Master Black & White Editing in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Turning to photo Black and White is pretty easy. All you need to do is add a black and white adjustment layer and just like that, you're done. Well, that did remove all the color, but there's a lot more to Black and White than that. That's why I'm excited to tell you about my brand new course, the ultimate guide to Black and White. In this course, we'll take a deep dive into the art of Black and White editing. We'll begin by learning the best method for converting a photo to Black and White. After that, I'll show you powerful techniques for controlling the light in your photos. Because Black and White photos don't have any color. Lighting is even more important than it normally is. I'll show you a ton of different techniques you can use to give you precise control over your images lighting. Lighting is critical for making a good black and white. But there's even more you can do to turn these photos into works of art. By combining our lighting techniques with affinities, other tools, we can create amazing Black and White photos. Just look at these projects we'll be making throughout the course. There's so much more to Black and White editing than just removing all of the color. By the time you finish this course, you'll have everything you need to make your very own black and white masterpieces. But before we jump into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with exercise photos that we'll be using throughout the lessons. I encourage you to download and use these photos because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson, and then you're ready to begin your journey to becoming a black and white master. So let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the Project and Resources tab. Then click on the download link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Black & White Fundamentals: Start off this course, we'll learn about the fundamental skills you need to make amazing black and white photos. We'll start off by learning how to convert your color photo into black and white. And then we'll take a look at how to adjust your photos lighting. Let's get started. 4. The Art of Black & White: Let's talk about the art of black and white photos. Black and white photos, take away the distraction of color. It's all about light. This isn't better or worse. It's just a different art style. In color, a red subject on a green background could look nice because of color contrast. But the same photo in black and white might not look that special. For black and white photos, we're looking for light contrast. So a light subject like this spider web against a dark background has a beautiful contrast, or maybe a dark subject on a light background, like this dark building against a bright sky, or maybe a dark moody photo with a beam of light. So Using the lighting this way will be our main goal throughout this course because we want to create a clear difference between our focal point and the background. Some other things that you might want to look for to make your photos look even more interesting in black and white, include interesting textures, shapes, or repeating patterns. Without color, light is what makes your photos interesting. Make sure to emphasize that lighting. Now that we know about some things to look for in black and white photos. In the next video, I'll show you a great technique for turning photos black and white. 5. The Best Way to Turn Photos Black & White: Let's take a look at the best way to turn photos black and white. To start, let's add a black and white adjustment layer to this photo. I'll go down to our adjustments, and then I'll click on Black and White. Using this dialog box. We can adjust these sliders to change how light or dark certain colors appear. You can see as I bring the red slider down. You can see her lips get a lot darker as well as these other elements. You can continue to do this with the different sliders. Just to see what things change in the picture. I like to bring them up and down. This green slider isn't changing anything because there's no green in this picture, and that's okay. I'll just move on. This part of the picture is getting darker as I do this. Same with the blue slider. The magenta tones down these edges of the picture here. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of turning that picture, black and white. Now, this is great in all, but there's actually a hidden problem with the black and white adjustment. Before we can fully understand that problem though. First, we need to learn a little color theory, and it's actually really interesting. Here I have this color card file pulled up, and this is just going to help us learn. I'm also going to change over here in the color panel. I'm going to change the wheel to sliders, and then I'll change it from RGB to HSL. Using these sliders, we can see the different values of the hue, saturation and luminosity of all of these colors. Right now I have the white layer selected, this one right here, you can see that this has a hue of zero, a saturation of zero, and lluminosity of 100. It was brought all the way up to create that white color. On the