Transcripts
1. Isolated Color Effect in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create an Isolated Color Effect 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 application share the same base code. This means that within him class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're looking at creating an isolated color effect in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, and we're going to look at a couple of different approaches to the task, and some of the other things that you can do once you have those colors isolated. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, 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. Now if you're ready, let's get started on creating an isolated color effect. We're going to start in Lightroom and then move to Adobe Camera Raw. In the class project area, you're going to see a download link for all of the images, so you're welcome to download them and follow along with this class.
2. Pt 1 - Lightroom Isolated Color Method 1: This is the first image that we're going to work with. What I want to do is I want to turn just these pylons orange and remove the color from everything else in the image. Now as with all images, you want to start with a well adjusted image, and this one is considerably underexposed. So I'm going to increase the exposure on this, but if I hold the Alt Option K, as I just drag on the white, you'll see I've got some clipped whites here, so I'm just going to bring the highlights down because that'll probably allow me to remove that clipped area. So now I've got my white settled. I'm just going to hold Alt Option as I look at my blacks and I want to just decrease that so that I get some blacks in the image. If I do nothing else, I will have adjusted the exposure on the image, at least this far. This is the before and this is the after. It's a little bit better exposed. Now let's look at the methods that we could use to highlight just these pylons in orange, leaving everything else with no color in it at all. In other words, black and white. Well, one of the tools that we can use is to open up this HSL panel. HSL and color are just two different ways of describing the color in the image. So you can use HSL or color. I just find for this purpose that the HSL option is easier to use, so I'm selecting HSL and I'm going to target saturation. So let's make sure that we've just got the saturation and the colors here. So I don't want any yellow in the image. I'm going to remove yellow and green and aqua and blue and purple and magenta. That leaves me with something that is either orange or red or a bit of both. So let's try orange. If I remove orange, I'm losing some of the color here. But you can see that because I haven't lost all of the color, there's actually some red in here as well. So these pylons and the paint work is orange and red. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take the orange slider back to zero. So I'm leaving all the red and all of the orange in this image. Now I'm going to the adjustment brush. Now the adjustment brush has been in Lightroom for years, so it's going to be available in all versions of Lightroom. You have some brushes here, A and B. You can choose to use either brush A or B, it doesn't matter. You can see the size of my brush. I can adjust it with the open and closed square bracket case or with this size slider, it's often easier just to use the open and closed square bracket case. I have flow set to 100 percent and I have Auto Mask turn on right now, but I'm going to turn it off. I'm also going to enable show selected mask overlay. Now what I want to do with this adjustment brush is I want to remove the remainder of the orange. So I'm going to this saturation slider. I'm going to set it to minus 100 and make sure everything else is not set. So if you've got some settings already selected here, just double-click on the word Effect to zero out everything and just drag your saturation slider to minus 100. You'll need to click once to pin this adjustment down. Now, my adjustment is green, but yours will be pink. I've just changed the color of mine. What I'm going to do is just paint over those areas where I'm seeing color in the image that I don't want to see color. So I don't want to see it up here. There's a little bit of color left in the bridge here. There's definitely some color here. Now it doesn't matter with this brushstroke if I paint over areas that no longer have any color in them, as long as I make sure that I paint out any color that I want to remove. So I can just adjust my brush to get in around the areas that I also want to remove the color from, and these areas in here as well. So I'm just going to draw this roughly. If I go too far, I can press the Alt or Option K, to use the minus brush. Or I can go and select the eraser here. But in this case I want to turn the Auto Mask off on the eraser. So I can flip between these two brushes by just holding the Alt or Option K, or I can go and select the actual eraser if I wanted. So let's just say in a minute I'm keeping this green or pink overlay visible so I can see the areas of the images I've already removed the color from. So as I said, I'm going to do rough job here. I'm leaving the orange in the water because I want to see the orange in the water and I'm going to disable the selected mask overlay. So with a little bit of cleaning up in here, I have the effect of orange being left in the image and all the other colors removed. Now when I'm done, I can click "Done". But if I come back in here later and have a look and see some places that I missed, well, it's easy enough to edit this adjustment. I'll go back to the adjustment brush. I'm going to locate the pin that controls this adjustment. I'm going to click on it once to select it. I'm back in my brush A, and now I can just go over the areas where perhaps I'm seeing some color that I wanted to remove that hasn't been removed. Of course I would fix up in these areas here. That's one method for isolating color in an image. What we did was we went to the saturation slider, removed the saturation from the colors we know we didn't want. We left the color red and orange that we did want in the image fully saturated. Then we went to the adjustment brush with a saturation of minus 100. We painted over the areas that we're this orangey red that we didn't want to leave in the image, leaving untouched the areas where we actually wanted to see the orange in the image. In the next video, we'll have a look at another way of achieving a similar result for this particular image.
