Create STUNNING Landscape Photos Using Adobe Photoshop - The ULTIMATE Editing Course Part 2

1. Introduction: Hi all. My name is Meredith. I'm a landscape photographer and outdoor educator based in Denver, Colorado. And in this multi-part course, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of Adobe Photoshop for landscape photography. In the second part of this comprehensive series, you will learn how to enhance and transform your photographs using Adobe Photoshop. Powerful adjustment tools. Adjustments allow you to correct and enhance the color, tone, exposure, and overall appearance of an image. In this course, we will learn about the best Photoshop adjustments to use specifically for landscape photography, as well as how to apply them to your images in the most beneficial and practical ways. You will also learn how to effectively use essential adjustments like levels, curves, color balance, and selective color adjustments to fine-tune your images and bring up the natural beauty of the landscape. This course is designed for all photography enthusiasts and passionate hobbyists to professionals. This is a very beginner friendly course. So don't be afraid to take this course if you are brand new to Photoshop. By the end of this course, we will have a deep understanding of how adjustments work so that you will be able to edit your photos like a pro, using all of the advanced adjustment techniques that Photoshop has to offer. Whether you're looking to create stunning landscape prints that people will want to buy from you or just share your images on social media. This course will help you develop the skills and competence needed to take your landscape photography to the next level. So if you are ready to join me in mastering the essentials of Photoshop, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson. 2. Photoshop adjustments overview: Welcome to part two of this course. Y'all, I am so happy to have you here in part two of this course on mastering the fundamentals of Photoshop, you're going to learn all about adjustment layers and how to use them to edit landscape photos. You haven't seen part one of this course, then I definitely recommend that you go back and watch that course first. Especially if you are new to Photoshop or we'd like to brush up on the core essential skills that you really need to have a solid understanding of in Photoshop. What you learned in part one of this course also really lays the foundation for what you will learn in part two. So it will really help you out if you watch part one before jumping into the second part of this course. In the first part of this course, particularly in the lesson on layers, you learn that adjustment layers, or one of the three types of layers that you will be using as a landscape photographer, along with pixel layers and smart object layers. We have used a few of these adjustment layers so far and you've learned some of the basics about what they are and the benefits to using them. But we haven't gotten into much depth about how to use them to enhance your images. Throughout part two of this course, you will learn how to actually use and apply the adjustment layers that are most practical for landscape photography. As you've already learned, there are several ways that you can make adjustment layers in Photoshop. The first is to go up to your main menu, into the Layers menu, then down to new adjustment layer. And you'll see this sub-menu here open up with all of the different adjustment layers that you can add to your image. The second method that you can use to add an adjustment layer is to go to your Layers panel. And down at the bottom where you see the half circle icon. If you click on that icon, you'll see again the entire list of adjustment layers that you can add to your image. The third way you can add an adjustment layer, and this is my preferred way to add an adjustment layer, is to go to the Adjustment panel, which is also indicated by the half circle icon. If I click on this and open the adjustment layer panel, then you can see the icons that represent the different types of adjustment layers that you can create. These are all at the exact same adjustment layers as the menu that appears at the bottom here. So it's really up to you, your own personal preference, the way in which you'd like to add adjustment layers. Before we dive into how to use all of these different types of adjustment layers, there are a few important concepts that you really need to understand before we start adding layers. First, it is essential to understand that there are only two variables that you can change in a digital image. In those two variables are brightness or luminosity and color. If I go to my image and start to zoom in to the pixel level, we can start to see that each individual pixel that makes up this image has a color and a brightness. Each one of these squares, by the way, is a single individual pixel in pixels or just the smallest units of a digital image. The best way to demonstrate this as if I open up my color picker over here. And using the eye dropper tool that automatically opens up with the color picker. I can sample one individual pixel and then see all of the color and brightness, as well as the luminosity information associated with that single pixel. Over here on the left, we have three values, abbreviated as HSB, which stands for hue, saturation and brightness. Without going too deep here into color theory, which I definitely recommend that you study up on and learn about because that will significantly help you as a photographer. Hugh essentially represents what the pure color is. So everything along this spectrum here, or the color wheel represents the hue. A hue is often called a pure color and it doesn't have any white, black, or shades of gray mixed into it. So any of the colors that you see along the color wheel are Hughes. Saturation refers to how close to a pure hue that, that color is. If we drag this up to the right here to get closer to pure yellow, then you'll see that that saturation increases all the way up to 100. Brightness, which is the third component of color, really relates to how bright our eyes perceive this color to be. Something important to note here is that brightness is often used interchangeably with luminosity, which is represented by the L right here. But brightness and luminosity are not the same thing. Luminosity, which is also called lightness, refers to how bright we perceive a color in relation to 100% pure white with a brightness value of 62 right here. It means that this color is 62% as bright as pure white. Notice that the luminosity value or lightness value of 62, is different than the brightness value of 53. So just understand that they are similar concepts, but they are not the same thing. They both relate to the tones of an image, but they are slightly different. If the concepts of hue, saturation and brightness, as well as luminosity are all new to you. Then I definitely recommend that you check out my histogram course where I cover these topics in depth and you'll really learn to understand what all of these different aspects of color mean. In addition to brightness, luminosity, and hue and saturation. You'll also learn about RGB listed down here, which represents red, green, and blue. And those are just the three different color channels that make up a single pixel in an image. For now, just understand that each one of these pixels is defined by the color values as well as the brightness values. Or you could also say the luminosity values. The key takeaway here is that because the two main aspects of a digital image, art, color and brightness, most adjustments will allow you to adjust either the color or the brightness of an image. Or in most cases, a combination of both brightness and color. Let's zoom out of our image here. And the easiest way to do this is actually to go to View and your main menu, then down to fit on screen if you ever need to use that, you can also use Command or Control Zero. Now that we've zoomed out of our image, let's discuss something called Blend Modes. And you'll find the options for blend modes in this menu right here. If I open up this menu, you'll see that the default is always normal, and then you'll have an entire list of different blend modes in this menu here. Blending modes defined how an adjustment will affect an image. Each layer can be assigned a blending mode that determines how its colors interact with the colors of the layers below it. There are different blending modes that can be used depending on the effect that you want to achieve. And we will cover blend modes more extensively in a future lesson. But for now, let's briefly cover just a few of these. The normal blend mode, which like I mentioned, is the default option, will show an adjustment layer without any blending effect. I will create an adjustment layer here just to show you what I mean. And I'm going to create a curves adjustment. Don't worry too much right now about how this curves adjustment works because we'll learn more about this in a future lesson. But essentially what it does is it gives you a histogram and allows you to create targeted adjustments to the different tones of your image. E.g. I. Can drag the top of this line here to increase the lighter tones in the image. So the lighter tones right here, then I can click on this line or the darker tones are located and drag this line down to darken the darker tones. And you'll see that this S curve shape here creates more contrast in the image. Not only have I increase the contrast, but you'll see that I've also saturated some of the colors like the blues, the yellows, and the greens down here. I've therefore, by adding this curves adjustment, I've increased the contrast, as well as change the saturation of the colors in my image. When I have the blend mode set to normal, this blend mode will not change the effect that this adjustment layer has on the image. You can however, set your blending modes to only adjust color or only adjust luminosity. And in this way, you can separate the two components of your image. So color from luminosity, if I change the normal blending mode to color, which is all the way at the bottom. The color blending mode applies the hue and saturation of the adjustment layer, but it doesn't affect the brightness or contrast of the image. In other words, when the blending mode is set to color, the adjustment layer is only affecting the color and not the brightness or luminosity of the image. You can see that clearly in the image where all of the color information that this adjustment layer created is retained, but the brightness has not been applied. And you can see that if I turn this adjustment layer off as well, if I change this blending mode to Luminosity, you'll see that there's quite a difference in how this image looks. We've lost a lot of the color and saturation in the sky here. But the areas down in the trees have gotten much darker. The luminosity blending mode only affects the luminosity values of the image. It does not affect the color. Will cover blending modes in more detail in a future lesson. But for now, understand that blending modes affect how an adjustment layer is going to be applied to your image. Another important concept to know about adjustment layers, like with all layers, you can adjust their opacity. And you can do that in the layers panel where you see opacity. To adjust the opacity, you can either click on this arrow and use the slider to slide opacity down and up. So 100% of poverty is full visibility of the adjustment layer. And at 0% opacity, the adjustment layer is invisible. This is a really useful feature that we'll use often that allows you to adjust the intensity or how much of the adjustment layer is visible. You can also hover over opacity where you see the double arrows and just slide those arrows side-to-side. And that will change the opacity of that layer as well. Finally, before we start to move through this course, right now, you should be learning how these adjustments work so that you are proficient in using them when the time comes to start working on an image from start to finish. Once you learn what each type of adjustment is used for and how it works, then you will have a much larger toolkit to work with when it comes time to make editing decisions regarding how you want to adjust your images. Just because you can use lots of different adjustments on an image, doesn't necessarily mean that they should be used. Ultimately, once you become proficient in using adjustments, you will be able to make better, more intentional decisions about which adjustments work best for a specific change that you want to make an image. With time and practice, it will get better and better at determining what you want to adjust in an image and the best methods to go about making that adjustment. In the next few lessons, we're going to cover the adjustment layers that I use most often are the most practical for landscape photography. Thanks again for being here and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Brightness/Contrast adjustments: In this lesson, you are going to learn about the brightness contrast adjustment. This is probably one of the simplest adjustments to use if you want to quickly and easily adjust the tones in your image. First, let's start by adding a brightness contrast adjustment layer to this image. And I'll do that by going to the adjustment panel, the half circle. If I click on the adjustment panel, I'm going to select the first icon here, which is the brightness contrast adjustment. And that will create the adjustment layer. Like I mentioned, the brightness contrast adjustment is very simple. It only provides two adjustments sliders, the brightness slider and the contrast slider. First slider, the brightness slider allows you to adjust the overall brightness of the image. And this slider affects all of the pixels in the image equally. And it does that by either increasing the brightness of all of the pixels or darkening the brightness of all of the pixels. You can see if I move this slider to the right, all of the pixels in this image start to get brighter and brighter. And if we look at the histogram up here, if I just click this triangle, I can refresh the histogram to make it more accurate. We see that all of the tones start to shift to the right. The histogram, by the way, is just showing the distribution of tones in the image. The brightest tones or the tones that are closest to white on the right side. And the darkest tones, the ones that are closest to pure black are on the left side. And the tones in the middle here are the mid tones. And again, if you're a little unclear about how histograms work, then I highly recommend that you go back and watch my course on histograms because they are an extremely important tool to be using when you're editing your photos and Photoshop. Now, if I take this brightness slider and move it to the left to darken down all the pixels in the image. You'll see that everything in the image gets darker and all the tones and the histogram start to shift to the left. This just means that all of the tones in the image are darkening down and moving closer to pure black. I'm going to reset this slider. And one way to do that is to bring this back to zero. You can type zero into the slider value. The alternate way you can do this is if I change this, once again is you can click this button at the bottom here, which will reset your slider back to zero. The second slider here is for contrast. And this slider allows you to increase or decrease the contrast in your image. Contrast of an image refers to the difference between the darkest and the lightest areas of an image. As we start to adjust the slider, I want you to pay attention to the difference between the brightest areas in the image. So what happens to the areas up in here where the light is hitting the clouds and the darker areas in the shadows where the trees are at the bottom of the image. When you increase the contrast of an image, you make the brightest parts of the image brighter and the darkest parts of the image darker. And you'll see that as I slide this increasingly higher, that the areas up in the sky that are catching the light are starting to get brighter areas and the shadows are getting darker. We can test this by setting this back to zero. So resetting our slider, then grabbing our color picker tool, then sampling and area of the sky, bright part of the sky that's catching the light will see that the brightness value for that particular pixel is 80%. If I close this and then increase the contrast. So really crank up the contrast here. We go back and select that same area, will see that the brightness went up to 90, so it went from 80% to 90%. We reset this and do the same experiment for it, the darker areas of the image. So let's sample some of these grasses right here and the brightness is 17%. We increase the contrast. We're making, the darker areas darker and the lighter areas lighter. Then I go back and sample this area once again. You'll see that the brightness has gone down to 11. Another way to see how the contrast has shifted is by looking at the histogram. So if we reset this and then start to increase the contrast, we see that the lighter tones are moving towards the right side of the histogram. So they're moving towards white and the darker tones are moving to the left side of the histogram. So they're really spreading away from the mid tones here. When you decrease contrast, we bring this all the way down. What's happening is that you are making the brightest areas of the image darker and the darker areas of the image lighter. What this effectively does is it shifts the brighter tones towards the mid tones and the darker tones closer towards the mid tones. So there's less contrast in the image, and this makes the image appear more muted. We bring up the contrast. The image moves from a more muted look to a more dramatic look. So it really depends on the type of aesthetic that you're personally trying to create with your image. The adjustments that we have just made so far are all global adjustments. So we have affected all of the pixels in the image when we've increased the brightness or decrease the brightness and the contrast. You can also make targeted adjustments as you've seen in the first part of this course. And layering multiple different adjustment layers to create targeted adjustments for different parts of your photo. Let's take a look at how to do that. I'm going to delete this adjustment layer by just dragging that to the trash. And I want to create a brightness contrast adjustment that only affects the sky. To do that, I'm first going to make a selection of the sky. So the area that I actually want to adjust, the fastest and most accurate way to do that is usually to go to Select and your main menu and down to Sky, which will allow Photoshop to analyze the image and select out the sky. Now that we have this guy selected, I'm going to add my brightness contrast adjustment layer. You'll see down here that I've created my brightness contrast adjustment layer. But the layer mask being applied to this adjustment layer reflects the selection that I created. The white area of this mask, as you learned in the first part of this course, is where they adjustment is going to show everything in black is going to hide this adjustment. What I wanna do here is make the sky look more dramatic. So I'm going to darken down the brightness. I'm also going to increase the contrast. Notice how only the sky