opposite end, we have this black rectangle here. If I click on that layer, we can see that the values have changed so that they're all zero. For all of the colors in between, they all have a different hue, but they all have the same saturation and luminosity. Each one of these has a saturation of 100 and aluminosity of 50. As I click on each of these, you can see that's true. They're all the same just with a different hue. Knowing all of that. Let's see what happens when we apply a black and white adjustment on top of all of these layers. Before I do though, picture in your mind what you think this should look like in black and white. Here's how it turned out. Does this surprise you? I know it surprised me when I first saw this. But what's going on here? Why did affinity turn all of these rectangles white? Shouldn't some of them be a little bit more gray? I want you to remember what I showed you earlier. All of the color rectangles have the exact same saturation and luminosity. Only their hues are different. As far as affinity is concerned, it doesn't actually matter that all of the hues are different since the black and white adjustment just removes the hue. If I select one of these color rectangles and change the hue, you can see that nothing changes about it. But if I change the saturation or the luminosity, you can see now we're starting to get some changes. I'll just undo that. I'll turn off the black and white adjustment because I still think this is a little strange. To me, this blue looks way darker than this lime green. Why does it look darker, even though the saturation and luminosity are the exact same? Well, the simple answer to this question is that we have weak human eyes. Scientifically, these colors all have the exact same level of brightness. But as far as our eyes are concerned, blue will appear darker. That's because the human eye is very sensitive to greens, but it's not as sensitive to blues. That's why blues look darker, even if they really aren't. As another example, let's come back to this portrait photo. I'm just going to delete this black and white adjustment and add a brand new one. As you can see, her scan looks way too bright when the photo is converted to black and white. Technically, affinity might not be doing anything wrong, but it sure looks wrong. That's the problem we need to address. But the question is, what can we do about it? Lucky, for us, there were some really smart people that ran into the same problem, and they already found the solution. During the 1950s, the world was beginning to switch from Black and white TV to color TV. Obviously, color TVs are great. But during this transition, there was a hurdle to overcome. How could TV stations play a show in color? But also play that same show on a black and white TV without distorting the colors brightnesses. As we've seen, turning colors into black and white is not as straightforward as it might seem. Well, to solve this problem, they came up with a formula to calculate the perceived brightness of a color based on RGB values. This formula is perceived brightness equals 30% red plus 59% green plus 11% blue. These percentages take into account that we see green as a very bright color, red as a fairly bright color and blue as a dark color. Using this color code, they could easily convert their color shows into black and white so that the shows could be broadcasted on all types of TVs. Now that we know this magic formula, how can we use our knowledge in affinity? Well, first, we can start adjusting this black and white adjustment. We know the default values in this adjustment aren't quite right, so we can actually use the magic formula to fix it. I'll put it up on the screen just so that we can reference it. First, red should be 30%. I'll type that in right there. Next, we have yellow, and this is a little strange, but as far as computers are concerned, yellow is actually red and green put together. If we add 30% red to 59% green, then we get 89% for yellow. Next, we have green, so I'll just type in 59%. Then we have Cyan, which is a combination of green and blue. I'll take 59% green and I'll add that to 11% blue. Now we have 70% for Cyan for blue, I'll just type in 11%. Last for Magenta, we're going to add the red and the blue together. Percent plus 11% equals 41% for magenta. With all of those values typed in, you can see this looks so much better. Here's the before and the after. You can see all of these colors have a better perceived brightness now. The dark blue is nice and dark and the yellow is nice and bright. This looks a lot better for our human eyes. Now, as great as this formula is, you're probably not going to remember all of the different numbers we used. To keep life simple, we can turn this adjustment into a preset. To turn this into a preset, just have the dialog box up, and then go up here to click on Add preset. Then we can type in any name we want for this preset. I'm going to call it accurate black and white, and I'll press. To access this preset, we need to get out the adjustments panel. Go up to the top of your screen two window and then click on adjustment. This panel will appear. I'm just going to tuck this right over here next to our layers panel