3. Pt 2 - Lightroom Isolated Color Effect Method 2: I've wound back the changes that we did to this image to the point where we adjusted the whites and blacks. I'm in the history area here on the left-hand panel in Lightroom. I've just selected the Black Clipping before I did any changes to the image saturation. Now, the second method for isolating the color in these orange pylons is this. We'll go back again to the HSL settings and go back again to Saturation. This time we're going to desaturate all the colors in the image. Now, you might think that you could just go and do this with the black and white slide. It doesn't work that way unfortunately, you have to actually find the colors and remove the saturation from those colors. Now, we're going again to the Adjustment Brush. This time we're going to zero everything out for the Adjustment Brush by double-clicking on the word Effect, and we're going to increase the saturation to 100. Going back to my A Brush, and in this case I do want to select my Auto Mask. What I'm going to do is start painting over the pylons. This Auto Mask is just isolating the effect to the area that is colored similarly, to the color that is under the cursor here, that little X mark. What I can do is in this case, just paint the color back onto the image. I'm saying, this is the area of the image that I want to be in color, and so I'm just painting the color back on. It's just a slightly different mental process, and it might work better for you, it might make more sense to you, also might be a little bit easier. It really depends on the image as to whether this is going to be easier or more difficult, but you want to just have a look at the two possible options that you have to use, and use the one that's going to work best for you. I'm just going to finish off here with this particular pylon but I could go and select the next one. That's another method of getting this isolated color effect. In this case, we're zeroing back out the saturation on every single one of the colors in this image, and then just going to the area of the image that we want to paint back the color in. We're doing that using the Adjustment Brush. Now, I have a second image where this particular process is also the one that you would want to use. Let's look at that now. In this instance, there's not really a single color in this bird. What I want to do is I want to leave the bird in color and the background in black and white. The simplest way of achieving that result is to do as we just did with those pylons. Is remove the color from the image entirely. Back in this HSL area, selecting Saturation and removing all the color. Going to the Adjustment Brush, setting the Saturation to positive 100, clicking on the bird. In this case, I'm going to leave Auto Mask turned on, particularly for getting in and around the bird's feathers here. I'll choose Show Selected Mask Overlay cause it might be a little bit difficult otherwise, to actually say that this bird is going back as a color image because it is white, but it's white with color in it. In this case, I'm just going to paint over the bird. If I go over the edge, I'm going to come back in with the arrays the brush. I've got my Auto Mask turned on so I will make sure that I'm picking up all the black areas on the bird's beak as well. Then press Alt or Option as I paint over to remove the paint from the areas I don't want it in. Now, you'll do a more careful job of this. You can always flip the between Auto Mask turned on and Auto Mask turned off, depending on whether you find it easier to locate the areas that you want to paint the mask on using the Auto Mask or without it. I generally flip between the two because there's usually not an area that is so discrete that makes it possible to use one or other of these to the isolation of the other tool. Now, I've got my bird painted out that's my mask overlay. Yours is going to be pink, mine's been colored green. When I go back, you'll see that the bird is now fully colored, the rest of the background is not colored, it's black and white. I'll click Done. Before we leave this particular image, let's have a look at another possibility we have. I'm going back to the Adjustment Brush. I know that the bottom of this boat is red and so too is this reflection. I'm going to take the saturation back this time. I'm going to set it to probably about 30. I increase my brush size, I don't want to have Auto Mask selected because I want a slightly more organic set of brush strokes. In this case, I'm not bringing back all the color in the red area, but just a little bit of it. That's another possibility for an image like this where you actually isolate a little bit of additional color, whether or not you bring it back at full saturation. Of course, if you're bringing these two areas back at different levels of saturation, you want to do two Adjustment Brush adjustments. I've got one here at fully 100 percent saturation to bring the bird back in, and I've got another one up here that's only using 33 percent saturation. Of course, these are adjustable, but isolating them into two separate editing areas allows them to be separately edited. You're not making the boat the same saturation as a bird because you wouldn't want that necessarily to be the case.