is being affected by these adjustments. You can really see this change if I toggle this adjustment layer on and off again, because of the mask that we've added to this layer, we can only see this adjustment in the sky. I also want to make a brightness contrast adjustment that only affects the land here. So only the trees, as well as these mountains up here. The easiest way to do that is to just invert the selection that we created this guy. So we select everything that is not the sky, just by inverting our sky selection. Before we can make that inverted selection, we're first going to need to re-select the sky. Since we've already done that, we can use our layer mask right here. As you learned in the first part of this course, if you press Command or Control and click on the mask, we turn this mask back into the selection. Now I'm just going to invert the selection by pressing Command Shift or Control Shift Plus I. Remember it. You can also create that inversion by going to Select and then inverse. If you ever forget those keyboard shortcuts. Now we have all of the land and trees and mountains selected everything except for the sky. At this point, I'm going to make my second brightness contrast adjustment. Now you can see that we have a layer mask of this adjustment that is completely reverse from the one below it. So we're only going to be affecting the land part of this image when we start to make our adjustments. What I'm gonna do now is I'm going to brighten up this area of the image. So I'm going to increase the brightness just a bit because it is quite dark down here. I'm also going to decrease the contrast. So we have a nice transition for the eye to move from less contrast to more contrast in the sky. And that's just a great compositional technique. Can think about when you're creating your adjustments is how you can create transitions. So things like dark to light and low to high contrast that just draws the eye through the image and makes it more aesthetically interesting. One thing I also want to mention here is that if I reset this, you can also click this auto button in Photoshop, we'll guess what it thinks the best settings for these sliders are. I don't find this to be very practical because I like to have complete control over the editing process. But you might find this helpful and it's just something that's good to know is here if you ever want to use it. You can also click on this use legacy option. And this just makes the adjustment operate like it did in older versions of Photoshop. Again, I always have this unchecked. I don't think it works as well as the current version, so I never really use it, but it's just good to know that that's there if you ever want to use it. I'm gonna go back and make the same adjustment again. So just increase the brightness and decrease the contrast. If I toggle this layer on and off, you can see how that adjustment only affected the land part of the image. In my opinion, I went a little bit too heavy on this adjustment. I think it's a little bit too bright. So what I can do is bring down the opacity and that'll just reduce the intensity of that adjustments. So now it doesn't look too over brightened in the land area of this image. Still might be a little bit too bright, but for now I think it looks pretty good. Now that I've made two separate targeted brightness contrast adjustments, I'm going to group these two layers together. And I will create a group by clicking on this folder icon and dragging both of these layers into group one. And I will rename this something like brightness contrast adjustments. Alright? Now, if I toggle this group on and off, I can see the changes that I've made to the entire image with two separate targeted adjustments. And it's really quite a dramatic difference that I've made there just by creating two separate adjustment layers. So there you have the basics of the brightness contrast adjustment. Like you saw it. It's a pretty simple tool to use and it's an easy way to adjust the brightness and contrast in your image. In the next lesson, you are going to learn about a different type of adjustment called a levels adjustment, which is a little bit more difficult to learn, but I think you'll get the hang of pretty quickly. So I will see you there in the next lesson. 4. Levels adjustments part 1: In this lesson, you're going to learn about the levels adjustment. This is a powerful tool that gives you more control over the brightness and contrast and an image. Much more so than the brightness contrast adjustment that you learned about in the last lesson. Let's first create a levels adjustment by going to our adjustments panel. And the levels adjustment is the second icon. We click on this, we create our levels adjustment. When you create a levels adjustment, you are shown an RGB histogram in the properties panel. Like we discussed previously, the histogram graphs of brightness of the pixels from dark to light. So on the left side of the histogram, we have the darkest pixels in the image. On the right side of the histogram, we have the brightest. In the middle portion of the histogram, we have all of the pixels in the mid tones. The levels adjustment works by allowing you to manipulate the distribution of the pixels in this histogram. We can see in the Channels menu here that this histogram is an RGB histogram. We can set our histogram in our histogram panel up here to match this RGB histogram. And the way to do that is to select this Menu button in your histogram panel. And you'll see a menu open up that gives you different options for this histogram. If you go to the extended view, you'll see that now we have the option to select the different channels in order to match this histogram with your histogram and the histogram panel, you need to select the RGB channel. So now these are both the same histograms. And this histogram and the histogram panel will be very useful to watch as we manipulate the histogram. In the levels adjustment Properties panel. There are two different sets of sliders that we can use to shift the distribution of tones in this histogram. First, we have the input sliders, which are the three sliders directly below the histogram. And then we have two outputs, lighters, one on the left of this gradient and one on the right. And we will discuss what all of these different sliders mean. The left slider is the black point and controls the darker areas of the image. The middle slider is the midpoint in controls the mid tones. The right slider is the white point, and that controls the highlights. By dragging the right slider to the left, you can increase the brightness of the pixels, especially in the highlights of the image. When you move the white point slider to the left, you are essentially telling Photoshop which pixel values in the image should be considered as pure white. All of the pixels at this point in the histogram, when I have the white point slider pulled down this far to the left, all of the white pixels at this point will be pure white. And all of the pixels above the slider to the right will also be pure white. That's why you see the brightest pixels in the image where the sun is hitting the clouds and some of the brighter parts of the sky. That's why all of these pixels are starting to turn completely white as I pull this slider down to the left. In other words, what this does is compress the lighter areas of the image to this point right here. I can reset the sliders by clicking the reset button. If I pull this left slider or the black point to the right, this will darken the pixels of the image, especially in the shadows of the image. When you move the black point slider to the right, you're telling Photoshop which pixel value in the image should be considered as pure black. All of the pixels at this point will be pure black. And all of the pixels to the left of this slider will be pure black as well. And that's why you see all of the shadow areas start to become pure black. We're just telling Photoshop to darken down all of the dark pixels in this image. I will reset these sliders here. The midpoint slider in the middle will allow you to adjust the mid tones in the image. If you move the mid tone slider to the left, it makes the overall image brighter. And if you move the mid tone slider to the right, the overall image becomes darker. You'll notice in our histogram, in the histograms panel up here, that as I move this midpoint slider down to the left, that all of the pixels in the image, all of the tones start to shift to the right or closer towards pure white. If I shift this mid tone slider back to the right, again, notice how the tones in the image start to shift all the way down towards pure black on the left edge of the histogram. The mid tone slider really allows you to balance the transition from the white point down to the black point. If I reset these sliders, you'll notice that the default value for the black point is always going to be zero. And the default value for the white point is 255. The range of zero to 255 represents the 256 levels of tone on the histogram. For an eight bit image, you're always going to have 256 tones that can be graphed along this histogram, where zero represents pure black and 255 represents pure white. Notice that as I start to bring this white point down to the left, as the image starts to Brighton, I start to blow out some of the pixels in this histogram. We can see that because some of the pixels are starting to stack up at the right edge of the histogram. That means that these pixels are pure white and that we've lost detail in this image. We can also check for clipping when we're adjusting our levels slider by pressing Option or Alt on your keyboard. And then as you slide the slider, you'll start to see where the pixels are being blown out in your image. Because I bring this down to the left, we're starting to blow out all the pixels sky, especially in these regions around the clouds. If I bring this all the way back to the right while holding Option or Alt, you'll see that we start to reduce the clipping in the image. So all the way at the right we have no clipping. But as I slowly start to pull this to the left, you'll see at about right there we start to get some clipping right here in this image. Typically you don't want to pull this white point slider so far to the left that you start to clip your image. So you start to blow out the pixels and make them pure white. The reason for that is when you start clipping the image, you will lose detail. So here we're losing detail in the highlights in the sky. They're really bright areas of the sky. And that's something that you want to avoid because losing detail will take away from the quality of your image. If I bring the white point back down to the left, we can test this by blowing up part of the image and selecting our color picker. If we sample the area that has been blown out, we can see that this is pure white. We know that this is pure white because the red, green, and blue values are 255 when all of these values are at their maximum. So when they're all at 255, this means that the color we have just sampled is pure white. We can do the exact same thing with the black slider. If I grab the black slider and then press Option or Alt and start to drag this slider all the way towards the right. You'll see all of the areas that start to turn black and have color are the areas that are being clipped. So we are losing detail in all of the areas that are being clipped. When we pull the black point to the right of the histogram. There's really not much that I can pull this slider to the right without losing some detail. If I bring this all the way back down, really, when I start to move this to the right, we immediately start to see some clipping down here in the image. So even at a level of one, I start to lose some detail in my image. So I would not in this situation want to pull that levels adjustment to the right really at all. I could pull the white point here down just a little bit because I don't have any clipping when I pull this just to about right here. So I can pull the white point down just a little bit without losing some detail in my image. Because this is such a high contrast image to begin with. Since the brightest areas of the image are so far apart from the darkest areas of the image, then using the levels adjustment to increase contrast really won't help me much for this particular photograph. Let me show you an example of a much lower contrast image. We're using the levels adjustment to increase contrast would really be helpful. Let me add a levels adjustment to this image. We can see from the histogram that the majority of tones in this image are in the mid tones region. And this really reflects why this image looks relatively flat. We don't have a lot of contrast. In other words, we don't have a big difference between the brightest tones and the lowest tones in this image. What I can do though to increase contrast is bring the white point down all the way towards the edge of the histogram on the right side. And I can bring the black point up if I shift the black point towards the right. Notice how we're starting to get much more contrast in this photo. You can really see the difference if I turn this layer on and off. So this is before, and this is after. There's quite a dramatic difference in the amount of contrast that just that simple tweak and the levels adjustment has created. I can also shift the midpoint in this image. If I start to shift this slider to the right, this image will start to darken while I still maintain the white point at the same location and the black point at the same part of the histogram. This is a way I can maintain the white and the black point while still darkening down the image. Alternatively, if I shift it to the left, I can lighten the image. So I do think a little bit lighter here looks better. And you can see if I turn this on and off. So before and after, that actually looks pretty good. And by increasing the contrast, we can really see more of the detail in the ripples on the sand. I think I can actually bring the white point down just a little bit more without blowing out this image. And I'll press option just to see how far I can really pull this down. I start to clip about right there, so I'll leave it right there actually to avoid any clipping. And for the black point, if I press Option and Shift us to the right, we start to get clipping right about there. So I think that's pretty good. Now we have the lightest pixels in this image set to almost pure white. And we have the darkest pixels in the image almost set to pure black. By reset this histogram, you can see a more accurate representation of this image now, where before, if I hide this adjustment layer, we can see that the pixels are really confined or scrunched up in the mid tones. If I turn this back on, we can see that the tonal range is much larger, so there's a much larger variation between the brightest and the darkest pixels in the image. And that's just another way of saying that we've increased the contrast. So again, when you have a low contrast image, it really helps to bring down these sliders closer towards the middle of the histogram, or at least down to the edge. So you're not blowing out the pixels, but you're telling Photoshop to make the lighter pixels lighter and the darker pixels darker. As you saw, I was really able to move this slider. I reset this. I was able to move this a lot, especially compared to this image. If we go back to the first image we looked at, I really can't move this slider much at all without blowing out the brightest pixels. And same for the black point. If I move the black point up, I start to clip the dark tones in the shadows. So the inputs lighters really don't do much for you in this situation when you have a very high contrast image and you're trying to make a global levels adjustment to the entire image. If I wanted to reduce the contrast in this image, then I could use the output sliders, which are the sliders at the bottom. The output sliders determine what the maximum and minimum brightness levels can be in the image. E.g. if I bring the right output slider down to the left, it prevents the brightest pixels in the image from turning pure white. So I'm setting the maximum brightness. The pixels in this image can be to this shade of light gray. So even if I bring this input slider down, if I push the white point down, the pixels are still not going to be pure white. They're gonna be whatever I set the maximum brightness right here to be. The same concept holds for the left slider. If I pull the left output slider to the right, the darkest pixels in the image can't be pure black anymore. They can only be this shade of dark gray. So again, even if I pull this black point all the way towards the right, all of the areas and the shadows are not going to turn black. They're going to be at their maximum, no darker than this shade that I've set right here with the output levels. You'll see that if I bring the right output slider down to the left. Notice what happens to the histogram up here. We start to see all of the tones shift down to the left side of the histogram. So they're all getting squeezed down to the left side of the histogram. If we reset this and bring the left output slider to the right. Notice that the histogram right here, that all of the tones start to get compressed towards the right side of the histogram. Essentially what this is doing is it's creating a much smaller tonal range. What we're seeing is that the difference between the darkest parts of the image. So the pixels right here at the left edge of the histogram, the difference between these pixels and the pixels right here gets much, much smaller. As you can see, the tonal range starts to get smaller and smaller as I push this towards the right. If I bring this back down, we start to see the distribution from the dark to the light tones get much, much larger. You'll also see on the left of the levels properties panel three different Eyedropper tools. The first one is the black point eyedropper. And this will allow you to set the black point in your image by clicking on the area of the image that you'd like to set as the black point. So if you select that Eyedropper, then click on an area that you want to set as the black points. I'm going to find really like the darkest area of this image, which is probably somewhere in here. Now I've said that exact pixel that I clicked on with the eyedropper tool to be the black point. This eye dropper is the white point eyedropper. And this will allow you to set the white point in the same way as you saw it with the black point eyedropper. You just select this and then bring it to the area of your image that you'd like to set as a white point. So I'm thinking this bright area in the sky will probably be the best place to set the white point. You can see that the histogram really shifted when I made that adjustment. But I do see that there are quite a few pixels that are getting blown out. If I refresh this, there are a lot of pixels that are touching the right edge of the graph. There's a lot of pixels that are pure white and that's definitely not something that I want. For this reason. I'm not a big fan of using the Eyedropper tools because it gives you a little bit less control. In my opinion. I like to use these sliders to adjust the black and the white point because I think it gives you more control over where those points sit. Just to mention, the third eye dropper tool in the middle is the gray point eyedropper. And this lets you set the mid tones of your image with the gray point eye dropper, you can click on an area that you want to be neutral gray. And that will cause that area to become the new gray point in your image. If I select an area in my image that I think should be gray, such as some of the rocks down in the bottom here. So maybe somewhere right there. Now I've set a new gray point in my image. And you'll also see that the color slightly shifted when I use the gray point eyedropper, it also removes the color cast. I can click around this image to try to select an area that I think should be neutral gray. You'll see all the colors shifts depending on where I click on this image. This can take a little bit of experimenting to get right in this tool can be helpful if you want to neutralize the color cast. But it's something that's not always necessary in this image. I don't find that the color cast was really a problem. I actually like the original version. It's sometimes this gray point eyedropper. It can help you if you find that the color cast is not appealing. 