so that we can access it at any time because during this course, we're going to use this preset a lot. Now that we have that, we can go to any photo and usually it'll look like this. I'll delete this layer. We just opened up a photo. We can go to the adjustment panel now. We can go down to where it says Black and White. It might be closed, so just open that up. Then click on accurate Black and White to apply our perfect values and see this beautiful black and white. This is such a great starting point for black and whites. The colors all look very accurate to what they shod. We'll be using this preset a lot throughout the course. Make sure to keep this adjustments panel out. I really like using this preset as a starting point. But keep in mind you can always adjust these values if you want for a little moodier of a look. It's really okay to do that. Often, I'll use this as a good starting point. Then I'll layer additional lighting adjustments on top of it to get the right look that I'm going for. In the next video, I'm going to show you the main lighting adjustment that I like to use to enhance the lighting in black and white photos. 6. Curves Adjustment Layer: In this video, I'll show you how to use the best lighting adjustment and affinity photo, the curves adjustment layer. To see how this adjustment works, I've prepared a few screenshots of it. This is exactly what the adjustment looks like in affinity, but I've just removed everything besides the adjustment so that we can really focus on it. The first thing to know is that this line, which is called the spline controls all of the lighting in your photo. As we move this line up, our photo will become brighter, and as we move this blind down, our photo will become darker. But if that's all that curves did, it wouldn't be that special of an adjustment. What sets this adjustment apart is that we get to choose which part of our photos lighting we want to affect. At the top right of the spline, we can control the brightest parts of our photo, and at the bottom left, we can control the darkest parts of our photo. As you might expect, the rest of the line controls all of the other tones in the photo, ranging from the darkest tones up to the brightest tones. If you wanted to darken the shadows in your photo, you would move this part of the spline. Or if you wanted to brighten the highlights in your photo, you could move this part of this line. That's about it. That's the general idea of how to use curves. I know this might sound a little confusing right now, but it's actually really easy after you've practiced a little bit. Let's jump back into affinity photo and try out curves. To start, let's go ahead and apply the curves adjustment. I'll go to our adjustments, and then I'll click on curves. I'm going to click right in the middle here and as I bring this up, you can see our photo gets brighter, and as I bring it down, our photo will get darker. I'm going to reset this because I want to show you where things can get pretty interesting with the curves adjustment. We can actually add multiple points to this line. In this example, here's the before and after. I've darkened the shadows. But then I brought this part of the line back up to meet the center so that we're not darkening the highlights. We've kept the highlights the same and we're only darkening the dark areas. You can really see this with the clouds. As I turn this off, you can see the clouds look exactly the same between this before and the after because these bright highlights are not being affected at all. We can also do this in reverse. In this case, I brighten the highlights quite a bit, and then I brought the line back in the middle so that the shadows aren't being affected. Here's the before and after of that. Only the highlights are getting brighter. The shadow areas still look the same. That's one way to affect the lighting in your photo, but I want to show you a really common thing to do, which is to make the highlights brighter and the shadows darker. This is pretty much just adding contrast. It's called an S curve because it looks like an S shape. Here's the before and after. This is such a great way to quickly add contrast to your photo. I do this all the time. Just make sure not to raise it to too much. If you make it a really obvious S curve, sometimes it just gets to be a bit too much. Keep it a little more subtle. I also like to make it so this line crosses right in the center just to make sure that the midtones stay about the same and we're only really brightening the highlights and darkening the shadows. If it's a little off balance, that's okay if that's what you want, but usually I like to just do it like that. Another thing that we can change with the curves adjustment is we can change the black point and the white point. The black point is pretty much just adjusting the darkest part of your photo. You can do that with the shadows node right here to adjust the black point. I'm going to bring this up and you can see that the darkest parts of our photo have all gotten lighter. Instead of looking black, it looks a little bit more gray. For the white point, I can bring this down and you can see that all of these white areas are