4. Pt 3 - Lightroom Adjust the Isolated Coloi: Before we finish looking at isolating color in an image, let's have a look at this particular image. Again, it's underexposed. So we're going to start by increasing the exposure a little bit, perhaps bringing down the highlights. I'll press the Alt Option key as I check my white. So I want some whites in the image, while I want to be just below where the whites are in the image, but I do want some blacks. So I've now adjusted this image just to give it a good tonal range. Let's go back to our HSL. In this case, I want to leave the doors blue. I want to remove the color from everything else in the image. So again I'm going to the saturation area and I'm going to isolate this time below. So I'm selectively removing color from the entire image except for the blue area. So everything else has been reduced to grade scale. At this stage, I may want to increase my contrast given that the black and white with a little bit on the flat side. So I've gone to the Tone Curve and I've chosen strong contrast, just gives the rest of the image a bit of a boost. But let's go back to the HSL sliders here. I've got blue doors here, and I've left blue in the image, but I could increase the saturation and the blues if I wanted to cyclic created as a slightly more electric blue, if you like. I can also go to luminance and increase the lightness or darkness in the blue. You can also get to that from the color option here, because color is just a different way of visualizing HSL. So off we go to these other colors. You'll see that the saturation for all of them is minus 100. They're all day saturated. For blue, we've got a slightly increased saturation and slightly decreased luminance. The zero values being the mid point for this. But having isolated blue, we can also adjust the blue. So we have a hue slider here, and if we take it to the left, we're going to walk that blue a little bit more towards turquoise, the next nearest color on the color wheel as we're heading towards green. On the other end of the slide, and we're going to take it towards purple, because that's in the red direction on the color wheel. Having isolated a particular color in the image, you can do one better and just adjust the color itself. So if you want it to be perhaps a little bit more turquoise or a little bit more purple using the hue slider in conjunction with saturation and luminance allows you to fine tune the color that you're isolating in the image.
5. Pt 4 - ACR Isolated Color Method 1: In the first three videos in this class we had a look at isolating color in an image using Lightroom. We're now going to take those same images and we're going to look at the process if you happen to be using Adobe Camera Raw. I've given you these three images. One, at least, of them was never a raw image, but I saved it for you as a raw image so when you double-click on it, it's going to open automatically for you in Adobe Camera Raw. It just makes it a little bit easier for you to work with this image. The first thing I'm going to do with every image is just to adjust the brightness of it and just give it a good tonal range because my camera shoots a little bit on the underexposed side. I'm going to hold Alt or Option as I just adjust the whites and that'll bring the highlights down a little bit. Just want to make sure that I don't have a lot of over-exposed highlights here. I'm going to bring the blacks down again with Alt or Option to make sure I get some black in the image. If you want to, you can go to the Tone Curve and just adjust it to give it a little bit more tonal contrast. I've chosen here Medium Contrast. But let's go back to the Basic Panel. At this stage, we've adjusted the image till we've got a much better tonal range, and we're ready to isolate the color. We're going to look at two methods for doing this. But so we can come back to this image and try a second way of applying this isolated color effect, I'm going to save a snapshot of the image. I'm just going here to this Snapshot Panel, I'm going to click on New, and I'm going to call this Adjusted Image. It's very easy to wind back to previous states of an image in Lightroom. It's going to be really difficult to do that in Adobe Camera Raw. So if you think ahead, you can just select and create a snapshot so that we can wind back to this position and look at an alternative method of processing it. Back to the Basic Panel now, we're going to look at how we can just isolate the orange in these columns. One method is to go to the HSL sliders here. We're going to click here on the HSL indicator. We're going to Saturation and we're going to drag to the left on the sliders for those colors that we don't want to see in the image. I'm basically, at this stage, removing yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta, leaving some combination of red and orange. If I drag on the red slider, you'll see that there's some orange in the image. If I drag all the way on the orange slider, you'll see that there's still some red in the image. Both red and orange are contributing to the color in this image; the color that in part we want to retain. I'm going to leave red and orange both set to zero. In other words, I haven't removed any red or any orange from this image. Having done that, I'm going to the Adjustment Brush. When I click on the Adjustment Brush, I can set the size of the brush so I can adjust it with this slider here, or I can use the open and closed square bracket keys on the computer. I want a fairly low feather value, so I'm going to drag the feather down so there's practically no feathering at all, which makes this a fairly hard edge brush. I'm going to increase my flow to 100 percent. Here's the Auto Mask option too. If I want to use the Auto Mask, I can enable it or disable it here. I can show or hide my mask by