5. Levels adjustments part 2: Another feature that you have in the levels adjustment properties are these presets. If you open this presets menu, you'll see a variety of options that are really just presets that have defined parameters of where the white point, black point in mid points will be. E.g. if I click increase contrast one, you'll see that we've increased the contrast of this image. And you can see the values of where the sliders have been moved. So these are just defined values based on this preset. You can play around with these to see how they shift the distribution of tones in the histogram. And maybe you use them as a starting point for when you start editing. And then start to dial in, which you'd like Best Buy, manually manipulating the sliders yourself. You can also use the auto feature, which like you saw in the brightness contrast adjustment. When you click on this Photoshop will determine what it thinks are the best levels for this image. Again, I don't find this particularly useful as you see here. I really don't like the lack of contrast in this image. I actually think it looks worse after using auto than it did before. So it's not something that I use very often, but it's just good to know that that's there if you ever want to use it. Another thing to know about the auto feature is if you hover over auto and while holding Option or Alt, you click on Auto, you will see more auto color correction options. You can play around with these and see if any of these auto adjustments work better for your image. Again, they might give you a good starting place before you really dive in and start making your own adjustments. It's something that's good to know is here. Again, I don't use that very much, but it can be helpful. A really important feature of the levels adjustment that you definitely should learn about is how you can adjust the levels of the different channels. If I click on this Channels menu, you can see that you have the option to select between the RGB channels and the individual red, green, and blue channels. So we've been working with the RGB channel, which is represented by the RGB histogram. But we can change this to the red channel. When I have the levels color channels set to red, then when I bring the right slider down, it will increase the intensity of red in the highlights. One way to better visualize this is if you go to your histogram panel and change this from RGB to read. So this histogram will match this histogram since we're on the red channel here, it will match the red channel here as well. Now as I bring this right slider all the way down towards the mid tones, you can see that the red channel is starting to get blown out. And if you've seen my histogram class, which really teaches you what's going on here under the hood. You remember that you can actually blow out the individual color channels of an image. So here we're blowing out the red channel and that's really reflected in the lighter tones and highlights in this image. With your RGB histogram, you really don't want to clip any of your channels. So I'm going to bring this back all the way to the right edge of this histogram. And if I press Option or Alt, if you're using a PC, you'll start to see where the red channel starts to get clipped. Because I bring this down to the left, we get more and more hundred percent pure red pixels. By backoff here a bit. Can see that right about here is where I don't clip this channel. If I reset this and start to bring the left slider towards the right. What's happening is that I'm decreasing the intensity of the red in the shadows. I'm really turning down the red in the shadows, but at the same time, when I decrease the red and the shadows, I increase cyan and the shadows. In other words, we're turning red off in a lot of the pixels down here in the shadows. At the same time as you turn down the red in the shadows. You also introduce cyan into the shadows. And that's something important to note here, is that as you turn down specific color channels, you will introduce different colors into your image. Here I can press Option or Alt. As I move that slider, you really see where I'm clipping the shadows with the red channel. If I turn this all the way down, it looks like some of the reds and the really dark shadows are already clipped. So I wouldn't want to pull this up anymore than it already is because I will immediately start introducing more clipping into this image. I will start to immediately lose a lot of that detail in the shadows, at least for the red channel. We can look at each of the three different channels here. If I set this to green and set this one to green as well, that correspond to the adjustments that we're going to make. I bring the right slider down to the left. I will start to introduce more green into the highlights. Here, as you can see in the green channel histogram, we have quite a few pixels that are clipped in the green channel. Again, something that's not desirable here. Obviously this image doesn't even look good to the eye. It looks overly green. But you can see as you start to bring this slider closer and closer to the left side of the graph that we blow more and more of the green channel out, they start to really stack up and pile on the right edge. If we pull the left slider to the right, we decrease green in the shadows, and we start to introduce magenta into the shadows. We can also use the Midpoint slider here to adjust the color balance between green and magenta. So as I pull this mid tone slider towards the right, we introduce magenta overall into the image. And as I pull this down to the left, we introduce more green overall into the image. Notice that as I shift this from the right to the left, I'm not blowing out any of the green channel on the left or the right. You can experiment with this to see what happens as you shift this slider and redistribute the tones in this green color channel. We can look at the third color channel, which is blue, and do the same thing. Let's reset this. And then in our blue channel, start to pull the right slider all the way towards the left. And you'll see we start to add blue into the highlights. And as I pull the left slider towards the right, I remove blue from the shadows, I turn down the intensity of blue, I start to add yellow. We look at our blue channels histogram that results from this adjustment. We see a lot of pixels start to spike on the left side of this blue channels histogram. That just means that for all of those pixels in the image, blue is now at its lowest intensity, and essentially that means that it's been turned off. Let's reset this and go back to our RGB histogram, which is basically just a combination of the three different color channels of red, green, and blue. Like we saw with the brightness contrast adjustment in the previous lesson, we can create even greater control over the brightness and contrast of this image by creating some targeted adjustments of different regions of this image. E.g. we can create a levels adjustment that just targets the sky. Or we can create a levels adjustment that just targets the land, the trees and the mountains, and the lower half of this image. This will give us even greater control over the distribution of tones in the image than we could achieve alone by just using this single adjustment layer. What I'll do here is delete this levels adjustment. Next we're going to create two separate levels adjustments, similar to how you saw in the previous lesson when we created different brightness contrast adjustment to target different areas of this image, we'll do the same thing with the Levels adjustment. What I'll first do is create a selection of the sky because we always want to create our selection first before we create our adjustment layer. So I will go down to select and then sky. Now that I have a selection of the sky, I'm going to add my levels adjustment. Now we have a levels adjustment layer with a mask that will reveal the adjustment only in the sky. And I'll be going through this a little bit more quickly in this lesson because we followed the exact same steps in the previous lesson for the brightness contrast adjustment. Here what I wanna do for the levels adjustment in the sky is I want to increase the contrast. I'm going to bring the white point down. So it really comes down to about the right side of that histogram. Then I'm going to bring the black point up just to darken down the shadows. Again, notice how only this guy is being affected because of the layer mask that we have over this levels adjustment. If I toggle this layer on and off, you can see what the adjustment has done to this image. We can see that there's much more contrast in the sky after we bring the white point down and the black point up. I also want to create a levels adjustment for the lower half of this image where all of the trees and the land are. So what I'll first do is go back and select the sky. And I'll do that using our mask that we've already created. So pressing Command or Control, click on your mask and you'll get that sky selection back. Now I'm going to invert this guy selection. So I'm going to press Command or Control Shift. I invert this selection. Now that everything outside of the sky has been selected, I'm going to create my second levels adjustment. Notice from the histogram how most of the tones in this lower half of the image are restricted or confined to the shadows area. So we don't really have many mid tones or highlights or really bright tones in this lower half that we have selected. What I want to do is darken down this area of the image. And I'll do that by bringing the mid tone slider to the right, just to darken that region down, up a little bit more. I don't want to touch this slider because if I start to move the black point to the right, I'm really going to start to clip all of the shadows. I'm going to start to lose all of the detail down in the trees. What I also wanna do is I want to bring out some of the lighter tones in the shadows. So some of the tones here at the tops of the trees to bring out a little more interesting detail in the lighter parts of the shadows. What I'll do is I'll bring the white point down. You'll notice that those trees, so up in the trees as well as some of the grasses and the foreground start to get brighter. And you'll see what this has done here is it's dark and down this region of the image while still maintaining some of the contrast. The reason I wanted to darken down the bottom half of the image because I wanted to make a nice transition from a dark region to a light region. Again, that's a nice compositional technique. You can use the transition from dark to light that will lead the eye through the image in a way that makes it a little bit more aesthetically interesting to the viewer. Even though I wanted to darken this area down, I didn't want to lose some of the contrast in the trees so the shadows to look more interesting to my eyes if I toggle this layer on and off. So this is before, and this is after. You can see the effect I've created by darkening down the foreground and the shadows while maintaining some of the contrast. It really gives it a nice pop of color and interests in this region down here. In this way, I've created two separate levels adjustments. One to target the sky, one to target the land. We could really make as many levels adjustments as we'd like to target literally any area of this image. But for now we'll keep it just it too. If we go over to the Layers panel and down to our original image, if I hover over the icon and press Option or Alt, if you're using a PC and click on that icon, you can see what the image looked like before I added both of these levels adjustments. So this is before and this is after. That's quite a dramatic difference. Unlike the brightness contrast adjustment that affected the overall brightness and contrast of the image, which can sometimes result in loss of detail in the highlights and shadows. The levels adjustment allows you to adjust the brightness and contrast for its specific tonal ranges. And the image. Moving the white point, midpoint and black points, lighters, gives you more precise control over how the tones are distributed throughout the image. In the next lesson, we will cover the curves adjustment, which will give you even more precise control over the specific tonal ranges in your image. 6. Curves adjustments: In this lesson, we're going to discuss how to use the curves adjustment. The curves adjustment is similar to the levels adjustment, and it also works by allowing you to adjust the tones in your image. But it is a bit more complex than the levels adjustment. It does, however, give you even more control over the brightness and contrast in your image more so than the levels adjustment does. And this will allow you to make even more precise adjustments to the tones in your image. Let's first go ahead and create our first Curves Adjustment will go to the adjustment panel. And the third icon represents the curves adjustment. When we click on that, we create a curves adjustment layer. And like with the Levels adjustment, we are shown a histogram of our image and RGB histogram, where we have the lightest tones are the brightest parts of the image on the right side of the histogram, and the darker tones on the left side. And we also have the mid tones here. In the middle, you'll see a diagonal line that runs from the left bottom hand corner all the way to the top right-hand corner. This is the default state of the curves line when it is a straight line that runs from the bottom-left to the top right corner. You'll see that this line runs through a grid. And as you'll see in a moment, this grid is useful to help you see the intensity of the adjustment you are making to a particular tonal range in the image. Something to note here is that you can actually change the number of grid lines. And you can do that by pressing Option or Alt and then clicking on this grid. So when you click on the grid, you'll see that you get more of these grid lines. It's really personal preference, whether you'd like more or less of these grid lines. Let's take a look at how we can adjust this curves line. The way to do that is to hover over where you'd like to make the adjustment. Click on the curves line and then drag either up or down. Wherever you click on this line. When you release what you've created is an anchor points. So you'll see a little dot created along the curves line. If I right-click on this anchor, I can move this anchor again up and down and reposition it anywhere along this curved lines so I can move it side-to-side, left to right and up and down. You'll notice here that as I drag this anchor point up, the image gets brighter. And as I drag it down, the image gets darker. Because I'm making this adjustment around the mid tones region. When I'm increasing the brightness, I'm affecting mostly the mid tones. When I decrease, I'm affecting mostly the mid tones as well. Where you click and drag mostly affects the corresponding tonal range in the image. You can also create as many anchor points as you'd like along this curves line. So if I'd like to adjust the highlights, I can click on the curves line in the region where the highlights are. Then I can increase or decrease the highlights. As I move this line, pay attention to the highlights area, that is the specific area of this image that I'm adjusting. You'll notice as I move this anchor up and down, this anchor does not move. So this is really positioned the curves line to stay in a single fixed position while I move this anchor point around, what this is doing is preventing major changes in the mid tones. Adjustment that I've made is preventing changes to be made in the mid tones while I move the adjustment in the highlights. The same thing if I were to click in the shadows and increase the shadows or decrease the shadows, you'll notice that it doesn't really affect lighter tones in the image. I'm really just targeting that specific tonal range on the histogram. And the more anchor points that I create along this line, less each anchor point adjustment will affect all the others. You'll see if I move this top anchor point. This area moves a little bit, but we really don't have any movement along the rest of the curve. And obviously this doesn't look great. So I'm going to reset this. And just something to note here. The more anchor points that you add to the curves line is not necessarily better. Oftentimes it really only helps to have a few anchor points along your curves line before the curves starts to get really messy. Actually, a lot of ways to make the curves adjustment look really bad. So I encourage you to really focus on the specific part of the image that you're trying to adjust and keep it simple when it comes to the curves adjustment. Let's discuss how we can increase the contrast and an image using the curves adjustment. Now, like you learned in the previous few lessons, in order to increase contrast, we need to brighten the brightest parts of the image and darken the darkest parts of the image. In order to do that, what I will do is I will go all the way up to the highlights, click on the curve, and start to drag that curve up. You'll see those brightest areas of the image start to. Brighter, then I will start to darken the shadows. If I click all the way into the darker region of the histogram, I will darken the shadows down. Now I've really created more contrast in this image. In this contrast adjustment doesn't really look that good because the image that we're working with here was already a high contrast image to begin with. So it really didn't need a global contrast adjustment that affected the entire image. You can see if we look at our histogram and the histogram panel. If I start to brighten these highlights up, I start to blow out or a clip some of those brightest pixels. And same for in the shadows. If I bring these down and really starting to, especially in the darks, clip the darks on the left side of the histogram. Let's take a look at a low contrast image to see how adding contrast using curves can really be useful. Let's open up our adjustment panel and then click on our curves to create a curves adjustment layer. We see from the histogram like we saw before in the previous lesson, that this image is very low contrast and most of the tones are piled up in the mid tones region. So what we're gonna do is increase the contrast here. So what