looking a little bit more gray and dull. But how can I do the opposite to make the shadows even darker or the highlights even brighter. These nodes can't go any higher or any lower. But what we can do is we can actually use them to affect the slope of this curve. If I bring this point over, you can see we're darkening the black point. More of the photo is becoming deep and dark black. We can do the same thing over here with the highlights, bringing it inward, to make the bright parts even brighter. You can see the slope of this line is a lot more intense now. That's basically how you can adjust the black and the white points. I know that was a lot to take in with the curves adjustment. But I want to quickly edit a few photos using curves just so everything can come together and make more sense. In the exercise files, there's actually a few more photos for this lesson. Let's go ahead and start with this one. I'll add a curves adjustment. This photo is a little dull and dark. I want to make it brighter. I'm going to just raise the spline. You can see how much nicer and brighter that looks. Here's the before and after. Curves can be super quick to use like that, just quickly brightening up the photo. For the next one, we have a photo that looks pretty faded. I'd like it to have more contrast. I'm going to add a curves adjustment. Then I'm going to do an S curve to bring in that contrast. Here's the before and after. You can see that already looks better. For this last one, I'd like the shadows to look a little bit deeper and darker since they look a little faded right now as a quick bonus tip to quickly pull up a curves adjustment. You can just press command or control. And now to make the shadows darker, I'm going to adjust the black point by bringing this over to the right. You can see that already looks so much better. Here's the before and the after. The curved adjustment can be a little tricky at first, but it's so flexible and powerful. After you get the hang of it, it's actually really easy to use. Great work in this video. In the next one, I'll show you how you can paint light onto your photos. 7. Overlay Painting: In this video, I'll show you a beautiful and fun technique for painting light onto your photos. By using the overlay blend mode, we can quickly paint to shape light onto our photos. First things first, I'm going to go to our adjustment panel. I'm just going to apply the black and white preset. We can close out of that and go back to our layers panel. Next, we can go ahead and apply a new pixel layer just so we have something to paint on top of. Next, I'll grab the paint brush. I'll paint in white paint, I'll make sure that I'm painting with 0% hardness and a nice low flow. I like to use a lower percentage for our flow so that I can gradually build my paint to build up the brightness as I go. I'll just go ahead and paint over the path to brighten it. If you want to change the size of your brush, just use the bracket keys on your keyboard to shrink down your brush or increase the size of your brush. I just painted and white paint all over the path. As you can see, when you just paint straight and white paint like this, it pretty much just covers your picture. But if we change the blend mode to overlay, you can see that this brightens the area in a very natural way. Here's the before and after. This is such a great blond mode for adjusting the lighting because as you can see, it makes it brighter, but if you paint in black paint, you can actually make your photo deeper and darker as well. I'll just paint in black paint over our subject to darken her so she contrasts with the bright background. You can see that this very naturally darkens her. Here's the before and after of that. I think I'll just darken a little bit more on the edge there. Looking good. I'm going to continue to add more lightness and darkness to this photo with my main goal being to just increase the contrast, but also increase the focus on our subject. Because our subject is very dark, I'm going to brighten the areas around her just to make her stand out even more. I'm going to paint in white paint over this grassy area and all around her. Maybe the trees a little bit. Then I'm going to switch my color to black to darken some areas. A super quick way to do this is actually to just press x on your keyboard. This will switch between these two colors. X, go ahead and click that anytime you want to switch up your color. I'm just going to paint in black paint around the edges of the photo to bring the focus in toward our subject. Here's the before and after of that. You can see this technique worked really well to bring the focus into our subject. I think this technique works really well on black and white photos to do that. But it's actually not that great for color photos because when you're painting with overlay painting like this, you're not only changing the lighting, but also the colors of the photo. I just want to show you this. If you were just to do this on the colored picture, here's what it would look like. It just looks a little strange. But in black and white, this actually looks pretty good. Again, here's the before and after. I might have gone a little overboard, so I'll just lower the opacity a little bit. But as you can see, overlay painting is such an easy way to shape the light in your photos. We've learned quite a few different skills in this first chapter of the course. In the next video, I just want to cap off this chapter by bringing everything together with a final project that we can do together. 