clicking here on the Overlay. Now, I'm going to come into the image and I'm just going to click once to pin this adjustment down. Now, I get my Add and Erase option so I can switch to and erase if I go too far with my painting. But since I haven't painted yet, I'm just going to start painting. The pink overlay is showing the areas of the image where I've removed the color and anywhere I see any color that I don't want in the image, I'm just going to paint over it to remove it. Just want to leave the color essentially in these pylons here. There's a bit of color left in the top of this bridge. I can be pretty enthusiastic with my brushing because if I brush over an area where the color has already been removed, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I brush over too much in the sense of just painting over the areas where I want to remove the color. The areas I need to be careful with are between these pylons, where I want to get rid of the color here on the bridge, but not the color in the pylons. I'm just going to adjust the brush with the open and closed square bracket case. If I go too far, I'm going to switch to the Erase Brush and that has similar settings. I'm going to decrease the feather, increase the flow here, re-size it with the open and closed square brackets, and then just use it to erase where my mask is showing me I've painted too far. When I'm ready to see what the image looks like, I'm going to turn the Mask Overlay off. I'm now seeing the result of my adjustment. Now, I'm not seeing what I wanted to see because I didn't actually make any settings here. So I'm going to zero off clarity because I didn't want to make clarity adjustment. Zero out sharpness and noise reduction, and I want to take saturation to minus 100 because that removes the saturation from the areas where I painted. Now, I still have this pin enabled and I'm still painting, but I'm painting with an eraser, so I'm just going to switch to painting with the Add Brush. Now, that I can see the results of my adjustment, I can just come in here and fine tune this effect. Now, you're going to spend a little bit more time on this than I am, but you can see that we've now removed the color from the image. When we're done with this tool, we can just press "Escape" or click one of these other tools. That's one method for isolating the color in just these pylons in the image. In the next video, we're going to wind this back and have a look at a slightly different method of handling this particular image.
6. Pt 5 - ACR Isolated Color Method 2: To wind back the adjustments that we've just made to this image. I'm going back to the Snapshot panel, I'm going to Click on Adjusted Image. What I've got now is the adjustments that we applied in the basic panel but I've removed the isolated color effect that we created in the previous video. We're going to look at a slightly different method for isolating color with this same image. We're going back to the HSL sliders we're going back to Saturation. This time we're going to remove the saturation from the entire image. Now you might think that you could do that with Convert to Grayscale but it's not exactly the same result and while it would convert the image to grayscale which is what we've got here, it won't allow us to put the color back and we need to bring the color back in these pylons here. I'm going back to the Adjustment Brush and in this case, what I want to do is to zero out everything by clicking on this hamburger icon and choose Reset Local Correction Settings. Then I'm going to look at the setting I actually do want to use. In this case, I want to increase the saturation of the selected areas to 100 percent. I have Auto Mask turned on, I'm going click to show my mask overlay. I'm going to click to pin down my brush and in this case I'm going to paint over those areas of the image that I want to bring the color back into. Now, they're being colored pink at the moment because of this mask overlay, just lets me see the areas where my paint work is going on. That's particularly important when you're using the Auto Mask option because the brushes are only selecting areas of color that match the color where that little x is in the middle of the brush and some areas of the image can be a little hard to get to this way. Once I've got my paint pretty much where I want it around the edges, I'm going to turn off my Auto Mask and I'm going to be very careful about painting in just the areas where I didn't get the paint in earlier. If I need to I can zoom in here too. I'm holding the Space bar to move the image around. I'm going back to my Brush tool and having re-selected the Adjustment Brush, I can click on the pin to go back to editing this area. Still have Auto Mask turned off so here I can just finesse the selection I've made. Of course, you're going to spend extra time on this to make sure that you're getting a really good result. I'm just going give you a rough look at the tools that I'm going to use and the only difference is that I'm not spending a heap of time on this. Once I've got that all selected if I need to erase something I can go to the Eraser, just going to erase off the bridge here. Again using the space bar just holding the space bar down so that I can move the image around. I'll disable the Mask tool here and let's just zoom back out to save the effect and I could go ahead and brush over these pylons as well to get this same isolated color effect. With some images you can use either of these two processes that we've just looked at. In other images you want to use this process where we remove the saturation from all the colors. We're going to look now at an image where that is going to be the case. For this image when we're trying to isolate a color in the image, there's really no single color that is visible in this bird. What I want to