots of reds down here and right hear and in the skin of the person here, we also have the red colors. The hues contained in skin tones are red, yellows, and oranges. So whenever I see a person, I know that I'm going to be dealing with red, yellow, as well as orange. That is a thing that I'm just aware about. We have those colors, red, yellow, orange we'll be dealing with lots of those. Now, we also have some greens here and here's the thing about green. Whenever I see trees, one of the things I've learned over the past few years with experience is in the greens, there's always some yellow. Now, I'm just going to throw up a color wheel real quickly so that we can take a look and seen what the color wheel says. Now, as you can see in the color wheel, yellows come right before green. So we have red, oranges, yellows, and greens and yellows come very close to the green. So there's always that point where you have the yellows grading into the greens. I know that anytime I see greens or yellows, there might be a mix of the other color. If it's a yellow, there might be a mix of green and if it's green, there might be a mix of yellow in it. So when I see this, I know that I have yellows in these greens as well, so not just greens. Now I'm going to zoom right out of this photo and what I do for that is I hit Control Zero, Command Zero depending if you're on Mac or PC and it shows me the whole photo again. So we've identified a few colors. We have reds, also, oranges, and yellows included in the mountains, in the rocks by the side of the road. We have the same thing on the road itself. We have the same thing in the skin color, and then we have greens as well as yellows and we also have some neutral colors. These would be considered as whites. The skies will either be considered as gray or whites, and if we go zoom in a little more, you can see right here that we have some blues, very tiny little, but still counts, everything counts. So I'm going to go right out of the photo again, Command Zero or Control Zero, depending if you're on Mac or PC and those are the colors. I'm going to go out of full screen by hitting my F button again and we're back in the screen. I love to identify my colors, that way, I know exactly what I'm going to be working with, what colors I need to tweak in my selective color adjustments. In the next lesson, we're going to go ahead and we're going to start messing with the colors to see what we can get out of this photo. 9. Playing w/ Colors: Green x Yellow: Right back hear in Photoshop, and we're going to start messing with our photos, not really messing with them, just tweaking them a little bit to see what we can get out of them. So for me, I'm going to start off with the green colors. I'm going to go to my selective color here, double-click on the icon, and it would bring up the different colors, we click on the color options and go down to green. Now, the first thing that I like to do is even though I've already identified my colors, I also like to see what the computer has to say about where and what colors are present in different spaces. To do that, I go with the blacks. I move the black slider up and down, and if you notice, it will tell you exactly where things are changing. You get to see where things are changing, and that is how you known what colors are present where. Now, what I consider the black slider to be is the black slider it's almost the base that holds it all together. It's the color black in a color, is the contrast of that particular color, or the saturation of that particular color in a given photo. When I check to see whether greens are by increasing the blacks, you can see they're in the trees and you can see that not all the trees are glowing or anything like that. That is because there are still some yellow content. Just for the sake of example, I'm going to go into my yellow color and I'm going to change the black slider just so you can see. There you go. You can see how much yellow content is contained in those greens. You can see the yellow line on the rode write here is also changing there. There you have it. There are more yellows than what we can see the green in the greens contained in this photo. I'm going to go back to the greens, one of the things I like to do is I'm going to first increase my blacks. I do like to increase the cyans and the greens, as well as the yellows contained in the greens. I'm going to take a look and see what that looks like by hitting the I icon here. It shows me what has happened. It's very subtle. You barely see any changes, but I like it. I'm going to name this selective color layer green. All you have to do is just double-click on the name, type in whatever you need, hit the enter button and it saved it for you. This is what I've done with the greened. For this course, I'm going to be doing every different change on a different layer. That way we can go back and see all the changes that we made throughout the course. Personally, by myself because I've done this a few different times, I tend to do it all on the same layer, or maybe two or three layers depending on how much change I'm going to be making, but for the sake of this course, we're going to be doing it on different layers so that we can go back, we can tweak things back and fourth and go from there. I'm going to make another layer. I'm going to go to the yellows this time because I still want to deal with those trees. Now let's see, if we increase the blacks, it goes really dark. I don't want that there. I want it to be brighter, good. That's exactly what I want. I'm going to increase my science. See how when you increase your science, it gives it that very lush green. It looks very summary, or springy. I'm