Transcripts
1. Hand Tint a Photo in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Hand Tinting an Image in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're looking at creating a faux hand tinted effect on images using both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. I'm going to give you access to the two images I'm using. I'm going to do one in Adobe Camera Raw, one in Lightroom, and you're going to be able to follow along in either or both of the programs. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt that lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. One, give it a thumbs up and secondly, just write one or two words even about what you're enjoying about the class. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started working on creating a faux hand tint effect in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.
2. Hand Tint Effect - Part 1: This is the first of the two images that we're going to work on, and this is direct out of the camera. This is a DNG image and you've got access to it so you can download it and follow along. Before we create our hand tint effect, we should be processing this image, so we should start with a good sound image. One of the problems with this is I don't think it's straight. I'm going to the crop tool, just going to straighten it up a little bit. I'm also going to crop some of the unwanted area of the image out of the way. The road down here is not doing this image any service at all. I'm just going to come up reasonably close to the base of the tram and just crop the top off as well. I'll click "Done". Ultimately, this image is going to be converted to black and white. But before we do that, let's just adjust the image. The exposure is a bit low. Here we don't have a lot of highlights in the image, so I'm going to increase the exposure quite a bit. I'm going to back off these highlight areas because I don't want too much for the shine on this tram to come through because I want to be able to color that later on. Backing off the highlights will help those areas in the image. I can bring a little bit of detail out of the shadows, if I'd like, by just increasing the shadows. That'll bring a little bit of detail out of the trees. I'm going to make sure that I have a black and white point. I'm going to hold the alto option key on a Mac and just drag up here to see where my white point is and I'm going to back off so that I'm well below that. There are no straight white pixels in this image. Every pixel has some element of color in it. Now I'm going to do the same with the blacks, alt or option drag on the blacks. Well, we have no blacks. Let's just go down here. This is the roadway under the tram, not an area of particular concern to me because I'm not going to be coloring it anyway. I'm just going to bring it down so that that is pretty near black. We've now got a better tonal range in this image. We've got some nearly white pixels and we've got some black pixels. At this point, we can determine which way we want to go with our black and white. There are a couple of ways that I like to be black and whites. One of which is shiny and one of which is a matte black and white. The second image we're going to work on, I'm going to make it shiny because it really does lend itself to it. Let's treat this one as a matte black and white, which means that we don't want a lot of contrast and we don't want a lot of christmas in the look that we're getting. I'm just going to take this image at this point and convert it to black and white and see how we go. If I need to make more adjustments, I will do that after I've converted it to black and white. I'm going to close down the basic panel and we're going here to the HSL, Color, and Black and White panel. I'm going to click on "Black and White". When you convert an image to black and white in Lightroom, there are two possible ways of converting. Either you will convert so that the markers here, on the sliders, are all in a long line, they're all lined up perfectly, or you'll get what I've got here, which is a custom black and white where Lightroom is looking at the image and making a custom black and white adjustment. It doesn't matter where you start from. What matters is where you end up. What I'm going to do is look at and see if there are any areas of this image that I want to darken or lighten. The underlying colors in the image will allow me to do that. If we've got some aqua in the image, for example, I can lighten it or I can darken it this way. I'm just going to bring it actually back to the darker area. I'm going to test blue as well. Blue obviously is going to be in the sky, but there's also quite a bit of blue in this image. I'm just enhancing the blues. I know there's green up here, so I'm going to the greens and I'm actually going to lighten them. There's going to be some orange color in these trees as well. Let's go and lighten up the trees a little bit and maybe also bring up the yellows. There's a fair bit of yellow in those trees as well. We've now adjusted the image to get a custom black and white. Our starting point for our taint is going to be the image as it is here, and we're ready to go ahead now and to create our tint effect. We're going to do that using the Adjustment Brush. going to click on the "Adjustment Brush" to open up this panel. If you're working in Adobe Camera Raw, you will need to make some adjustment at this point because you can't lay down the Adjustment I'm Brush if all your sliders are in the neutral position, it doesn't matter in Lightroom, which is really nice. I'm just going to actually reset all my sliders in Lightroom, and I'm going to color this part of the tram. I'm going to click to put down my pin because every adjustment has a pin. I've got controls here for controlling my brush and there are a couple of things that I'm concerned about. Firstly, I want my flow to be fairly high. I want a slight feather, no, a very big feather. When you see my brush over the image here, the inside area is the brush diameter, the outside ring is showing how much feathering we've got. We've got a little bit