I'll do is go back to the highlights area. Click on the curve, create that anchor point and drag up. We'll see our histogram shifting to the right. Then I will go down to the darker parts of this image. So some of the darker pixels in the histogram and bring those pixels down in brightness. Now we're really starting to get a lot more contrast in these patterns in the sand are becoming a lot more apparent when we start to increase contrast. You'll notice that I've created this S shape. This is the typical shape of the curves line when you want to increase contrast. So whenever you want to increase contrast and an image, it'll generally want to consider creating this S-shape where you have the highlights boosted up here in the shadows, brought down in the left side. Because this image looks a little bit too dark to my eye. What I can also do is create an anchor point in the middle of the tonal range and just start to bring that up a bit. I've lost a little bit of that S curve shape, but to my eye, I do think the brighter image looks a little bit better. And at the same time, I've also maintain some of that contrast. So I would always recommend creating your contrast first and then making minor adjustments, tweaking with different anchor points along your curve. Afterwards. Let's now look at an example of how we could decrease contrast. For that, let's go back to our high contrast image. And I will reset this curve. If you remember, in order to decrease contrast, what we need to do is darken down the brighter parts of the image and lighten up the darker parts of the image. So to do that, I will go back up to my highlights and start to darken these highlights down. So I'm bringing the brightness of this area of the image down the area and the brightest parts of the sky. Then I can go over to the shadows, create an anchor, and then drag the shadows up. So I'm decreasing the contrast in the image by bringing the shadows backup. I can decrease the contrast even more just by bringing that anchor point up even higher. And you can see this guy really now looks terrible. What I think I'll do here is create an anchor point in the mid tones region and then bring this anchor point in the highlights back to neutral. So as you'll see, I'm bringing this back onto that diagonal line that runs from left, bottom, left all the way to the right-hand corner. The problem here though, is that there are a lot of shadows in the sky and the clouds up here. So this adjustment that I've made to the shadows is making the shadows down here look a little bit better. But in the sky they do not look great. So what I could do is create a layer mask by going up to select. What I'll do is select the sky. So we're going to create a layer mask that mass out the sky. So this adjustment is only showing through to the land part of this image, the trees and the mountains and the foreground. Once I have my sky selection, I'm going to invert this selection using Command or Control shift and I. And in order to create a mask on this adjustment layer, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this adjustment layer into its own group and then create the mask on top of that group. So I'll go down to the Layers panel and create a group. Then I will drag this curves adjustment into that group. Now, I will click on this group so that I have it selected. Because we have this area of the image selected. When I add my Layer Mask. Now I have applied a mask to this group that hides everything in the sky. In other words, I've created a mask over this guy that's being applied to everything that is inside this group. That includes that curves adjustment layer that we created by toggle this on and off. So this is before and after our curves adjustment is only being shown in the land part of this image, everything outside of the sky will actually do is delete this group, will drag this whole group to the trash, will create a new Curves Adjustment. Another useful feature of the curves adjustment is this click and drag adjustment tool. To use this tool, you hover over the area of the image that you want to adjust. Wherever you hover, you will start to see this small circle that appears on the curves line. You'll see if I hover over the darker tones, that circle moves into the lower region of the histogram into the shadows. If I hover over the brighter tones, it'll move up towards the highlights. If I click on this part of the image, you will see that an anchor point is created on the curves line. What I can do is while clicking, I can drag up to lighten that region. I can drag down to dark in that region. And this is a really helpful tool that will allow you to hone in on the specific area of the image that you want to adjust by just looking at the image with your eyes rather than wondering where that specific area lies on the histogram. You can also do in curves is you can set the white point in the black point just like you saw in levels. You can do that using these sliders on the right and the left. If I drag this white point down, you can see I'm starting to increase the brightness and the pixels while blowing out these pixels on the right side of the histogram. So I won't bring that down too much. And you can set the black point, which will set this part of the histogram to pure black. And again, this works just like the black point in white point slider in levels. We can also set the black point, white point, and grade point using the eyedropper tool just like in levels. So if we click on the black point eye dropper, we can select a part of the image that we'd like to be black. If I click on some of the darker shadows, we can set the black point to that particular pixel that I clicked on. The same thing for the white point. I use the white point eyedropper. I can set the brightest part in the image to pure white. Like I mentioned previously, these aren't tools that I generally use. You can see what I did that, that I clipped and blew out all of these white pixels here. And that is something that I definitely don't want to do. I've lost a lot of detail in the Skype. So I prefer to go in and have the most control possible by using that curves adjustment. So I can watch the histogram and ensure that those pixels aren't getting blown out. Like in levels. We also have presets. And each of these presets has a predefined set of settings that when you apply it to your image, it will help you quickly make adjustments to its tonal range and contrast. So you can try out some of these and see if they help improve the look of your image. That definitely does not look good. Let's try the lighter. You can play around with these and find one that is maybe a good starting point to start with. And then you can start to adjust the anchor points to what looks best to your eye. Another powerful feature of the curves adjustment just like levels, is the ability to change between the different channels. Here we've been on the RGB channel, but we also have the red, green, and blue channels that we can select from. So if I select red, this will give me extremely precise control over how red appears in my image. The important thing to understand we are adjusting each color channel is that when you click and create an anchor point, when you move that anchor point up, it increases that color, it increases the intensity of red. And when you move that anchor point down, it decreases that color. It removes that color from the image. If you remember, when we remove red, what happens is that we add in science. So here we're increasing read in the mid tones when we drag this up in the mid tones area. And if we drag this down in the mid tones, we are decreasing red, but we are increasing cyan in the mid tones. If I remove this anchor point by dragging it off the graph and add an anchor point up in the highlights. What I can do is I can add some red into the highlights and that actually might look a little bit nice. And this guy here that's catching some of the light, you'll see though, as I increase the red in the highlights, I'm adding too much red down here in the shadows. What I can do is click and create an anchor point and start to drag some of those anchor points back to neutral. Now, I've really reduced a lot of that red that I created in the highlights anchor point by neutralizing the curves line in the shadows. We see before. And after adds just a nice little touch of red to the sky. If I select the green channel and drag green up, I will increase green in the image. If I drag it down, I will remove green but add in magenta. And finally, with blue. Just like before, if I increase blue, I add blue to the image. And if I decrease blue, I remove blue but add in yellow. This might look a little nice in the sky as well. So what I'll do is I'll drag this up to the highlights and decrease some of the blue in the highlights just a tiny bit. Then again, I don't like how this is creating a yellow cast and the lower half of the image. I'll just create more anchor points and drag them to the neutral position along that curvy line. I've added a little bit of nice yellow color in the sky. If you find that you have an unwanted color cast in the image, you can neutralize that by selecting the gray point eyedropper, like you saw in the levels adjustment. Then just click on an area of your image that you'd like to be neutral gray. So maybe in the rocks down here and then you can remove some of that color cast. Again. You may or may not want to do that depending on the image and how you want the overall image to look like levels. We also have the auto feature so you can click on auto. And Photoshop will guess what it thinks the best curves line will look like for this image. Like I mentioned before, I don t think Otto is the best way to go hear. It generally doesn't select the exact adjustment that I personally prefer. You can also press Option or Alt and click on auto, and then you get an additional set of options. You can play around with these and see if those look any better on your image. And finally, if you're wondering what this tool right here is, this is a pencil tool that allows you to draw your own curve. You could come in and just draw a curve that you'd like to create. So maybe something like an S curve. You can see it pretty quickly here that, that looks really terrible. And this is the reason that I never use the pencil tool. I personally have never able to drop pretty curves with it. I prefer using the anchor points and having the control of the anchor points. You can do to the curves line that you draw, however, is use this smoothing out tools. So this will smooth out the curve that you draw. And you can see that helps a lot. But again, the anchor points really allied to have a lot more control over what that curves line looks like. Finally, this button right here will just allow you to reset your histogram. When you reset the histogram, it will more accurately reflect the image after you've major adjustments. This is similar to clicking on the triangle with the exclamation point. Then your histograms panel that will just refresh the histogram and make it appear more accurate. So that's a general overview of the curves adjustment. This is the best adjustment tool to use when you really want to have the most control over your adjustments to the tonal range, contrast, and color of an image. But it definitely takes more practice and skill to get the hang of. Once you get the hang of using this tool though, it will really help you make more precise adjustments. The next few lessons we'll dive into how to make adjustments of color, including the vibrance adjustment and the hue and saturation adjustments. So I look forward to seeing you in the next few lessons. 7. Vibrance adjustments: For the next few lessons, we're going to shift gears away from the tonal range adjustments that affect the brightness and contrast of an image. And start to cover the different types of adjustments that affect color. In this lesson, we're going to cover the vibrance adjustment, which is really the simplest of all of the color adjustments. First, let's create a vibrance adjustment. By going to our adjustment panel, we will select this icon which represents the vibrance adjustment, will create a vibrance adjustment layer. You'll see that there are only two sliders and the vibrance adjustment properties panel, one for vibrance and one for saturation. Both of these sliders will allow you to affect the saturation of an image. But vibrance and saturation are two separate concepts. In simple terms, the saturation slider adjust the intensity of all of the colors in an image. While the vibrant slider just adjust the intensity of the less saturated or more muted colors of an image. E.g. if I take this saturation slider and slide it all the way to the right. You'll see that we're increasingly saturation or intensity in all of the colors in this image. This includes a lot of the colors that were already saturated, such as all of the yellows and oranges and the clouds, and a lot of the greens and the trees down here. And it also affects the areas in the sky that were very desaturated to begin with. If we pull this saturation slider back down, we're decreasing the intensity of these colors so much so that we turn the image into a black and white image where we're moving all of the color from this image when we take out all of the saturation. In contrast, the vibrant slider affects saturation a little bit differently. This is a slider that will more selectively adjust or increase the saturation of the less saturated colors in an image. If we pay attention before moving this slider to the areas of this image that are less saturated. So these areas up in the sky where we have some blues and some subtle purples, as well as these areas down here where we have some desaturated areas in the shadows. Let's start to pull this vibrant slider up and see what happens. So as I pull this all the way up to 100, you'll see that the effect is a little bit different than when I pulled the saturation slider all the way up. What's happening here is when you increase the vibrance of an image, it will mostly increase the saturation or intensity of the less saturated colors were really targeting these colors up in here, as well as in this region and the shadows, the colors that were already saturated to begin with, these colors in the sky, the yellows and oranges, as well as the greens. They became a little more saturated when I pulled this vibrant slider up. But as you can see, the less saturated, the more muted colors were really affected more intensely than these colors in the sky and the greens down here. And that's really the difference between the vibrance and the saturation sliders is that the vibrant slider is targets the less saturated colors. And the saturation slider will affect the saturation of all of the colors. We will discuss how these two different sliders can be beneficial in different situations. You'll see if I bring the vibrance all the way back down to the left, I don't completely transition this image into a pure black and white image. We still have a little bit of color in the sky and down in the greens and the bottom of this image. Notice though that the colors that were completely desaturated or turned into the grayscale or black and white. Were those more muted colors. So again, we're targeting the less saturated colors when we reduce the vibrance. Let's talk about the situations when the vibrant slider can be a more beneficial tool to use then the saturation slider. The vibrance tool can be particularly useful when you want to prevent color clipping or loss of color information in your image. When you increase the saturation of an image that is already pretty saturated, it can often cause the colors to get clipped, which essentially means that we lose detail in the areas of the image that are already saturated. Something important to understand when you're working on editing the colors of your image is that when you increase the saturation of an image that's already saturated, it can often cause the colors to get clipped, which essentially means that we lose detail in the areas of the image that we're already saturated. So e.g. if I bring this saturation all the way up, we're going to start to lose detail in the areas of this image that we're already saturated to begin with. If I pull this back down just to see the starting image, we see that these areas, these yellows and oranges, are already relatively saturated, same with the greens down here. And I can test that if I grab my color picker. And just sample some of these pixels. First, just to note, we have to select our bottom layer or our image before we can sample those pixels. If I go back and grab the color picker and select that pixel, e.g. that one has a saturation of 54. That's relatively high for this image. Considering if we select this pixel up here, the saturation is 16. So we're working up in here with much more saturated colors. If I go back to my vibrance, adjustment, will pull this saturation back up so much so that we start to lose the detail, the color detail up in here. It's not necessarily obvious right away that we've lost some color detail and color information in the sky. But we can check that by looking at our histogram. So if you look at this RGB histogram, we can see and I will refresh that histogram here. That there are pixels that are piling up on the left edge of this histogram, which means that we've lost some detail in at least one of our color channels. Since we're looking at the RGB histogram, we know it's either red, green, or blue. We can check that by looking at the different color channels. If I go down to read, we can see it nicely distributed histogram where we don't have any pixels touching the right-hand edge and we don't have any touching the left-hand edge. So that's a good sign that the red channel has not been clicked. I go down to green. We see the same thing. I don't have any pixels touching the right edge nor the left edge. Let's check out the blue channel. Here. You can see that we have quite a few pixels that are touching the left edge. The right edge looks okay. But in our blue channel on the left, we have some pixels that have been clipped. You remember from the histogram course, when you're looking at the histogram for a color channel, whenever you have pixels that are touching the left edge, or they're piling up on the left edge of the histogram. It means that that color has been completely turned off. You take anything else away from this? Just understand that we have a channel histogram that's clipped. We've lost color information or detail in our photograph. This generally something we want to avoid if we want to maintain high-quality images. If you remember from earlier in this course and the lessons on levels and curves adjustment, we turned down blue, we also increase yellow. So since we know in this image that we have quite a few pixels where blue has been completely turned off. We can assume that yellow has been increased for those same pixels. So my guess would be that in this area over here is where we've lost detail in that blue color channel. We can actually test that if we select our image and grab our color picker. If we start to sample these pixels, you'll see that the saturation is 100%. And really as I move all over this area of yellow, all of these pixels that I am sampling or all 100% saturated. We can also see that blue is at 0% intensity. In other words, Blue has been completely turned off in the pixel that has been sampled here. That corresponds to what