do is to turn the rest of the image into a grayscale and just leave the bird in color. To do that I'm going to the HSL sliders and in this case I'm going to Saturation and I'm going to drop down the saturation on all the colors in this image, effectively turning this into a grayscale image. Now, I'm going back to the Adjustment Brush. I'm going back to the hamburger icon, I'm going to reset the Local Correction Settings so we zero this brush back out and we're going to increase the saturation to 100. Going to adjust the size of my brush using my open and closed square bracket. I'm going to pin it down in the bird somewhere. I can see it more easily I'm going turn the Mask on and let's just check and say, I haven't got Auto Mask selected, I'm going to use Auto Mask. I'm just going to start painting over the bird with Auto Mask. It's going to make it easy for me to get these particularly the very white areas of the bird. It's a little bit worse down the edge of the bird's neck so I'm going to have to fix that up a little bit in a minute. I'm using a combination of Auto Mask with a steadily decreasing brush size to try and get the best possible selection I can. If I turn Auto Mask off, I'm going to be able to get this area just under the bird's beak a little bit better. When I've done all I can in terms of selection, I'm going to use the Erase tool to just erase back the areas where the brush has gone too far. Again, you're going to be little bit more careful about this. Perhaps zoom in and get a better result. But flitting between Add and Erase will let you select the areas that you want to return the color to. Now I've got my Mask turned on so when I turn my Mask off we are setting the color back in the bird. To get out of this tool, I'll just press Escape. If we need to come back at a later date to make an adjustment to the Adjustment Brush, we'll just make sure that we target the Adjustment Brush. Click on the pin to select it and now we can adjust the error that we had painted, this area that is pink when the Mask Overlay is turned on. If we want to add a second adjustment, we can go up here and click New. In this case, I'm going to bring the saturation down quite a bit, I only want it to be about 20-30 percent. I'm going to increase the size of my brush. I'm probably going to increase the feather that a little bit so it's slightly softer. This part of the boat here is red and so to is its reflection. I've just painted in a little bit of detail up here at a lesser saturation than I used for the swan. I set the swan saturation back to a 100 percent so this is what it was like in edited image. Here, I've just added a slight bit of saturation just to give a little bit of visual interest to the image. I'll press Escape or click on one of these other tools to get out of that. For this particular image, removing the saturation from all the colors was essential because there really wasn't any particular color that was contributing to this bird. There all colors in the bird and just painting the saturation back on was the easier method to use.
7. Pt 6 - ACR Adjust the Isolated Color: The final image we're going to look at is this one. What we want to do here is just isolate the blue doors. But in doing so, we're going to have a look at how we could also adjust the blue doors as we do that. Again, we want to start off with a well-adjusted image. I'm just going to increase the exposure. I'm going to hold Alt or Option as I just decrease the white to get back this overexposed areas here. Will check for my blacks. I've got a pretty good set of blacks there. I want to leave the blue doors in place. I want to remove the color from the entire rest of the image. I'm going to the HSL slider, select "Saturation" and just remove the color from the image with the exception of the blues. Now the image to me looks a little bit flatter at this stage. I'm going to the tone curve, and I'm going to drop this curve list down, I'm going to choose Strong Contrast. That's going to give me a slightly more contrasty image. You could also perhaps increase the clarity here. That would help you get a little bit more contrast in the image. Now we've got blue doors, but if we don't like the blue, we can adjust that. I'm going back to the HSL selection here. Now with the blues and with Saturation selected, I can increase the saturation in the blue. I can make them more saturated by just adjusting the saturation in a positive direction. I can also go to luminance. For the blues, I can increase the lightness or decrease the lightness in the blues. I can also go to hue. Now, the hue slider for the blues, as you can see here, at this end is a little aqua, and at this end is a little more purple. This allows us to walk the blues around to the next nearest colors on the color wheel. In the left direction, we're headed towards green, so we're going to turquoise. If we go in the opposite direction, we're headed towards red, which is taking us to purple on the way. We can't get all the way to red this way, but we can get to purple. You have ability to fine-tune the blue that you're getting in these doors to make it either a little bit more green or a little bit more purple, depending on where you put the hue slider. Your project for this class is going to be to create an isolated color effect on an image of your choice. You're welcome to use the images that I'm giving you in the download link in the project area or you can use any image of your choice. Post a picture of your completed edited isolated color effect as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about isolating color in images in Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom. 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. Secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look out 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