going to dial it back and you can see what happens on the opposite sighed. Now, I usually play with my sliders and now there are things that I already know will happen when I play with certain sliders, or when I play with a slider differently, but I implore you, play with them as you want. You can see that when you dial your science back, it gives you that very fulfilling to a photo. Let's take a look and see what magenta has. Something I should have mentioned earlier is we have cyan, magenta, and yellow. Now, I should mention that the opposite colors of cyan, magenta, and yellow would be red, green, and blue. That's what we popularly call R, G, B. So we have CMY and RGB , and these colors are the digital opposites of each other. If you know anything about digital color theory, how does that work? If I increase the cyan in a photo, it increases the cyan in the photo, or in the yellows in this case, increasing the cyan increases the cyan. Now, if I decrease the cyan, it increases the red. You see? It's like whenever I increase cyan, reds decrease, when I decrease cyan, red increase. That's how that works. I'm going to decrease it because that's what I want. Now, for the magentas, I'm going to set this back to zero, CMY, RGB. When I mess with my magenta slider, I'm also messing with the greens in the photo. If I reduce the magentas, I'm increasing the greens, and if I increase the magentas in this photo, I'm reducing the greens. Now you can seen here that a combination of increasing my magenta, and reducing my cyans gives me a very fall feel to this photo. This is how you can create fall in Photoshop shop in the shamba by changing the colors of the leaves. That's how it works. You don't have to pay for presets anymore for those lots, you can do it yourself. I'm going to go back, increase my cyan. Let's take a look. I'm going to decrease my magentas with this one. Now, Y. The opposite of Y, yellow is going to be blue. So if I decrease my yellow, I'm increasing my blues, and if I increase my yellows, I'm decreasing my blues. I'm just going to mess around with it, see what I get. I really like the look with the increased yellows, but I'm going to take that down. Another thing to remember is, while I'm playing with the yellows, there is again some content of yellow in the skin here. So that's something that I got to remember. I'm going to reduce that. Let's take a look. These are the changes that we've made so far. I'm going to go ahead and group all the changes. How I do that? Is I select the green, I'm also going to select the yellow by holding the Shift quay and clicking on the yellow, and I'm going to hit Command G and that would group the layers together and I'm going to name that color grade. I think that's better. This selective color one here, I'm going to double-click on that and name that yellow because that is what we changed. Let's take a look. I'm going to turn off the eye icon for the color grade. That's a change that we've made so far. That's all the changes that we've maid. I think that looks good. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and let's take another look. I think that looks good. In the next lesson, we're going to be playing with tweaking the red balance and seeing what we can get out of the red sliders. 10. Playing w/ Colors: Reds: Now, we're going to play with the red colors. Again, I will be pulling out my Selective Color layer, open that up. Under colors, I'm going to select reds. Again, the first thing I do is play with the black sliders, see where exactly does that affect. You can seen the roads, the mountains, as we identified earlier on. All the roads and the rocks by the size of the road as we identified earlier on. Let's take a look. If we decrease the Cyans, we're going to be adding more reds, and you can see that it's just beautiful. I really like that. Reduce the Cyans, we're adding more reds. That puts some life back in the skin tones, and we can do the same. Let's try moving our magenta and see what we get. We can see obviously, we don't want to go to the left side of the magenta because we're getting lots of greens in there. If we go to the right, again, some magentas in there, and I like the amount of life that is coming into this photo through this red slider. Let's see what we have with the yellows. Let's decrease it first. You can see that it has a purple-ish. That's because of the addition of blue to the photo. If we click to go to the opposite side, you can see that it makes everything really warm. That's not bad. I don't want it as much as that, so I'm going to dial it back a little bit. Let's play with the black slider as well. Just so you know, the black slider is not meant just for checking to see what is present. Of course, you can use a black slider as well to add some more effects to your photo. Let's take a look. Right now, we've added our reds, which I should name the layer red. Let's take a look and see what we've done. It just looks like there is sum more life that has been added to the photo. I like the fact that we got it a little warmer than where we started, and it just looks beautiful to me right now. I hope you are working on yours. Again, yours doesn't have to be exactly what I'm doing. Let it be your style. Let it be what you want to see. I like that. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about the blues. Remember, we said there were just slight blues right here. We have some blues right in the sky. While here, it goes white, but let's see what we have in the blues and we'll go from there. 11. Intermission : Hi, guys. This is just an intermission message to say congratulations on making it this far. I hope you're having fun. I hope you're learning something new. Let's keep it pushing. I hope that you are playing around with the project files to see what you can get out of them. All right. Let's jump right back into the lessons. 