we're seeing in the histogram where we have this spike at the left edge, which represents blue at zero intensity. Again, if I go back and select more of these pixels, if you notice blue stays at zero the entire time. The key takeaway here is that we've lost a lot of color information in this yellow, orange region of the sky. Now, what I can do to avoid this clipping, if I go back to my vibrance adjustment, I can watch this histogram while I pull the saturation back down. And you'll see as I pull that back down, that the closer I get to more neutral saturation, we start to lose the clipping in the blue channel. You can play around and see how far you can pull this before you start to lose some color detail. And if I pull it back to about right here, that's about where we start to see that clipping. And the more I pull this up, the more we see that spike occurring on the left edge of the histogram. So really, there's not too much I can pull this slider, the saturation slider up without causing clipping, but I can't pull it up a little bit. So that might be a nice adjustment to make. Let's take a look at what would happen if I pull this vibrant slider up. Let's see the difference compared to when we pulled the saturation up. You'll see as I pull vibrance up and up, we're not getting any clipping on this blue channel histogram. That is really what the vibrant slider it was designed for was to prevent the clipping that occurs when I increase the saturation slider. You'll notice though that we bring out a lot of the blues, purples and magentas in the sky. As we'll discuss in a moment, the vibrance and saturation sliders can affect different colors a little bit differently. So the vibrant slider, it can really be a better option to use when you're increasing saturation in an image. And you find that one of your color channels, one or more are being clipped so that you lose detail in your image. Another thing to know about the vibrant slider is that it is designed to prevent skin tones from being overly saturated, like you just saw when you increase vibrance, it will affect the blues, purples, and magentas more so than the yellows, reds and oranges. The reason for that is because Photoshop thinks that some of these tones in the sky here are potentially skin tones. The adjustment isn't targeting them as much as the magenta and blue colors, the saturation. If I reset this and bring the saturation all the way up, the saturation will affect the yellows, oranges, and reds, as well as the grains. If we look at the greens down here, in addition to the yellows and reds, a little bit more than it affects the blues, purples, and magentas. So the difference between how vibrance and saturation target different colors is something to watch out for when you are editing your images. E.g. let's say you're working on an image like this and you'd like to increase some of the nice warm golden tones in the clouds that are occurring at, say, sunrise or sunset. The vibrant slider would not necessarily be the best tool to use in this circumstance because golden tones like oranges and yellows are not quite as targeted by the vibrant slider as say they are by the saturation slider. So in that circumstance, I'd want to use the saturation slider, at least just a little bit over the vibrant slider. When I'm personally editing my photos with the vibrance adjustment, I typically use a mix of both of these sliders. So there's not necessarily one that I prefer over the other. Oftentimes I'll use a combination of the two to dial in the color intensities that look best to my eyes. E.g. if I think the color in the sky looks a little bit flat, which I do in this particular photo. Then I can use the vibrant slider to target those less saturated colors. But I'm also targeting those purples, magentas and blues. So I'm really killing two birds with 1 st by using this vibrant slider to adjust the colors in the sky right here. If I want to target the oranges and yellows and the sky, then I will use the saturation slider. So starting from zero, if I want to boost some of this color, I would just bring this up just a bit again, watching the blue channel histogram to make sure I'm not clipping that channel. And something about here, it looks pretty natural to my eye. We can turn this layer on and off by looking at the difference that we've made by adjusting the color intensity throughout this image. So this is before. And this is after. So I just brought in a little bit more color. It's often best to err on the side of not overdoing the color saturation. It's really easy to overdo the saturation and it's very easy to make the image look unnatural. And that's personally why I tried to go pretty easy on the saturation and the vibrant slider. Something important that I also want to point out here about saturation is that certain parts of an image will look better with more saturation than others. That is because when you are out in nature looking at a landscape with your own eyes, objects that are hit by direct sunlight typically appear more saturated than if they are not being hit by direct sunlight. E.g. in this image, the top of the mountain is getting hit by the last flight of the day. This is an image I took at sunset. And most of the image is actually in the shadows. If we look at the trees down here, this is all in the shadows and it's not being hit by direct sunlight. In contrast to the top of the mountain up here. It would therefore look more natural for this area at the top of the mountain that's getting direct sunlight to appear a little more saturated. Especially more so than the trees that are not getting hit by direct sunlight. If I cranked up the saturation on these trees, it would look really unnatural and it might not be quite obvious why. And the reason for that is that our eyes and our brains just naturally know that this area should not be saturated because it's not being hit by direct sunlight. When I'm bringing up saturation, I'm really paying attention to which areas should be saturated, which areas should not be saturated. So I want this area up here to be saturated. But you can see as we bring the saturation up, we're affecting the trees down here as well. And obviously this is way over saturated up here, but a little bit of this extra orange and yellow does look a little nice. So in order to avoid overly saturating the trees while still maintaining the additional saturation I want to create on the mountain. We're going to have to create a layer mask or a targeted adjustment using a layer mask. And you've seen how this works in previous parts of the course. If you remember, for each adjustment layer, we have a layer mask that comes with it. This white mask just means that the adjustment is affecting the entire image globally. We want to affect as part of this image. Then we'll need to select a black brush. I will select my brush tool, and then I will press X on my keyboard to switch this from black to white. So black as the foreground and white as the background. And then I will bring this brush in a little bit smaller in order to hide the areas of the image that I don't want the adjustment to show. Then I will paint onto the mask over those areas. You can see how that saturation starts to go away in the shadows, which I do think looks a lot better. I can also paint over some of the saturated areas which I do think are a little bit over saturated. So I can either bring the saturation down or I can bring the opacity of my brush down and then just take out some of that saturation just by painting with a gray brush. If we look at this image before and after, we're only affecting the saturation up here in the mountain as well as the clouds. That's probably still a little bit too much saturation for my eye. So what I can also do if I feel like I've got the mask pretty good, I can bring the opacity of the entire layer down. So this a layer does not have as much of an effect on the image. We're still maintaining all of those adjustments. They're just not going to show through as intensely. So if we look at before and then after, that is a much more subtle adjustment. Another thing to think about, and this is also really important about saturation is that the eyes are naturally drawn to more saturated colors. You can use this natural tendency of the eye to create transitions and draw the eye through the image. Like I mentioned in previous lessons of this course, it often helps to have transitions in your composition. So things like dark to light, such as down here, dark to light, and low to high contrast. Or in this case, you could have low to higher saturation. If we have a lower saturation down here in the shadows, which already looks more natural because it's not being hit by direct sunlight. We have a transition from lower saturation to higher saturation. The area that I often find best to have the most saturation is the area that you want to emphasize and direct the viewers attention to things like the subject of your image, which in this image, I would consider this mountain to be one of the main subjects. When you're editing your colors, think about how you can create transitions from lower to higher saturation just to help the I move through the image and to make it a more interesting and visually appealing photograph. Finally, the last thing here that's really important to understand when you are editing saturation and vibrance is that whenever you adjust the color of an image, doing so can also affect the brightness and contrast of the image. The reverse also holds true. So adjusting things like brightness, luminosity in contrast, can also affect the color and saturation of an image. When you're working with the levels and curves adjustment to enhance contrast like you learned in the last few lessons. Always take a look at saturation levels and see what's going on in the image color wise. Because brightness and contrast adjustments can also affect saturation. I recommend always starting with the brightness contrast adjustments first, and then save saturation adjustments for the later stages of editing. Or at least keep adjusting saturation as you go along, you may need to make adjustments to the vibrance and saturation sliders throughout your workflow to correct for changes made by altering the brightness and the contrast. So that's just something to keep in mind as you start to integrate all of these different types of adjustments that you can make in Photoshop. Start with the brightness contrast adjustments, levels, and curves that you learned in the previous few lessons. And then start to make your vibrance and saturation adjustments. You can always keep tweaking those as you move through your editing process. I know that's a lot of information right now. And we're going to start to work through these concepts more, especially in the workflow editing series of this course. The next lesson, we will dive even deeper into color adjustments and you will learn all about the hue saturation adjustment. I look forward to seeing you there in the next lesson. 8. Hue/Saturation adjustments: In this lesson, you're going to learn about the hue saturation adjustment, which gives you even more control over the color in your image than the vibrance adjustment does. Let's first create a hue saturation adjustment layer. You'll see in the properties panel for this adjustment, we have three different sliders. We have a hue slider, a saturation slider, and a lightness slider. Let's talk about the saturation slider first, since you're familiar with saturation from the last lesson. This later works like the saturation slider you saw in the vibrance adjustment. Where if we slide this to the right, we increase saturation in the image. And if we slide it to the left, we D saturate the image. However it, you'll notice if I pull this saturation slider all the way up to 100%, you'll see that this image becomes extremely saturated. Much more so than we were able to saturate the image using the vibrance adjustment. Just to compare the difference, we can create a vibrance adjustment and pull the saturation. I'll actually turn this hue saturation adjustment, hide that layer, and then pull this saturation all the way up to 100. And you'll see that there's a very big difference between when we pull this saturation all the way up on the vibrance adjustment compared to the hue saturation adjustment. If we hide the vibrance layer and turn the hue saturation back on, you can see that dramatic difference. And that's the main difference between when you're using the saturation slider on the hue saturation adjustment is that when you increase saturation, you will increase the intensity of the colors much more strongly than if you were to use the saturation slider in the vibrance adjustment. For this reason, I recommend that you go very light on this saturation slider. In most cases, especially when you already have an image that has saturated colors, because it's very easy to overdo it. In. Another thing to know is that it's easy to add saturation into your image, but becomes much harder to remove saturation, especially as you move through your editing workflow and start to add more and more adjustment layers. So this is an adjustment that I recommend that you go easy on, especially at the beginning of the editing stages. And then maybe later on, you can start to add in more saturation as you move towards the later stages of your editing. Not only can your image look really unnatural as you boost the saturation, but it can also cause color clipping, which we discussed in the previous lesson. When you really increase saturation, you can lose a lot of color detail, which will reduce the quality of your image, like you learned previously, it's really helpful to watch the RGB histogram while you're increasing saturation. Just to ensure that you're not clipping any of the colors in your image. So we can see here, if I refresh this histogram, we have a huge spike on the right edge of the histogram. And we have a spike on the left edge as well, which means that we are losing color information in detail in this photo. Clearly by looking at this image, it's way over saturated. But if I start to bring this down while watching the histogram, we can see how far we can go without getting any clipping. So right about here is where I stop seeing the pixels pile up on the right edge and the left edge of the histogram. So this might be a nice adjustment to make if you want to boost the saturation just a little bit. So we can see here it before and after. But as just a nice little bit of color to this image without removing some of the color information due to color clipping, will go ahead and just remove this vibrance layer. We also have a slider for lightness. The lightness slider controls the brightness of the colors in the image. Moving this slider to the right makes the image brighter, and moving it to the left makes the colors darker. We've discussed previously how changing the saturation of a color can also change its brightness. And the reverse holds true as well. So changing the brightness can also change the color. This slider allows you to account for changes to the brightness of an image when you make saturation adjustments. E.g. if I increase the saturation, we can see that the sky, it starts to get brighter. And I'll overdo this here just so it's easier to see. This guy is getting a little bit brighter. And to compensate for that, we can bring the lightness down to darken down some of those pixels. I've way overdone this adjustment here to make it more obvious. But when you're moving along through your editing process, you may need to adjust the lightness of certain areas of your image after making saturation adjustments. And those tweaks might be minor, but it will really help you balance out and compensate for how saturation and adjustments to your color change the lightness of those adjustments. Alternatively, if you want to prevent the saturation from affecting the brightness of the pixels in the image. What you can do is set the blend mode to color. Now when you make saturation adjustments, if I bring this up, this will prevent the saturation slider from changing the brightness. So that's something else to consider here as well when you're adjusting your saturation. I'll go ahead and turn this back to normal. The third slider we have is the hue slider. And this specifically adjust the hues in the image or the pure colors that lie along the color spectrum. When you move the hue slider, it shifts all of the colors in the image towards a different hue on the color wheel. These two color bars at the bottom of the panel represent the full spectrum of hues. And as you'll see in a moment, these 2 bar will help you visualize how the colors are shifting. The top bar represents the neutral state of the colors before they have shifted. And the bottom bar shows you how the colors are shifting. If you move the hue slider to the right, all of the colors in the image will shift towards the right on the color spectrum. You can see now e.g. all of the yellows have shifted to green. And we can see that in the clouds here that used to be mostly yellow. Now they are shifted towards the green hues on the color spectrum. The blues are now magenta, which we can see up here in the sky. These colors were mostly blue and we can see that they've shifted towards magenta. And the greens are now cyan, which we can see down in the trees which have shifted towards cyan. If I move the hue slider to the left, all of the colors will shift to the left on the color spectrum. We can see that the yellows have shifted to read. And again, we can see that in the sky now the clouds have shifted from yellow to red. The blues have shifted to cyan, which we can see up in the sky. And the greens have shifted to yellow. Again, we can see how the greens and the trees have shifted towards yellow. You might be wondering how this slider can be useful because you can see as we move this color hue slider, the image looks really unnatural no matter where we take this. This slider isn't really practical when you're applying it globally to the entire image. You can however, make targeted adjustments to specific colors in the image by using this color selection menu. When I open this up, you can see that we can select from six different colors. We have the three primary colors, red, green, and blue. We also have the secondary colors, yellow, cyan, and magenta. You can select one of these colors and then use the sliders to make targeted adjustments to that specific color, e.g. and actually, I'm going to reset this and reselect yellow. When I select a yellow, I'll be able to use these three sliders to only adjust yellow. If I now move this hue slider, if I shift it to the right, you can see that only the yellows and the image are being adjusted. So if we pay attention to the yellows and the sky as well as the yellows and the trees. We can see that we're shifting those yellow colors towards the green area of the color spectrum. If I pull this hue slider down to the left, you can see that the yellows are shifting left on the color spectrum, more towards the reds and magentas. The hue slider can be particularly useful when you're just selecting for a single color. Here I've overdone the change in hue. But let's say if I bring this back to neutral, Let's say I wanted to adjust the yellows and the sky just to become a little bit more red, orange in color. So what I could do is shift this hue slider just a little bit to the left. Now I'm adding a little bit more orange into the sky, which might look better