of feathering here. That's perfect. I'm also going to select between Auto Mask and no Auto Mask. In this case, I'm going to use Auto Mask because it's pretty evident the area of the tram that I want to select here. I'm just going to paint over it, making sure that the little cross hatch in the middle of my brush is not moving over something I don't want to select. If I just move it over the area I want to select, I'm going to make a good selection, but right now we have absolutely no clue what I'm selecting. Well, let's just go and choose show selected mask overlay because that's going to make it a lot more apparent what I'm selecting here. I'm just going to go over and select the top of the tram here. Now I've got some bits I didn't want in my selection, and that's just fine. What I can do next is go to the erase tool and the erase brush is just exactly the same as the add brush except it erases, so it allows me to get rid of this pink highlighting and the pink highlighting is just showing me where my selection is. That's all it is. I can now go and remove it from the areas that I don't want it in. You'll probably be a bit surprised by this coloring effect in that it really doesn't matter if you're not a 100 percent accurate. You get a really good result even without being pedantic about making your selection. It's a really nice effect to do for that reason. It's a fairly casual effect, if you like. You probably will want to show the mask overlay while you're painting now, and then turn it off when you're ready to add some color. We're going to add color using the color selector here. I can just hover over a color and as I click on it, it's being applied to the tram. I can work through these colors and decide what color I actually want to apply to the tram. I'm going to do this one into some pastel colors, but I'm going to start with turquoise. Now, if we've got too much turquoise here, it's too dark, well, I can just back off the saturation. I've got my color tone that I want, but I just want less saturation. When I'm done, I'll click the "Close" button. At this point, I can still go ahead and erase or add areas to the tram. If I see some area that's not covered, I can add it. I will go back to Brush A or Brush B. Brush A and B are exactly the same thing, they're just two different brushes. You could have them at different sizes, so you could switch between them if you want to. I tend to just use Brush A and then just scale it size-wise as I go. I'm using the open and closed square bracket key to scale my brush. Once I've got the first color down on my tram, I'm going to click "Done" because I'll need a second selection for my second color. I'm just going to go ahead and speed up the video as I make that second selection. Turning off the Auto Mask is handy when you've got an area that is a little bit uneven, and if you're not making a really good selection of it, turn Auto Mask off and then just continue and add Auto Mask to continue painting. Once I've painted my mask on, I can go to the color selector and start selecting an alternative color to go on this area of the tram. I'm going to go for a purple look here, and click the "Close" button. Now when you're flipping between the eraser and brush A, if you want to do it using a keyboard shortcut, you can just hold down the Alt or "Option" key and that flips between the eraser and brush A. That also can make it easier for you to be able to work between erasing and also making a selection from your brush. I'm going to new and I'm just going to color in the trees up here. For this, I don't want auto mask on because there's so much leaf action happening here. It's a little bit difficult to pick it out accurately with auto mask, and really all I want is an idea that there is some green up here. I don't want it to be too accurate. I'm going for a subtle green look here. Once I've applied the green color, I can then go back, and because I still have this pin selected, I can go and add or remove some of this green color if it's not in the exact right place in the image. I'm going to finish up with some orange or brown on these trunks. I'm going to use auto mask for these because it's pretty obvious the distinction between what is trunk and what is sky behind the trees. I'm pretty sure I haven't made the world's best selection there, but you'll notice that it really doesn't matter too much if you don't make a great selection because you can come back later on and remove it and you also might be surprised that no very good selection really is still pretty good for giving you the hand tint effect. There we have our finished image. This is a hand tint effect applied to an image using the adjustment brush in Lightroom. Of course, you want to convert your image to black and white before you do this. Now if we go to the "Backslash K" to see the before and after, we're going from the original color version to a new colored version. If we want to see how it looked from black and white forward, let's see how we would do that in Lightroom. I'm just going to open up this panel over here and you'll see here that I've got my Convert to Black & White entry in the history panel. This is my history panel here in Lightroom. Let's go back to what we did when we converted the image to black and white. I converted it to black and white, and then I adjusted some of the colors. This was effectively the endpoint of my black and white. With this selected, I'm going to right-click on this entry in the history panel, I'm going going to choose copy history settings to before. Now, I'm going to wind back to the very top entry in the history panel, which is my colored image. Now when I press "Backslash", we're going to compare between black and white, which was the choice that we made as to where we wanted our before image to be and our colored image. Now, using the "Backslash K", this is going to be our before. It's halfway down the history panel here. It's at this point, but this is the comparison we want to make, before and after. In the next video, we'll go and color an image in Adobe Camera Raw and this one's going to be a shiny image.