8. Lighting Practice Project: This final video of the chapter, we'll do a project together from start to finish. This will be pretty simple. Since we have the preset already, we can save some time by applying that. Let's start by going to the adjustment panel, and then applying the accurate black and white adjustment. That step one, nice and easy. For the next step to this project, I'm going to use a curves adjustment to adjust the lighting. I'm going to press command or control just to use our shortcut. Then I'm going to make a little bit of an S curve to add contrast to this picture. Here's the before and after, and you can already see some improvement with this picture. As one more step to finish this off, I want to do some overlay painting to really enhance this path leading to the house. I'll add a new pixel layer. I'll set this layer to overlay. Then I can go ahead and grab the paint brush to paint in white paint and black paint to brighten and darken different areas. Like I said, I'd like to enhance this path. I'll go ahead and paint in white paint. I'll hit x on my keyboard to switch to white. Then I can go ahead and paint all along this path. I also want to enhance the house, so I'll paint in white paint over the house. I think I also want to paint on the white flowers on the sides. I think they're just so pretty. I'll just paint in white over the little blossoms there. I'll do the same on this side of the road. While I still have the white paint, I'm just going to lightly paint over the sky with a nice big brush. Now I'll press x to switch my color to black. I'm just going to paint in black on this grassy area over these trees. Just like that. Now I can turn this off so that we can see the before and the after before, after. I'm just going to select both of these layers. You can see the before and after of really enhancing the house at the end of the road. Just like that, we're done with this final project. Super easy, super simple, great job. Now that we finished this first chapter. In the next one, we're going to learn how to add our own special lighting into our photos. I. 9. The Magic of Shapes: Now that we've learned the basics of Black and White editing. In this chapter, I'm going to show you some more interesting techniques. We're going to learn how to take Affinitys shape tools to adjust the lighting. This is a pretty fun technique that allows you to change up the lighting at any time. I think you're really going to like this one. Let's get started. 10. Creating Light: Let's learn how to create beautiful light by using shapes. I've already applied the black and white preset right here to this photo. Here's what it looked like before, and here's the after. For this video, I want to show you how you can actually use any shape you want to create light. Let's start by using a circle. I'll just click on the little gray triangle next to this rectangle to open up all of our shapes, and I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'm going to hold shift and then I'll click and drag to add a circle to our image. To make this look more like it's lighting up the photo and not just sitting on top of the photo. I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. This looks a little strange in the sky. I'm just going to lower it so you can see what this looks like on the grass here. It's overlaying and lighting up that area. This looks, I guess, but it's not very natural. There's a few things we can do to make this look more natural for our lighting and the first one is to blur the edges to soften it. To do this, I'm going to make sure I have the ellipse still selected. Then I'll go down here to layer effects. Then I'm going to click on Gaussian Blur and I'll check that on. Then we can go ahead and increase the radius. You can see how that just softens the edges to make it look more natural. I actually think I'm going to type in 300 for this, just to really blur the edges, and I think that looks pretty good. I'll close out of this. Then I want to show you a little trick I like to use with this effect. If you go up to the context toolbar and click on this icon, it will hide this blue bounding box whenever you click and drag it around, which just makes it easier so that you can see what you're doing without being distracted by these blue lines. I think I'm actually going to place this right in the center. Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger by holding shift and clicking and dragging. Here we go. I really like this placed here because it makes our dark subjects stand out more by having all of this light around them. I do think this is a little too intense. I'm going to click and drag on the word opacity here to lower this down. Not bad. Here is the before and after of that. I really like this. Let's do one more example using a different shape just so we can practice. This time, I'm going to use a rectangle. I'm just going to add the rectangle to this side of our document right here. I made sure to overlap it a little bit because we're going to blur the edges. If it's right against the edge, it's not going to look very good, but I can show you that in a minute. Before we do that, I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. Then I'll go to our layer effects. I'll check on Gaussian blur. I'm just going to type in 300, so it's the same as our last one. I'm going to show you that if I bring this down, you might start to see some darkness on these edges because the edges are blurred. By overshooting a little bit, it just guarantees that this area stays nice and light as opposed to having some of that darkness there. That's why I like it to overlap a little bit like that. With that, you can see that before and after, I'll just lower the opacity of the slayer a little bit. Before and after. Very nice. The light does look like it's coming from the side, as you can see, he's lit up on this side of his body. It makes sense to add some more lighting on the side. I'm just going to select these two layers so that you can see a complete before and after using this technique for creating light. That's how you can add light using shapes. This has a lot of fun applications from adding a brighter source of light off to the side or enhancing different areas of the photo. This is quicker than painting in the light. It's a nice way to save some time. In the next video, we'll use a very similar technique to add beams of light to a photo. 11. Light Beams: This video, we'll learn how to make a light beam. This will be a little different than making a big ball of light like how we did in the last video. Before I walk you through this though, I just want to say I did already apply the preset. Here's the before and after of that. To get started on our light beam, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to grab the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to click and drag out a rectangle that I'm going to place diagonally so that it aligns with the roof here. You can adjust the sizing by using any of the handles on the side here. That looks pretty good. Again, my rectangle is going off of the document just to make sure that the whole area is covered with light. With light beams, they usually start brighter at the top, closer to the light source, and then they gradually fade away. To create this effect, we're going to add a gradient that goes from 100% white down to 0% light. I'm going to grab the gradient tool. Then I'll just click and drag to add this gradient. This top color stop is already 100% white. With this bottom one selected, I'm just going to change the color to white. If you still have these sliders out, you can just raise the luminosity slider to do that. Then you can lower this opacity slider to fade that color away. Very nice. That's how you do a transparent gradient. But light beams don't always fade completely like that. I think I'll raise the opacity to around 50%. Just so we can make sure that it stays visible. Then we can go ahead and add our other adjustments to this. For example, I think I'd like to blur the edges a little so that they don't look quite so harsh. I'll click on the layer effects, and I'll add a Gaussian blur. We can raise this as much as we'd like. I really like how that blurring looks. I think I'll type in 200 just to make this more intense. All right. For anyone wondering, I actually didn't change it to overlay on purpose. The overlay blend mode looks really good for naturally making a photo brighter. But in the case of this light beam, using the overlay blend mode would make this look a little bit too faded and you wouldn't really be able to see the light beam. That's why I kept it at the normal blend mode. To finish off this effect, I want to darken the rest of the photo to make this light beam stand out more. To do that, I'll press command or Control M to bring up our curves adjustments. Then I'm just going to darken the image. I think this is looking a little bit too dark. Maybe I'll brighten the black point a little by bringing that up. You can see that just makes it look a little less intense. All right, very nice. With that, I'll just select these layers so that we can see the before. And here's the after of adding a light beam into our photo. In the next video, I'll show you a great technique for brightening up your subject. 