depending on what appeals to your eye. We can also affect the saturation of this specific color. So if I start to increase the saturation, I'm only targeting this range of yellows in the image. I can also change just the lightness as well. I can bring this up again, only targeting that color. And we can make these adjustments for all of the different colors listed in this menu. So if we wanted to adjust greens, we could increase the saturation of just the grains, which you can see down here is being adjusted mostly in the trees. We can also increase the lightness and maybe shift the hue slightly as well, depending on what looks better to your eyes. And the fact that you can choose between these different colors really gives you much more control over saturation, hue and brightness. Each individual color in an image. This in my opinion, is one of the best features of the hue saturation adjustment. The ability that it gives you to specifically target different colors in an image. We can also target different colors using this click and drag tool. Wherever I hover over the image with this tool, I can click and then drag to the right to increase the saturation of that color. And drag to the left to decrease the saturation of just that specific color. And you'll see where I click it automatically select that color from the color menu. And I can do this for all of the different parts of the image that I'd like to adjust. E.g. increase some of the saturation in the greens and the trees, and maybe increase the saturation of some of the yellows in the sky. You've probably noticed that when I select a color, a slider appears between the two color bars. This slider indicates the selected colors position on the color spectrum. And it allows you to fine tune the exact colors that you want to adjust. You can manipulate this slider in a few different ways. There are two vertical bars here that represent the color range. If you slide this slider out to the right, you will increase the color range to include more of the reds and yellows. And if I slide the left bar to the left, I start to include more of the magenta is. The wider you make these 2 bar, the more colors you're going to include in the selection. The two outer sliders show where the adjustment feathers or tapers off into the neighboring colors. The more you move away from the color range, the more you smooth out or feather into the adjacent colors. The third thing you can do is click and drag on this slider to change the position along the color spectrum. So if I wanted to shift the colors selected from the reds more to the yellows, I can just drag the slider to the right towards the yellows. If I increase the saturation, we can see that the yellows are starting to get more saturated. But if I expand this color range to include more of the grains, this saturation adjustment is going to affect more of the greens down here. Then I can expand this feathering so that the transition of this adjustment is more smoothly feathered into the adjacent colors. I could drag this down to the left or towards the blues. Now you see that this adjustment is really only affecting these regions in the sky, the purples, magentas, and blues. So this slider really allows you to fine tune and adjust the specific colors that you want to be targeted using the hue saturation sliders. Another tool that you can use to select for specific colors are these Eyedropper tools. So if I select, say red and select this eyedropper tool, then I can hover over my image. And it just like a standard eyedropper sample, the area of the image that I'd like to adjust. You can see when I clicked on this area, now these slider appears in the blue range. You can use the Eyedropper with the plus button to add the amount of colors that are gonna be included in this selection. So I can click around this image here and you'll see that this slider starts to widen to incorporate some of the purples and magentas into this selection. Then I can increase the saturation of those particular colors or lighten them up if I'd like to do that as well. You can also remove the colors selected by using the eyedropper with the minus symbol next to it. And click on the colors that you'd like to remove from that selection. You'll see how this slider adjusted to accommodate for the removal of some of these purples. You can get even more precise with these targeted color adjustments. If you make an adjustment to a specific color, say here yellow. Let's say I wanted to increase the saturation of yellow in the sky, but I don't want to increase the saturation of yellow in the trees because we do have green and the trees, but we also have yellow mixed in there as well. And you can see that when I increase saturation, the saturation in the trees is increase just because those yellows are mixed in with the greens. I don't like the effect that this saturation adjustment is having on the trees. So what I can do is selecting the layer mask, which we have already selected here. Then I can grab a brush and using black as the foreground to paint onto this mask like you've seen before. I can paint over the trees to remove that saturation. And I will increase the opacity all the way to 100 for now. And as I paint onto this mask, you can see how that saturation is disappearing. And the trees, we still have a saturation in the sky. And we can look at this layer by turning it off. So this is before and this is after. Now that yellow adjustment, that targeted adjustment that we already were making two yellow is now only isolated to this area of the sky. I do think this looks a little bit too yellow still in the sky, so I'll just bring the opacity down. That adjustment is a little bit more subtle. Now we have just a nice touch of yellow in the sky, which I think looks nice. So using the hue saturation adjustment as well as a layer mask is a great way to make really precise adjustments to specific colors in the image. If we go back to the Properties panel, you can also see that we have the option to select from different presets. Just like you saw with some of the other adjustments. These will help you make quick hue saturation adjustments. And you can try some of these out to see if one of them fits the aesthetic that you're trying to create. And then maybe tweak your image from there using the different sliders. These presets are not something that I personally use, but I just wanted to point them out here because they might be useful in your workflow. The last thing I want to briefly mention here is the colorize option. And again, this is not a tool that I personally use, but I want to point it out in case it might be useful in your workflow with this colorize option does, is it allows you to apply a specific color tint to the entire image, replacing the original colors. When you enable this, you can change the hue of that tint. And you can see that this adjustment is not being applied down here where we've created this mask. So what I'll do is right-click and just disable that layer mask. And then we can also adjust the saturation of that tint. Can change the saturation as well as the lightness. So these sliders work just like you've seen before. But we're really just working with a specific tint that's being applied to all of the colors in the image. So that pretty much covers all of the features of the hue saturation adjustment. As you can see, this is a really powerful tool that gives you a ton of control over the colors in your photos. Like I mentioned, with the vibrance adjustment, this is an adjustment that I recommend that you add in later in your workflow after you've made brightness and contrast adjustments with tools like levels and curves. 9. Color balance adjustments: In this lesson, you're going to learn about the color balance adjustment. The color balance adjustment in Photoshop is a powerful tool that allows me to adjust the colors in your image to achieve a desired color cast or balanced. This adjustment can help you correct for unwanted color shifts. Enhance the color harmony and improve the overall color tone of your image. Let's first create art color balance adjustment. You'll see in the color balance properties panel that we have three different sliders for each of the three color channels, red, green, and blue. As you might have guessed, these three sliders allow you to adjust the color balance for each individual color channel. You also have options in the tones menu to adjust from either the mid tones, the highlights, and the shadows. So whichever option that you select here is where the majority of the adjustment is going to be created when you use these sliders. When you have this set to mid tones, when you increase red in the red channel, you add red mostly to the mid tones. You really add red to all of the colors in the image, but especially in the mid tones. And if you slide the red channel down, as we've seen before, when you remove red, you add cyan. If we increase green using the green slider, we add green to all of the colors, especially in the mid tones. And if we slide greenback towards magenta, we remove green and add magenta. And similarly, like we've seen before, as you add blue, you start to increase blue here, especially in the mid tones. And as you remove blue, you add yellow into the image. If I change this to shadows, most of these adjustments are going to affect the shadows area if you pay attention to the shadows down here as well as in the sky, most of this adjustment is occurring in the shadows. So this works for all of the sliders here. And we can do the same thing with the highlights. If we pay attention to the highlights, increasing red will increase red in the highlights, and decreasing red will increase cyan in the highlights. This works the same way for all three of these sliders, which you can see as I move the green slider and the blue slider. In addition to the sliders, you also have a checkbox for it Preserve Luminosity. This option is designed to ensure that the adjustments made to the color balance will not affect the overall brightness of your image. By enabling this option, photoshop will automatically adjust the brightness of your image as you make changes to the color balance, and it will try to maintain the overall luminosity. I usually have this checkbox checked, but sometimes I experiment to see if I liked the look of the image better without it checked whether or not you have preserved luminosity enabled really depends on your own personal preference and what you're trying to achieve. Sometimes I like the look of my image better without Preserve Luminosity and sometimes I like it better with it checked. Again just something to play around and experiment with. One thing I want to mention here before we dive into the best uses for these sliders, is that the magenta and green slider is similar to the tint slider that you'll find in light room or Adobe Camera Raw. And the yellow blue slider is similar to the white balance slider that you'll also see in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. So if we hop into Adobe Camera Raw here for a moment by double-clicking on our smart object layer. You can see that we have the temperature and the tint sliders. These two sliders are essentially the same as the sliders that you'll get in the color balance adjustment. E.g. I. Can slide this more towards the yellow to increase yellow or increase the temperature. And back towards blue to decrease the temperature and make the image look cooler. And for the tint slider, like the green and magenta, I can slide this to the right to increase magenta, and slide this to the left to increase green in the image. I just wanted to point that out because there are multiple different ways that you can adjust the color balance in your image. We've also seen methods using the curves and levels adjustment to essentially do very similar adjustments that you can do using the color balance adjustment. And know that one of these methods is not necessarily superior to another method. It really comes down to what works best for you and just having the knowledge and awareness of all of the different methods in which you can adjust color balance so that you can decide what works best for your editing workflow. The color balance adjustment can be useful in two main ways. The first is when you want to remove or neutralize an unwanted color cast. And the second is when you want to introduce a color cast, one that you think will enhance the image. First, let's discuss removing an unwanted color cast. And we're going to jump over to this image. You've seen this image previously in the course when we were working on levels and curves, increasing contrast in this image. I've actually already gone ahead and created a levels adjustment to increase the contrast just so we can see the patterns on the sand. You can see that this image has quite a strong blue color cast. In order to remove that blue color cast and to neutralize this image to make it appear more what I saw when I was out in the field shooting with my eyes. I can create a color balance adjustment. To remove the blue cast. I can go down to this blue channel slider and start to slide this towards yellow. And what I'm doing again is removing the blue. And in doing so, I'm adding yellow. And I can take this down quite a bit. Now you can start to see that this image is becoming more neutralized. I'm losing a lot of the blue in this image. We can see this strong color cast before. And then after we've removed a lot of that blue tint to the image, I could even come up to the red, science lighter, and maybe perhaps increase red just slightly. Because the majority of tones in this image are in the mid tones. If I were to switch this to shadows, the adjustments wouldn't have a major effect. Again, if we look at the histogram, you can see most of those tones are in the mid tones, but we could try to add a little more yellow to the shadows. Now I think this image is starting to look a little bit too yellow, so I'll go back to mid tones. Back off on some of those yellows. We can try to add a little more yellow or it removes some blue in the highlights as well. Now let's take a look at before and after. I think now after making this adjustment, the image looks a lot closer to what I saw with my eyes. We're not shooting in the field. And that's usually my personal goal when I'm editing is to focus on how I can make the image as realistic as possible, as close to what I saw when I was out shooting. Like I mentioned, another way that we could have removed this color cast is by creating a Curves Adjustment, a curves or a levels adjustment. So if I turn this adjustment layer off and I go down to the levels that I've already created here. If I go up to the Channels menu and change this to the blue channel, then when I adjust the midtone slider by pulling it to the right, you can see that I'm removing that blue color cast as well. And you learned all about how to adjust color balance using levels in the levels lessons. So I won't go into too much depth here. But I just want to point out again how many different ways in which you can achieve the same thing in Photoshop. That's part of what makes Photoshop so complicated, but it's also what gives it power. Now, I often jump back and forth between different tools to adjust color balance. So sometimes I might use levels and curves, and sometimes I might use the color balance adjustment. And I'd probably use the white balance and tint sliders and Adobe Camera Raw the most. Making adjustments to my raw photos before I move into Photoshop and add additional adjustment layers to adjust color balance. Let's take a look at another example. This is an image that I think has a little bit too strong of a blue or greenish color cast. But one that I also think could benefit by adding a color cast into the sky. So I think this guy up here looks a little bit flat. And I know that when I was out shooting, there were a lot more yellows, oranges, and reds and the sky is this was taken at sunset when I'd like to add some of that back in with a slight color cast. Let's create another color balance adjustment on this image. The first thing I wanna do here is remove this bluish tint or color cast that I think is affecting most of this image. So what I'll do, like you saw in the previous example, is grab the blue channel slider and remove some of that blue. And in doing so, I will increase the yellows. I'm just gonna go pretty light on that for now. So I think that looks okay. I'm also going to check Preserve Luminosity just as a starting point. And then maybe uncheck that later depending on what looks best to my eyes. I also might bring the red channel up just slightly, maybe just one or two points. Let's look at before. And after. I think that looks a little bit better now that we've removed some of that blue color cast. Like I mentioned, the second way that the color balance adjustment can be useful is to add or increase a color cast that you think will enhance your image. I want to increase some of the yellows and reds in the sky. And because most of this is in the highlights, I'm going to switch this to the highlights. Then I will start to increase the reds just a little bit. Again, I'm pretty light on this adjustment. Then some of the magentas and a little bit of yellow. I think something right around there looks nice. Let's take a look at how that shift has affected the image. So this is before and this is after. And you'll notice that we're starting to see more of a dramatic change in the color balance. The more we start to shift the sliders and move into the different tones of the image. I do think that this area down here has become maybe a little bit too red. So I might go back in and go to the shadows. Just increase some of the cooler tones just a bit. Be a touch of cyan. Let's take a look at before and after. And to my eyes, I do think that this slight adjustment has improved this image significantly. I would probably continue to tweak these sliders just a little bit more. That can take a lot of time and practice to really dial in the color balance perfectly. But hopefully that gives you a good idea of how you can use these sliders to either remove an unwanted color cast or introduce a color cast that will benefit the image aesthetically. We can also take a look at what happens when we turn Preserve Luminosity off. I actually think that when I have Preserve Luminosity checked, this image looks more natural than when it does unchecked. So I think I will keep it checked for this particular adjustments. The color balance adjustment is one of the easiest tools you can use to balance the colors in your image. I often find it a little bit easier and more intuitive to use then the levels and curves adjustment. If I'm trying to adjust the color balance. Like I mentioned, I'll often jump between multiple different adjustment layers because even though this tool is easier to adjust color balance, it won't allow you to adjust brightness and contrast like the curves and levels adjustments do overall. However, the color balance adjustment is a powerful tool that you can use to help you achieve your desired color tone and enhance the overall color harmony of your image. 