12. Playing w/ Colors: Blue x White x Cyan: For the blues again, same step we've been doing the whole time. I will be adding another selective color layer, renaming that blues. I'm going to go to the blues, I'm going to see what we have here with our black slider. I'm going to check to see if we really have anything and you can see it's a very subtle change. I'm hoping you can see that, very subtle but it is there. Now for this one, I'm actually going to draw up the black so that we have some more contrast in the blues. Now from the blues, one of the things I usually like to do and you can mess around with this as you will is I like to reduce the yellow, so that it accentuates the blue colors and I like to increase the cyan as well. Sometimes I do not really play with the magentas, other times I do. But in this case, since we don't really have too many blues, I'm not going to play much with it. Reducing the yellow, increasing the cyan gives it a good punch to the blue. We can't really see much in this photo, but I'm pretty sure if we had that same effect on other photos, we'd be able to see more of that. Now, the last color that is in here, whites. Let's play with the whites as well, since the whites go right in with the blue. Selective color layer, double-click on that's to rename, name it whites, and let us go into the whites. Again, same step. I'll play around with the blacks and you can see it right there. You can see that when we reduce the blacks and send whites to completely white, everything goes white and you can see when I increase that color, now you can see some blues come in. I'm going to close this for a moment and toggle off our blues and see if we can see much of the difference. Now we can't really see too much of a difference in there, so we're just going to play around with the whites. I don't want the blacks all the way at the top, but one of the things I love to do with my whites is I like to reduce the yellow that is in the whites. If you notice that throws some blue back in there, just take a look. I only pull it to negative 100 just to exaggerate and show you what I'm talking about but you can see that it puts some blues into it. If I take yellows all the way to the top, you can see that it puts some yellows into it obviously. I'm going to reduce that a little bit and what we get is this takes us closer to pure white. We had a situation where we had a bride in a dress that is white and we turn down the yellows on that dress, it gives a glowy feel to that dress because it's really pure white. Another thing I like to do sometimes is add some cyans to it. Again, the same treatment I do with the blues. I don't really play with the magenta is in it, I just like to keep it safe like that. So that is that, that is good for that. Again, let's take a look and see what we have, our before and our after. You can see all the changes we've made and it's really just bringing this photo to life. I really am enjoying this right now. Now, one of the colors that is always also in the blues and sometimes in the white is cyan. I'm going to throw in a cyan grade for this one as well. Cyan color, change to cyans here. Don't forget to rename and let's take a look and seen what we really have. You can see the color of the skirt that the girl is wearing, you can see it's responding to that cyan. I'm going to turn that up a little bit and you can see that it increases the contrast in the skirt. Let's go back and fourth again. You can see that write there. I'm going to move this away. I'm still playing with the black slider. We can see that it has some effect on the skirt. I'm going to increase the blues by reducing the yellows, I should say. Increase the cyan is because it only makes sense, cyan, for cyan. For the blacks, maybe I'll turn it up just a little bit. Let's zoom out and take a full look at the picture. In fact, let's take this into full screen. See what we have. That looks good. I like it, I really do. Now I'm going to minimize the color grade and let's take a look and see what we have for before and after. Before, and after, I think that really looks good. Now in my style of photography, I love colors. I like to keep colors present wherever they are. Now, there are some times that I might mute a color if there are too many colors clashing. But if a color is present, I personally like to keep it present, so that is beautiful, I think. We have our color grade and I'm really enjoying it. Let's do one more time that before and after, I like it. Very colorful just as I want it and just the bright and just popping out the screen like that. In the next class, we're going to talk about how to start saving your grading as a lot. That way you can use it in other files. 