12. Un-Mask the Subject: Let's learn how to unmask our subject. Sometimes when adding more light, it might overwhelm your subjects face. But if you use a mask and simply remove the light off of your subject's face, you lose the ability to move your light source around. That all might sound a little confusing right now. Let me show you the problem. First, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, and I'm going to click and drag to add a rectangle of light across our subject. Then I'll change the blend mode to overlay. To get this off of our subject's face, I'm going to add a mask to this layer. With this white mask, we can fully see the rectangle, and if I paint in black paint, then we'll be able to remove this lighting from our subject's face. I'll grab the paint brush and I'll just quickly paint in black paint to remove this light from her face. Now I can show you the problem. If we move this rectangle layer around now because we want to adjust the light source, you can see that this hole that we painted in the mask moves with the rectangle. We'll have to repaint it and adjust this and it's just not very flexible. I want to show you the solution to this. First, I'm going to delete this mask layer. Then I'm going to duplicate this original photo layer with command or Control J. I'll just place this on top of everything, and then I'll place the black and white adjustment on top of everything. Your layer should look like this at this point. Now I'm going to apply a mask to this layer instead. I'm going to apply a mask and then I'm going to invert this. I'll press command or control I to do that. Right now, this duplicate layer is completely hidden, so I can reveal her face using white paint. I'll grab my paintbrush and white paint. I'm painting in white on a black mask to reveal this layer again. You can see what this looks like, I'll just turn these layers off. You can see I am just applying this. Her head is on its own layer now, separate from everything, which means that now we can go ahead and move the rectangle around, and her face will stay totally lit just the way that we want. That's just a much more flexible way to do it. Now, if I actually want this to look good, I would need to polish up this rectangle a little bit. First, I'm going to go to our layer effects and apply a gaussian blur to it. This needs quite a bit more blurring. I think I'll just type in 300. There we go. That already looks better, but I think I'm going to go ahead and lower the opacity of this rectangle. I'll lower that about halfway. Maybe we do want a little bit of lighting on our subjects face. If that's the case, then we can go ahead and lower the opacity of this head layer that we painted. I'm just going to lower that down about halfway. All right, with that, now I can show you the before and after of this technique. Here it is before and after, let me just get out the hand tools, so those bounding boxes disappear. Here is the before and after. We've brightened up the subject without overdoing it. Great work. In the next video, I'll show you how to add a mystical fog effect to your black and white photos. 13. Creating Fog: In this video, we'll create beautiful, mysterious fog. As you can see, I've already applied the black and white preset to this photo. To add fog, let's go ahead and start by adding a really long white rectangle to the bottom of the photo. I'll grab the rectangle tool. Then I'll just click and drag to add this. Then to blur this, I'm going to go to our layer effects. I'm going to blur it quite a bit this time. I'll type in 600. Now you can see what that looks like. Because we've blurred the edges a lot, make sure that your rectangle extends far past the edges. You see the difference there. We have a lot more darkness, but as we fill this out, the white can go all the way to the edge, I'll do the same for this bottom part and this part on the side. I don't want to add the overlay blend mode to this rectangle so that we can still keep this fog effect a little bit more thick. But I do think I will reduce the opacity a little bit. About like that. If you want more precise fog, you can also just paint in regular old white paint. I just want to show you that technique. I'll delete this layer. I'll add a new pixel layer. Then I'll grab the paint brush so that we can paint in white paint with a nice low flow like that and a really big brush. Now, I'll just paint this across the bottom like we had it before. But maybe I'll go up in a few areas. Maybe I'll bring it more around the side. If you ever paint too much or you didn't want it, feel free to grab the eraser tool. I'll just erase that a little bit. The hardness on my eraser tool is set to a random amount. Let me just lower the flow and hardness so it matches our paint brush to create a softer edge there. All right. And of course, we can always lower the opacity of this layer, just to calm it down a little bit. And there we have it. That's how you add fog. It's actually pretty simple. In the next video, I want to show you a fun new technique for adding a vignette to a black and white photo. 14. Editable Vignette: Let's learn how to add a vignette to a black and white photo. As with the other ones we've done in this chapter, I already applied the black and white preset. There's the before and after. In this video, I really want to show you a super cool technique for creating a vignette. There are so many ways that you can add a vignette to your photo. But what I really like about this technique is that it allows you to move your Vignette around. It's very editable, so I think you're really going to like this one. First, we're going to add a rectangle that fills the entire photo. Make sure you have snapping turned on like this, and we're just going to bring this all the way to the edge and we're going to snap it to the other edge like that. For this rectangle, I'm going to say I want no fill, where this white color is, go right here and click that so that we have