10. Selective color adjustments: In this lesson, you're going to learn about the selective color adjustment. The selective color adjustment is also a tool that allows you to fine-tune the color balance in your image. And it's similar to the color balance adjustment. But it will allow you to make even more precise adjustments to the color balance of each individual color in your image. I personally only use this adjustment at the very end of my workflow just to make minor tweaks and adjustments to individual colors as well as the color harmony in my image. Sometimes I don't necessarily even use this adjustment and all if I don t think that it's necessary. Oftentimes what I'll do is after finishing most of my editing, I'll step away from the image for at least a few days. And then maybe I'll come back and use the selective color adjustment again just to dial in those minor changes to color. Let's go ahead and create a selective color adjustment layer. And you'll find this adjustment at the bottom of the adjustment panel. You'll see that it looks similar to the color balance adjustment. And we have four different sliders to adjust color. We have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. We also have a colours menu, which gives you the ability to select from the six different colors, as well as the whites, neutrals, and blacks. When you have the white selected, it'll mostly affect the highlights in the image. When you select the neutrals, your adjustments will mostly affect the mid tones. And as you might have guessed, when you select the blocks, you'll mostly affect the shadows when you make your adjustments. Let's first start with the neutrals. And you'll see that these sliders work just like we've seen before. If we increase cyan, we will increase cyan in really most of the image, especially in the mid tones. And if we decrease cyan, like you've seen before, we introduce red into the image. The same thing with the other sliders. Increasing magenta increases magenta. Removing magenta ads green. Increasing yellow increases yellow. Again, mostly in the mid tones here, since we've selected neutrals, decreasing yellow introduces or adds blue. The black slider will allow you to add black to the image. When you increase black. If you go to the left on the black slider, it will introduce white into the image. These sliders work similarly for the whites. Again, this will focus mostly on the highlights. So if I increase cyan, most of that adjustment effects really the brightest parts of the image. So right in here in the sky and a little bit down here as well. The same thing as you saw with the neutrals. If I select the blacks. Again, this will mostly affect the shadows. So increasing cyan will affect the shadows which comprise the majority of this image. So mostly in the foreground, midground, as well as in the sky up here. Again, these all work the same. You can go through and test how each one of these works on your own. But just remember we add the color by moving to the right and we remove the color by sliding to the left. You can also make these adjustments to each individual color. Right? Now we have selected the reds, and this is really where the power of this adjustment comes in when you can really dial in and adjust each individual color channel in this image. When you move these sliders, you're essentially mixing in these colors into the red channel without affecting any of the other colors. If I move science to the right, I'm mixing in cyan with the reds. And if I move this cyan slider to the left, I start to add red in with the reds, so I'm increasing the reds. If I move the magenta slider to the right, I start to mix magenta into the reds. You can see how that changes in the sky where we have, most of the reds are located in the skies. We really see that adjustment there. If I take magenta back down, we add green into the sky or wherever those reds are predominantly located in the image. Same thing with the yellow. If we move yellow to the right, we mix yellow with red. And moving yellow to the left, we remove yellow and add blue into the reds. The black slider, when we move the black slider to the right, we're adding black into the reds. So that'll darken down the reds if there are reds and the image, you'll really notice that here we don't have that many reds actually, so it's a really minor adjustment. You can see when I move that all the way to 100%, it doesn't make a huge difference. It does darken down the sky a little bit more, but because there's not a large amount of red here, we don't see a major adjustment. You'll see when I slide the black slider to the left, I add white into the red. I start to lighten up the sky a little bit. So you can see before. And then after we do have some red up in the cliffs, in the mountain side, up here in a little bit, down in the shadows here as well. You'll also notice that you have options between relative and absolute. Relative and absolute options determine how the color adjustment values are calculated for each color range. The relative option, adjust the colors based on their relationship to the other colors in the image. E.g. if I move the slider to the left, this will reduce the relative amount of cyan in the red compared to the other colors in the image. In contrast, the absolute option adjust the colors based on their absolute values. When you have absolute selected, the color balance sliders affect the absolute amount of each color present in the selected color range. E.g. when this science lighter is pulled all the way to the left, this reduces the absolute amount of cyan in the reds, regardless of the other colors present in the image. The most important thing to understand about this is that the relative option is useful when you want to adjust the colors in an image while preserving their relative proportions. I typically almost always keep this on relative, but sometimes I'll experiment going back-and-forth between absolute and relative to see if I like one look better than another. Because these two options affect the color adjustment values a little bit differently. You may also want to experiment with both options to see which works best for your image. You can see that there really wasn't much of a difference when I select absolute compared to relative. In certain circumstances, when you make certain adjustments, you will see a much larger difference. But I tend to find that the relative option looks more natural in most circumstances. So that's why I usually keep it on relative. Let's look at some examples so you can get a better understanding of when these sliders and when this selective color adjustment can be really useful. Oftentimes, when I'm making my final color adjustments, I'm really looking at the color wheel in determining which colors lie within my color harmony. If you're unfamiliar with the basic color harmonies, then I definitely recommend that you go read up on some color theory and the basics of color harmony as that will really help you out when you're editing your photos, especially when you're working with color. And I will provide some links in the course resources on color theory and color harmony that will really help you out when you're starting to learn this stuff. But for now, just know that when I'm looking at this image in my mind, I think a complimentary color harmony would look best. I see blue in the sky as well as a lot of yellows. So when I look at the color wheel, you can see that blue, which are getting in the sky, is opposite of yellow on the color wheel. So we can say that these two colors, yellow and blue, are complimentary colors. And then they would look aesthetically pleasing if they were the two dominant colors in this image. What I wanna do in this image is really emphasize these two complimentary colors, the blue and the yellow. And de-emphasize some of the colors that don't really lie within that color harmony. These in particular would be some of the reds that I see up in the cliffs on this mountain, as well as some of the grains. So I think I'm going to try to take down a little bit of this green as well as some of the red up in the mountains. In order to remove some of this red, what I'll do is go to my color sliders. And I will start to slide site and just a little bit to the right. And again here, these are really minor tweaks. I can bring this all the way to the right just to really show you the difference that it makes before and after. We've really taken a lot of red out of the mountain, but the sky as well. And I actually kinda like that little touch of red in the sky, but I do like the mountain better without that red tint. I'm going to take this about right here. Then in order to only apply this adjustment in the mountain, I'm going to use a layer mask to hide everything else except this adjustment. And really the easiest way to do that is if you select your adjustment layer mask, you can invert this mask using Command or Control I. And now when I grabbed my brush, I set this to a white brush, a white foreground. So I'll just press X on my keyboard as you've seen many times throughout this course. Then we'll just paint onto the area that I'd like to show through on the adjustment. Again, that's going to be this area on the mountain. I'm also before I start brushing, I'm going to bring the opacity down just so it's not a full-blown adjustment here. So it's just a little bit of a subtle adjustment. So as I paint on, again, watching the layer mask, you can see that we're starting to see white coming through this layer mask. And I'm just going to paint on only the areas that I want the adjustment to be visible. So something like that I think will look good for now. We can turn this adjustment layer on and off to see the difference. So that's before and that's after. It's a very, very slight change and it's really not that noticeable, but these really small tweaks that you make to color when you start to make them all over your image. It can really have a large impact when they all come together. I might actually go back to my adjustment and then increase cyan a little bit more. Just remove that read from that area a little bit more. I think something right there looks pretty good. Like I mentioned, I also want to take down some of the green down here in the trees as well as some of these bright grasses. Because they really don't lie within the color harmony that I've decided to work with. So what I'll do is actually create another selective color adjustment layer. This time I'm only going to be watching the green at the bottom of the image. And as you learn throughout this course, the opposite of magenta is green. So if we want to remove some grain, we can start to add a little bit of magenta. You'll see if I take this all the way up just to demonstrate we do remove some of the grain. So you can see before and then after that adjustment is really slight. I'll probably just take it up to about right here. Then I might add a little bit of blue to the greens as well by moving the yellow slider to the left. So by removing yellow, I'm adding blue. Oftentimes when you have areas of your image that are in the shadows, they do naturally have more of a bluish color tint to them. Sometimes adding a little bit of blue to the shadows will improve your image just a bit. Another thing I might try is increasing the whites and the greens. So brightening some of those greens up, which will wash out that green color a little bit, but it might add a little bit of contrast. You'll see if I bring that all the way to the left, I really did brighten up a lot of the tops of the trees. And I do like that increase in contrast. I'll probably bring this up to around here because that contrast, I think makes the image pop a little bit more. Now we can see before and after, we really don't have any green in the sky and not too much green in the mountains. So most of this adjustment has been targeted in this area of the image. So I'm really not going to worry about touching the mask for this particular adjustment layer. I also know that there's quite a bit of yellow in the grains, and that's often true when you have any type of green vegetation in your image. So green trees, green grasses, there's usually at least a little bit of yellow mixed in. So if I go to my yellow channel, I'll just show you really quickly. When I move this back and forth, you can see how much yellow there is in trees and the grass is. A lot of times I'll start with an adjustment by moving this black slider back and forth, just so I can see where that color is located in the image. When I start to adjust the color, sliders might make a similar adjustment like I did to the greens just by adding in a little bit magenta and a little bit of blue by sliding that to the left. I'd also like to increase the whites again just to create more contrast in the trees. Let's see, before and after. In those greens definitely look a lot more subtle. They look a lot more muted and less saturated. And if I feel like I've taken that adjustment a little bit too far, which I think I have done just a little bit here. I can just bring that opacity down to make it blend into the original image just a little bit better. So something around right here, I think looks nice. Then we can see before, again, this looks way too green for my eyes. Then after a lot more subtle, I think looks a lot more natural. I do think that it's also helped this overall complimentary color harmony that I'm trying to work with. I'm gonna go ahead and create another selective color adjustment layer. Now I'm just going to work through some of these additional colors. We've adjusted. Our reds are yellows are greens. Let's try out some cyan. Sometimes I'll move through all of these sliders, rocking them back-and-forth and seeing if they add any value, any benefit to the image based on what looks best to my eyes. There's really not a lot of cyan in this image, so we're not seeing any adjustment here. Let's try our blues. You can see there is quite a bit of blue up here. But I actually think the original blue looks nice. Lighter, more muted blue really looks nice with these yellows. Again, I can try to move these and see if they help, but I don t think that it's really adding any benefit here. My personal philosophy in editing and probably life is to keep it as simple as possible. I really tried to minimize the adjustments as much as possible. And when I do make an adjustment, I try to rationalize or justify why that adjustment is necessary. Sometimes it's really easy to go overboard moving sliders and changing things just because you can. But that's not necessarily going to lead you to a better outcome. Your final image won't necessarily be a stronger image just because you found a lot of ways to make things look different. In this case with the blues, I don't really find any of these sliders adding value, at least to my eyes. If I keep going, Let's check out magenta. And if I move the science lighter, we do get actually some nice magenta in the sky as we start to add a little bit of red and decrease cyan is a nice touch of red to the Skype. But like I said, I can't really justify making this adjustment. First of all, because red doesn't really lie within my color harmony. Complimentary color harmony of blue and yellow. I think I'm gonna pull this back to neutral and just let some of the natural magentas occur in the sky. Since that's really what I saw when I was out shooting with my eyes. And again, that's another one of my main goals is to try to make the image look as natural as possible, while still trying to dial in some of that color harmony and use a little bit of creative freedom to emphasize the colors that I think look best and de-emphasize some of the colors that don't lie within that harmony. We can try magenta. Yeah, it does add a little bit of magenta to this guy, but I really don't think that looks very natural. It might look pretty, but it's not quite as natural as I'd like it to be. And yellows, we see not much of a change. I might boost the blacks up here a little bit just to add some contrast in the magenta is it looks pretty nice to my eyes. So I think I'm just going to stick with this for now. And I want to point out here that we've made three separate selective color adjustments. And this is one of the reasons that Photoshop can be so powerful is that you can add as many adjustment layers as you'd like. You can start to layer on adjustment after adjustment to really fine tune and make extremely precise, detailed adjustments to specific parts of the image. And now what I can do is group all of these together. So I'll create a group and drag these into that group. And I could rename this group something like selective color. And now we can collapse that group. Let's check out before and after. So that's before. And that is after. We're seeing slight changes really all over the image. And I think these adjustments make for a little better color balance over all. So for now, I'm just going to stick with this. And I want to show you another example, the photo that I took at the sand dunes and Colorado. And for this particular image, I want to make the color of the sand look a little bit more natural. I feel that it has a little bit too much of a bluish tint or a bluish color cast. And I could use the color balance adjustment, but I find that the selective color adjustment allows you to make these adjustments a little bit more precise. So I'll create a selective color adjustment. And let's set this to the blues. If Iraq, this black slider back and forth, you can see that there's quite a bit of blue in this region of the image. So I'll bring this back to neutral. And then in order to remove some of the bluish tint just in this area of the image. I can increase the yellow channel. You'll see as I move that to the right, the sand dunes become less blue. And I do think that they become a little closer to the color that I remember seeing out in the field. A little bit more of a cream tan color. And there was bluish light coming from the sunset. This was after the sunset. And I don't want to make this look unnatural as if there wasn't any blue light hitting the dunes? I'll just adjust this just a little bit. So something about right there. Then we can see before and after, I could probably boost this up a little bit more. And I think this makes the color of the dunes look a little bit more realistic. Typically, I really only like to adjust one, maybe two colors. And really of those colors only adjust them slightly. Here I've only boosted the yellow. I really don't think that I need to change any of these other sliders. You can see when I add magenta, it really doesn't make the image look nice same if I decrease magenta and add green. I really tried to go in and say, what do I want to adjust and how do I want to adjust it. So I immediately knew I wanted to remove some of the blue, made the decision to go into the blues and then increase the yellows. The ability to determine which color channel to choose which of these sliders you need to move in order to properly adjust your color balance is something that takes a lot of time in practice. So don't get frustrated if, especially at first, all of this seems overwhelming and it really doesn't make a lot of sense. And you look at your image and it just seems almost impossible to figure out what to do. The best way to learn this is to go in and just start experimenting. I'm still personally learning all the time. So I hope your patient with yourself and that you don't worry too much about the best way or the perfect way to do this. There's so many different ways to do many of the same things in Photoshop. This is a tool that just takes a lot of time in practice. And hopefully you're having a lot of fun along the way. The next lesson we will discuss blending modes, which we've briefly discussed before, and cover a few more adjustment layers that I think that you should be aware of, but are not necessarily ones that I personally use all the time. So I look forward to seeing you in the next few lessons. 