3. Hand Tint Effect - Part 2: This is the image we're going to be working on in Adobe Camera Raw. It is a JPEG image, but I've saved it as a DNG so that you can go ahead and easily open it in Adobe Camera Raw. I have the crop tool selected and I'm just going to drag over this so that I can crop it. I'm going to select the zone tools so we can get out of the crop tool and back into working on the image. We're going to do a similar thing with this image as we did with the tram. I'm going to increase the exposure because it's a little on the underexposed side. I'm going to bring down my highlights a little bit because a lot of that highlight detail is actually in this little seal's face. I'm going to check my black and white points, so I'm going to Alt or option drag on the white slider and just see where my white points are and back it off so I'm just below those. But that will help me by increasing the exposure just a little bit. Then let's go and get the blacks. Well, there's a black point in here. It's not an area of the image we're concerned about, so I'm happy about letting it go to black. Now I suggested earlier that this was a shiny image. It's a shiny subject, but also the image has got quite a bit of shine it. Well, we're just going to enhance that. I'm just going to wind up the clarity here so that we get quite a bit of shine in the image. I can also throw a bit of contrast at the image. Now I can either just add a blanket contrast or I can go to the tone curve and then go to the point curve here and select medium or strong contrast as they may help me build a bit of extra contrast into the image. Now if I use strong or medium contrast, one thing I'm a little concerned about is it seems to be darkening this a little bit. Let's go back to the Basic panel and let's just increase the shadows a bit, perhaps get a little bit of detail out of the shadow areas here. We could also increase the exposure a little bit. Bring down the highlights if we think that increasing the exposure is going to blow these highlight areas out too much. There's our starting point. Of course next up we need to convert this to black and white. We're going to the HSL/Grayscale panel here in Adobe Camera Raw and we're going to choose Convert to Grayscale. Here is our grayscale mix. Exactly the same mix as we had in Lightroom, allows us to adjust the individual colors in the image. Now the seal was aqua blue, so I'm thinking that some of the color in this seal is going to be in the aqua and the blue area. We might be able to lighten these areas a little bit. Well, most of it appears to be in the blue. We're able to get quite a bit of lightness back into the blue area by just increasing the blues. You You also experiment with other areas of the image if you want to throw them into a darker appearance and perhaps draw little bit more attention to the seal itself, you could do so. Next we going to drop the oranges and the reds. You might find when you're converting to black and white that you get a bit of fracturing in the image. Fracturing occurs when you take colors that are alongside each other, such as if you're looking at orange, red, and yellow are very close to orange and if you take them in opposite directions, you likely to get some fracturing where you have some pixels that are red and they're darker and some pixels that are orange next door to it and they're lighter. You can avoid fracturing by making sure that you draw smooth lines here so that you don't have one color going in one direction and the one immediately after it going in another direction. Bringing the reds, oranges, and yellows over here is darkening all of those. Then we're moving into lightening up the blues and the aquas, maybe even the purples a little bit and then swinging back so that these adjustments here are going to pretty much match where the red is adjusted and that will give you less fracturing in your image. Now that we've got our black and white, let's go and add some color for that. We're going to the Adjustment Brush and click on the Adjustment Brush. In Adobe Camera Raw, you need to do something with the Adjustment Brush. First of all, I'm going to click the hamburger icon and reset everything and then I'm going to go and start with a color. I'm going to choose a color for my seal and I'm going to make him a sort of orange color. I may not get the right orange, that doesn't matter. Just going to click to pin down my adjustment. I'm going to check my brushes here. I do want Auto Mask turned on and I want a bit of a feather, but not that much. I want my flow and density to be fairly high. I can now adjust my brushes in the open and closed square bracket case and because I've got my color already selected, I can actually see it as I'm painting it. The mask is ensuring that little x in the very, very middle of my brush is the point at which when I put it either a color on the underlying image, Lightroom's going okay. I'll select that color and I'll select everything that is adjacent to it, that it's also that color. This is allowing me to run the brush up the edge of the seal and you can see that none of the area behind the seal or very little of it is being selected as I do. Learning to work between