13. Saving Color Grade As LUTs: Now that we have our color grading exactly where we want it to be, we can go ahead and save that as a LUT. The purpose of that, is so that we can use it in future projects or we can use it to just make our work a little more consistent when it comes to the colors of it. Couple of things that I should tell you. You need to delete that Background Copy layer. Again, that was just for safety while we were working. In order to save your LUT, please delete that layer. I'm going to select it and hit the "Delete" button. All that we should have is the Color Grade and the Background layer. That's all that we should have. That is very important. If not, you're going to have problems with your LUT. Let's have that saved. We're going to go over hear to File. You may not see me clicking on File, but you seen the pop-down menu. So File, under File, we go to Export and in Export, we're going to go to Color Lookup Tables. That's the exact meaning of LUTs, L-U-T, lookup table. We click that. Now, it's going to bring us to this dialog box where we have to answer a few questions. Now, I personally usually use Lowercase File Extensions, and the reason for that, is it's more accessible to other different programs. Now, if you decide not to, you can have a.Cube file. In this case, we're going to be using.Cube. Photoshop can open any other of the options for the formats, but we're going to be using a.Cube. Again, the reason is it's more accessible to different programs and I want that option. I'm going to be using mine in a lowercase. Now, for Grid Points, I'm leaving mine at medium and the reason for that is you don't want to have it at to high or maximum. If not, it's going to bee tasking your computer a lot whenever you want to use that LUT. No pun intended. That's exactly how I'm going to have my settings. I'm just going to hit "OK." Now, it's going to ask me where do I want to save it and I want to save it here, as Skillshare Project Photo LUT. I'm going to hit "Save." Save it wherever you want to on your computer, that's all up to you. Now, I have that saved. Now, let's try something. What I'm going to do here, is I'm going to toggle off our Color Grades just to make sure we have our original picture. What I'm going to do here, is I'm going to import the LUTs that we just exported, just to make sure it works and see how it still works on this photo. I'm going to go here, under Adjustments layer, you can see this grid boxes here, the grid boxes, that is where it says Color Lookup. You see that whenever you toggle over any of the icons, you can see what that does. Color Lookup is what we want. Now, it's going to ask me 3DLUT file, Abstract, Device Link. I'm going to select 3DLUT File, and I'm going to load that. Now, do I want to load a 3DLUT file? Yes, I want to load exactly what we have just made. I'm going to try to load that and it's going to take me right here, and this is what I want. This is the one that I named. You can see here, Skillshare Project Photo LUT.cube. That is exactly what I want. I'm going to open that up and you can see write there, it puts a layer on my photo and you can see that layer is doing exactly what our LUT was doing. You can see it. The LUT and the layer are exactly the same thing. Now that's how you. 14. Trying Out Your LUTs : In the previous lesson, we saved up our color grades as our LUTs and I'm really excited. Again, I'm so excited to see what you guys come up with. I want to see before photos as well as after photos using a LUT that you created. Don't forget to put that in the Projects folder of this course. So back to the lesson. In the previous photo, we were able to save our LUTs. Now, let's see these LUTs. They may or may not work in different photos. Again, it wouldn't be a lie to say that every single LUT would work on every single photo. So we're going to try it out on some other photos and see if it works out. We're going to go ahead and open up some more photos in Photoshop and see how the LUT carries over to those different photos. These photos are also going to be included for you there, they're the project photos, 1.1 and 1.2, I'd include them for you so you can try out your LUTs and see how that works for you. Again, it opens up in Adobe Camera Raw. The point of this is so that you can make some color corrections before you send it in for maybe final color grading, or some more corrections, or depends on what you're looking for. So this photo right here, I'm just going to increase the exposure a little bit to my taste and increase the contrast just to bring back a little bit of contrasting details as I increase the exposure. On the left here, I can see that there are shadows. I want to bring that up just a little bit, might be a little too much. I think that's good. Highlights, bring it down a little bit. Highlights are mostly in the sky, so I'm just going to bring that down a little bit just for our contrast sake again. Blacks turn it up slightly. Because of increasing the blacks in the shadows, I'm also going to increase my contrasts as well. I think that looks good to me. I'm going to increase my vibrance slightly just to give the color a little bit of more pop. I do like pop. Now, we're not going overboard like this, don't do that. All right. There we go. So maybe I'll add up plus 12. I do like that, I enjoy it, so I'm going to open that up, and let's see what it looks like in Photoshop. This is exactly what it looks like. We're going to go ahead and try out our LUTs to see if it works. Again, it may or may not work. Call a look-up table, we're going to load 3D LUTs, open that up. It takes me to my folder where I have the LUTs, and that opened that up. There we go. So that's a before, that's an after. I do like it. I love the fact that the blues pop a little more. You can see that, and you can see that in the greens it does lighten them up. This is just a beautiful summer's day. I do like it, I do like what I'm getting out of this. This is what we get with the presets, the LUT that we created on this photo and so that's a before, that's the after. You can see that the skies go really blue and I really like that. The greens, they're just nice and green. You just have a beautiful summer's day here. If there's anything I'm going to do to this photo, I made down right there, I may have to just turn down the brightness just a little bit just to get some more contrast and just so we have a little bit of vignette in all around the photo, and so that the view I go right into the center of the photo. That might