11. How to use blending modes: In this lesson, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the different types of blend modes you can use when editing landscape photos and Photoshop. Up to this point, we've only covered normal color and luminosity blending modes to control whether our adjustment only affects brightness or only luminosity or both. As you've seen before, all of the blending modes are located in this menu, in the layer adjustment panel, there are actually over 20 different blending modes in Photoshop that each change the look of a layer in a specific way. And they're mainly grouped by the overall effect that they have on an image, such as darkening and lightening or modifying contrast of an image. Blending modes gives us an additional amount of control over the appearance of our layers, particularly how layers interact with each other. Each Blending Mode produces a different effect by blending the pixels of one layer, the pixels of the layers below it. The topic of blending modes and how to use them really deserves a course of its own because there's so much to learn about them. For this reason, I'm only going to cover the four blending modes that I personally use the most in my landscape photography. And then you can go and dive deeper into how all of these blending modes work on your own. If you're interested in learning more, you can always reach out to me if you'd like additional tutorials or more advanced instruction regarding blending modes. Alright, let's go ahead and discuss how we can use some of these different blending modes. First, you can apply different blending modes to both pixel layers and adjustment layers. When I personally work with blending modes, I typically only apply them to adjustment layers. First here, I'm just gonna go ahead and create a curves adjustment to apply to this image. When I change the blending mode for this curves adjustment, it will affect how this adjustment layer will be blended into the image. E.g. if I change this from normal, which is the default state to multiply, you'll see that the image becomes much darker. The changes at each of these blending modes has on an image is essentially the same for every adjustment layer. E.g. if I create a levels adjustment and I will hide this curves adjustment for now. If I change the blending mode of this levels adjustment to multiply. You can see that this multiply blending mode has had the same effect by darkening down this image. Once you apply the blending mode, you can still use the adjustment in the same ways that we've seen throughout this course. E.g. in the levels adjustment, I can go to the Properties panel and adjust this levels adjustment, just like you've seen in the levels adjustment lesson. So I can move these sliders to adjust the white point, the midpoint, and the black point. The same thing with the curves adjustment. If I hide the levels and then turn the curves adjustment on and reset this to Multiply. I can modify this curves adjustment just like we've seen before, to change the brightness, the contrast, the color balance, and all of the different things that you've already learned how to do using the curves adjustment. So really what you're doing when setting a blend mode Other than normal is that you're using a combination of the adjustment layer with the blending mode. And obviously this blending mode doesn't work for this image. But we'll discuss some of the best practices as well as some examples of how you can use the adjustment layers with different blending modes. The blending modes that I personally use the most and I believe are the most commonly used by landscape photographers are the multiply, which we just looked at, screen overlay and soft light. Again, these four are not necessarily the best, but in my opinion they're the most practical. And especially when you're starting out in Photoshop, they might be the best to start out with, to start experimenting with. All of these other blending modes are definitely worth experimenting with and learning more about. As you just saw at the multiply mode darkens the image. And it works by multiplying the pixel values of the top layer or this curves adjustment layer right here by the pixel values of the underlying layer. So the image layer we have here, the multiply blending mode often gives the image a moodier look, and it gives it a little bit more dimension. And obviously, like I mentioned, it doesn't work for this image, but we can try it out on the sand dunes image that we looked at in the previous lesson. We can start out by creating a curves adjustment. Then set this to multiply. That does darken the image up quite a bit. And it is too much here as well, but it is a little bit better than we saw in the previous example. I could just bring this opacity down so that adjustment isn't quite as intense. So maybe something about right there. I can also lighten up this image a little bit using the curves adjustment so they can reduce some of this darkening effect. The screen blending mode is another commonly used blending mode that creates a brightening effect in the image. So if you'd like to make the adjustment lighter or parts of the adjustment lighter, you can set the mode to screen. Then you can use your curves again to darken this image down to what looks best to your eyes. The soft light blending mode increases contrast in the image. So in other words, like we've talked about, it makes the darks darker and the lights lighter. The overlay blending mode increases the contrast even more than the soft light blending mode. So if you really want to punchy, contrasty look to your adjustment, you can set the mode to overlay. That's just a general overview of the foremost commonly used blending modes. We will come back to how to use these modes later in the course. And also in my editing workflow series, you'll really get to see a lot of examples of the best circumstances and situations in which blending modes, combined with specific adjustment layers will really help enhance your image. 12. Using solid color layers to enhance light: In this lesson, you will learn an editing technique that I like to use to enhance the color of the light and my images. This technique involves the use of a solid color layer in combination with the soft light blending mode, which you learned about in the last lesson. There are two main ways to create a solid color layer. You can go to your main menu, into the Layer menu, then down to New Fill Layer. Then you can select solid color. You can also create a solid color layer by going down to your layers panel and click on the half circle icon. And then in this menu, select Solid Color. The solid color layer isn't technically an adjustment layer, so you won't find it in the adjustments panel. When you create a solid color layer, like the name suggests, you will get a layer that is a single solid color and you'll be prompted to select what color you'd like that layer to be. For now I'm just going to click Okay, and we'll come back and select a new color in just a moment. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the blending mode. I'm going to switch this from normal to soft light. Now we can see that solid color layer has become more transparent as it's been blended into the layer below. You can see that there's now a light blue tint reflecting this color. It's been overlaid over the entire image. What I wanna do next is enhanced the color of the light that's coming from the sun and hitting the landscape. So what I'll do is I'll double-click on this solid color layer. Now I'm going to select a new color. So I'm going to select one of these golden colors in the sky. Now I'm also paying attention to my color wheel. And we've discussed that for this image that I'd like to work with, a complimentary color harmony. So I'd like to work with blue and yellow, which is on the opposite side of the color wheel. I'm actually going to brighten this color up just a little bit so we can make really a bright natural looking light on this landscape. Then I will click, Okay. What we're going to do next is high this solid color layer using its mask. We'll go and select the mask. Then I'm just going to invert this mask to make it solid black. So I will just press Command or Control. And then i, now that I've created a solid black mask, I'm hiding all of this solid color layer. What I wanna do next is reveal a little bit of this layers that I can paint in some of this nice warm yellow light onto the landscape. So I will select my brush. Then with my brush color set to white. I'm going to start painting onto this image. I'm actually going to change the opacity. I'm going to pull this way down because I want this adjustment to be really light to something around 14, 15% will work well. And I'm using a pretty large brush here. Next I'm going to start painting onto this image moving in the direction of the light. So starting from the source of light or the sun, I'm just going to paint across the landscape. And I'm just going to make a few brushstrokes and moving all the way across. You can see that it looks now there's a really soft warm beam of light that's really illuminating the mountain side. If we look at before, we hide the layer and after, it really makes a nice effect, enhancing both the color harmony as well as the lighting and the image. I do think however, that this adjustment is a little bit too intense. So I'm going to bring the opacity down. Probably something like that. So it really looks natural. And then let's see what it looks like before and after. I really like the additional color that's been introduced. So introducing more of those yellows that are complimentary to the blues, while maintaining all of the original colors and overall color balance. Because we haven't been touching this area down here. And we haven't added any unnecessary yellow light into the sky as well. When you're painting onto the landscape, really focus on the areas that are getting hit by direct sunlight. Just to enhance those warm beams of light hitting the landscape. And always pay attention to the color harmony that you're trying to work with. So if I was working with another color harmony or if I wanted to adjust this yellow color, I could double-click on this solid color layer and then change the colors so I can make it a different shade of yellow or maybe orange. Or I could change it to something like in the range of blues on the color wheel. You can see that has a dramatically different effect. I wouldn't want to add any cool tones into the image where light is reflecting off the clouds and off of the mountain side at sunset. So really stick to the colors that work within the color harmony that you've chosen. This technique is one that works really well for sunrise and sunset shots. And I hope you enjoy using it in some of your images. In the next lesson, we're going to wrap up our discussion of adjustment layers and cover a few additional adjustment layers that you might want to incorporate into your editing workflow. I look forward to seeing you there in the next lesson. 13. Black and white and photo filter adjustments: In this lesson, you're going to learn about a few more adjustments, including the black and white adjustment and the photo filter adjustment that can be useful when you're editing landscape photos. I personally don't use these adjustments very much because I have alternative methods that I prefer. But I just want to point them out in case you want to try them out and experiment with them for yourself. First, I want to briefly cover the black and white adjustment. I'll go ahead and create a black and white adjustment, which you'll find in your adjustment panel right here. And you'll see that when we add a black and white adjustment layer, the image now appears in the gray scale. This adjustment also allows you to adjust the tonal values of the different colors using all of these different colors, sliders. When you move these sliders to the right, you add white into that particular colors. So you're essentially brightening that particular color. If you move it to the left, you increase black in that color, which darkens that color. This image doesn't have a lot of red, but we've seen in working with this image in previous lessons that there's quite a bit of yellow, especially in the sky and as well as the trees. So if I slide this yellow slider towards the right and increase white and the yellows. We can see that the yellow areas really brighten up, so especially in the sky. And it actually looks quite nice in the trees. We have the lost a lot of contrast in the sky. And we can see in our histogram that we've really clipped the image, so we've lost a lot of detail in this image. Now, you might be thinking that we could mask out this area. So there were only seeing the adjustment in the trees. But watch what happens when I paint onto this layer mask. So if I grab a brush and then switch this to a black brush just by pressing X on my keyboard. If I start to paint into the area that I'd like to hide, we pull this opacity up all the way to 100%. And if I paint onto this area, you can see now that we're seeing into the layer below, the image itself has not been converted to the grayscale. Black and white adjustment just gives the image the appearance that it's in black and white. In my opinion, this makes it much more difficult to make targeted adjustments when you're working with black and white images. The method that I prefer to use when working with images and black and white is to convert them in Adobe Camera Raw. So as you've seen in previous parts of this course, if we double-click on this smart object layer, the image is opened in Adobe Camera Raw. In Adobe Camera Raw, we have the option to convert to black and white right here. Even though I've converted this image to black and white, I still retain the color information in this image. So if you go down to the black and white mixer, you may have to open up this panel. In Adobe Camera Raw. You can work with these sliders just like you saw in the black and white adjustment to increase the brightness or decrease the brightness, the different color channels. So let's try out yellow. Since we have a lot of yellow in this image, we're making that adjustment like we saw before, especially in the trees where we get some really nice contrast. I actually have more control here over the brightness of the colors than I do in the black and white adjustment. If I wanted to mask out the yellow adjustment in the sky, just so that I could only see that adjustment in the trees. What I could do is reset this. So all of these colors are back to zero to the default state. And if I click Okay. Now I have a smart object layer that's been converted to black and white. I'll go ahead and hide this black and white adjustment for now. To make that targeted adjustment, what I'll do is right-click on this smart object layer and then go to in this menu New Smart Object via Copy. Now that I have to smart object layers, I will go to my top layer. Double-click on that smart object layer just to open up Adobe Camera Raw again. Now this time I will make my adjustments so I will increase, brighten the yellows. I'm just going to stick with this for now to make this demonstration more simple. When I'm done making that adjustment, I will click, Okay. Now this Smart Object layer includes that yellow adjustment. This is the original unedited layer, except for the black and white conversion. This is the layer with the brightened yellow channels. And I can change the name of this just to make it easier to remember. Again, I only want the adjustment to show right in this region. I will create a layer mask. And I will invert this layer mask. So that is a completely black mask like you've seen. I'm gonna do that by pressing Command or Control. And then I. And to allow that adjustment to show through. I will switch my brush to a white brush and we'll press X on my keyboard just to switch the foreground color to white. And then I'll paint onto this image just in the region that I want to adjust. So now we are only saying this version of the smart object layer in the region where the trees are, where we've created a white area that is revealing all of those adjustments. I can turn this layer on and off. So this is before, and this is after. And in my opinion, that makes for a much more interesting, more dynamic area in the shadows. We will come back to this idea of duplicating smart object layers to make adjustments that we then mask out so that we can make targeted adjustments in specific areas of our images. But for now I just wanted to point out that I believe that that's a much better method than using the black and white adjustment, which is much harder to make targeted adjustments with. I also think that using Adobe Camera Raw gives you more control over the color channels when you're editing in black and white. So I'll leave it at that for now. Feel free to experiment with this black and white adjustment and it might work better for you. I'm gonna go ahead and drag these down to the trash. I will go back into Adobe Camera Raw just to turn this back into a color image. The last adjustment I want to show you is the photo filter adjustment. We'll go to our adjustment panel. You'll find the photo filter adjustment right here. So create that adjustment layer. And you'll see when I created that adjustment, it applied a specific color or tint to the image. This adjustment can be useful if you want to quickly change the overall color balance of your image. When you have color selected, the color cast or tint that's added to the photo will be this color, which you can click on and change. If you'd like to change this from a warmer color, you can change the color by sliding this arrow on the color wheel. If I move this to blue, I can add a cooler tint. You can see that this really cool as the image down. And if I were to use this, I would probably use the layer mask to mask out at least some of the areas in the sky. So I can keep a lot of the areas that includes sunlight or direct sunlight to be a little bit warmer. You can also choose to use these filters, which are kind of like presets and experiment with these and see the effect that they add to your image. So some of these are warming filters that really make the image look orangeish yellow gives it a warmer feel, where you could try out some of the cooling filters. Again, these will cool down the image quite a bit. The density slider is used to control the strength of the applied filter. You can see when I drag this up, it makes a filter appear more visible and it adds more color to the image. Moving the slider to the left will decrease the intensity of this filter. Again, you might want to play around and experiment with this. This is not an adjustment layer that I typically use, especially since there are many other ways to add a color cast to an image. Many of those ways we've already discussed throughout this course. That concludes all of the different adjustments that you're going to learn in this course. I definitely recommend that you try out all of these different adjustments that we've covered so far and experiment with how they work, applying them to your own images. Like I've often mentioned, this really is the best way to learn all of these features in Photoshop. And you'll start to learn which adjustments work best for your style and your editing workflow.