having Auto Mask turned on and off is really important because having it turned on in some situations can make masking and painting this effect on much, much easier than it would be if you were just working with a regular brush, but sometimes you just want to turn it off. Probably in an area like this, you would want to turn it off because all sorts of things are happening in this area. But we do want to make them all one color. The same down here. These are where the seal is picking up reflections from the carousel around him. Now at this point, I might decide I want to color his eyes differently or not at all. I'm going to the eraser. Same thing happening with the eraser here and I'm just going to erase this area so that we're actually going to add some different color or no color at all to his eye. Also going to make sure that there is none of this orange color in this detail piece on his forehead because that will allow me to recolor it later on. Once I finish with my 1st color, I can go and click on "New" and then I can add another color. I'm actually going to color this piece up here. I'm going to click to add my pin. I'm still working in the orange color, but that doesn't matter because I can change my color at anytime. It's going to erase some of the orange color that's bleeding out from the edge here. We have our pin selected, so I'm going to click on this color and let's go and pick a different color for the piece on his forehead, for example, a red, may be back off the saturation a little bit, click "Okay". You can see that we've got some bleeding out here. If we don't want the bleeding, make sure that you've got the eraser selected. Now that you can see that extra color, you can just go ahead and remove it. Let's give him some extra color around here, so we'll go and click "New". Let's go and select Auto Mask because I do want to select this area here and it would be really helpful if I didn't have to do the brushstroke very accurately. Click on the color. Let's choose a different color for the piece around his neck, click "Okay". If we've got some over extension or not enough color, I'm just going to paint a little bit extra on there and then go to the eraser and just neaten up the edges. But you'll find that you don't need to be very accurate at all when you're painting this color tint effect onto the image. If you're looking at the color of the seal itself and you want to change that, I'm just going to click on "New", but I'm going to go and click on this pin because that finishes up working on this one over here and allows me to re-select this pin. This pin is controlling the entire color on the seal and so we can change that at any time. We can come back and say, well, we want it to be a little bit more green, for example. If we go to this pin here, once it's highlighted, we can go and click on it, then we could change that color too. You can do the same thing in Lightroom, so just pick up your pins and just change whatever setting you have applied using that pin. Of course, we've only used a color tint attached to these pins, but you could also adjust exposure and contrast or any of these settings could also be adjusted when you're applying this color using this particular adjustment. To finish, I'm just going to click away from the image here. If we want to compare the before and after, I'm going to press the letter "P". This is the before, the colored version of the image, this is the after. If we wanted to compare the black and white version of the image with the colored version of the image, we're not going to be able to do so. There is no History panel in Adobe Camera Raw in the same sense that you have a History panel in Lightroom. If you want to do this to your own images, just be aware that as soon as you get your black and white image, come over here to the snapshots and make a snapshot. Click here and create a new snapshot so that the snapshot is the black and white version. I'm going to call mine black and white, even though it is not black and white. Once you save a black and white snapshot, then you can come forward, create all of your adjustments, and then go back to your snapshots, create a snapshot that is your final image and then you can toggle between the black and white and final version of the image using snapshots. Unfortunately, the History tab that you have in Lightroom, we really, really like to see it in Adobe Camera Raw but it's just not there yet. Your project for this class is going to be to take an image of your choice or you're welcome to use one of the two images that I've used in this class, process it and then convert it to black and white and then hand-tint it or apply hand-tint effect to the image using the Adjustment Brush in either Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. Post a image of your completed hand-tint effect in the class project area. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and then write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and they help them determine if they'll enjoy those classes too. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to both all of your comments and your questions and I also look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