be one of the changes I would make, but when it comes to the coloring, I think the LUT is doing a great job. I'm going to go ahead and open up another photo, and the other photo is going to be our project 4 or 1.2. We have our project photo 1.2 over here, and again, I'm going to just do a slight editing in this photo. I want to bring up the shadows just a little bit, as well as the exposure for this photo. I want to increase the contrast as well just to give it some more definition to the colors. I do like that. I really like this photo. I love the way the colors just match with each other. You got some greens, some blues, yellows, and reds, red orange here, so it's beautiful, and some whites. I really do enjoy this photo as is. Let's see, I think that's everything. I'm going to increase the vibrance just a little more, so it pops a little more. That's good for me. I'm going to go ahead and finish up by opening it up in Photoshop. That's the photo. Again, let's try out our LUTs that we created on this photo. I'm going to go up here, color lookup table, load 3D LUTs, and I'll select the LUT that we created. I go ahead and there you have it. That's the before, that's the after, before, after. I think I'm really liking this LUT, I think I'm going to keep it. You can see it before and after. You can notice that the whites get a little bit more life. Look at the chairs, there's is a low more life in the whites, you can see. It puts just low tint of blue in them and just gives him that purity of white. So I do like that. Then you can see what happens to the blues that are up here as well, they start to pop out some more. You can see that, and the greens just light up. Look down here and notice how that happens. You can see all of that is happening. It just so happens that our LUT works out for all these pictures. Here's the thing. All LUTs are not going to work out for all photos. LUTs can be very selective because when we're making LUTs, we're looking at the colors in the current photo and using them to estimate for another photo we're going to take or another photo were previously taken. So it's not always going to work out. This is why you need to be able to have the power to make the changes that you want. Study your colors, study your photos, and then you'll be able to create what you want out of them. 15. Saving Your Luts into Photoshop: Now that we have all LUTs and we've tested it out in different photos, we've seen that it works. Again, it may not always work out, so be ready to tweak back and fourth with different photos. But for this one, it works, which is great. We're going to save the LUT into Photoshop. Let see how to do that. In order for you to save you LUTs to Photoshop, all you have to do is located it in your finder and then you're going to move that over to the Photoshop preset folder. For me, I have mine right hear, that's a lot that we just created SkillshareProjectLUT.cube. I'm going to copy that by hitting command C on my Mac, Control C on your Windows. You can also drag it if you want, but I'm going to be using the control keys. I'm going to go to applications on my Mac, find the Photoshop document, that's Adobe Photoshop 2020. I'm going to go into preset folders and under 3D lots. Now I'm going to paste it there either by right-clicking and hitting on paste item or by using Control V, it's going to try to take permission from me. I'm going to put in my password for that to happen. There you have it. We can see the LUT right there. Once you have it saved in the preset folder of Adobe, it is now there anytime you need it. Now you may need to restart your Photoshop just so it comes on and that is exactly what I'm going to do right now. I've restarted my Photoshop and I'm back with the photo that we previously worked on. I'm going to go back to my LUTs and I'm going to use the adjustment icon down below here. Go back to my color lookup and select under 3D LUT file, and you can see right now that we have our skill share projects whole LUT. It's now there for us to use. Whenever you want to reach it, it's write there and I'm going to click that and you can seen what it does. It's right there on the photo brightening up the greens and saturating the blues. These are all the different settings that we put into it, and I'm really happy with this. We have successfully created a LUT. Congratulations. 16. Congratulations !!!: Congratulations, you have reached the end of this course. I hope you've been able to take something out of this course, I hope you successfully created a lot. Again, I'd love to see before photos and after photos of what you have come up with. Now, this doesn't have to be any of the projects photos, it could be a photo you've taken in the past. Please share them in the project folder for this course, I'd love to see them. I'm pretty sure every other person who took this class would like to see what you came up with. I hope that you've enjoyed this. I'll be including the lots that I've made out of this, I'll be including it in this class so that you can have that, you can test it out for yourself, and you can see how it works. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, feel free to leave a message in the comment section, and I would love to reach out to you. If there is anything in photography or color grading that you want to heard about, let me know. I'll be making future courses hear on Skillshare, and I'd love for you to be a part of the journey. Feel free to follow my Skillshare account here so they get notifications and updates as to when I put up a new course. Thank you so much for taking this course with me, I sincerely do appreciate your time and attention. You take care of yourself and see you later.