no fill. It looks like we have a black stroke right now, which is perfect. I'm just going to go up here to the context toolbar, and I'm going to change the strokes width. It'll be different for every photo because this is going in pixels. If your photo is a little bigger, you might need to type in a value here. For example, maybe I'll just type in 200 for this one. We just want a really large stroke that goes all around the image. With that done, I'm going to go to our layer effects, and I'm going to add a gaussian blur to soften the stroke. We can bring that up. Maybe I'll type in 200 for this one. Then we can go ahead and lower the opacity. This looks a little more subtle. I think I'll lower mine about halfway. Here's how it's looking so far. Here's the before and after. But now I want to show you the magic of this fgnette. You can resize this fgnette from all of the different sides to choose how big and dramatic you want this feignette to be. For example, maybe you don't want it on this side as much because it looks a little obvious with this water area over here. You can even bring it in a little more or out. It's fully customizable, and I think that's something that's just so cool about this one. With that, you can see the before and after. As one last tip, you can change the vignette to be dark or light. All you need to do is have your rectangle selected and then change the color. If you want this to be a light dream vignette, it looks like the fog we were working with in the last video. You can just change the color of the stroke to white. I'll just change my back to black because I think that looks better for this one. But that is an option. And there you have it. Adding a vignette is such an easy way to bring the focus in toward your subject in a black and white photo. In the next video, I want to show you another way you can bring the focus in toward your subject by adding a blurred photo frame to your photos. 15. Blurred Photo Frame: Let's make a blurred photo frame in this video. I've already added our black and white adjustment to this one. Here's what that looks like. To make this photo frame. First, I'm going to add a shape to place our image inside of. To do this, I think I'm going to go ahead and add an ellipse. I'll click and drag while holding shift to make a perfect circle. I'm just going to keep that placed over our subjects like that. Next, I'm going to go ahead and blur this circle with a layer effect. I'll check on the Gaussian blur, and I'll bring the blur up to 200. There we go. Then I'll make sure this is below our black and white adjustment. Let's see what happens if I add our photo as a child layer to this circle. Well, that doesn't look right. Right now, our photo is blurry. You can't even see the subjects. I just wanted the edges to be blurry, not the entire photo. I'm going to have to undo this. I'll press command or Control Z to undo that. To make the photo not appear blurry. We actually need to rasterize the circle layer so that the blur only appears on the circle edges. To rasterize this, go ahead and right click and then go down to where it says a rasterize. When you click this, a dialog box will appear right here, and you just want to check, preserve layer effects. If you preserve the layer effects, then we're right back to where we started and our picture will become blurry. Instead, I want to rasterize this so that this blurring is baked into this layer. Now I'm going to make our image, a child there to the circle, and you can see that our picture isn't blurry anymore. This looks great. I'm going to add a background color now to complete the look. I'll go to our shapes and I'll add a rectangle to this document. I'll bring it to the bottom and we can make this rectangle any color we want. I think I'm going to make it a super dark gray color like that. With all this set up, now we can go ahead and adjust the position of everything because it looks a little strange that it's on the bottom part of the picture instead of centered. I just want to grab the move tool and show you how we can move these around. To move this photo layer, first, you need to unlock it, and then you can go ahead and move this. We can also resize the circle. I'll go ahead and select that and move it, but it looks like the child layer moves with it. To avoid this, we can actually go up to the context toolbar and click Lock Children. Now that child layer will stay right where it's positioned and we can move the circle up to meet it. I want this to be centered like that, and maybe I'll move this child layer a bit like that. I can also resize the circle if I want it a little bit larger. I'll just increase the size. Like that. Okay, that's it. Now you know how to create this fun, blurred frame effect. Great work on this video and on this chapter. In the next chapter, we're going to learn a few techniques to add sharpening and blurring to black and white photos. 16. Sharpening & Blurring: So far, we've learned a lot of different ways to control the lighting in our photos. But black and white photos are more than just lighting. In this chapter, I'll show you some important skills like how to sharpen and blur your photos. Let's get started. 17. Sharpening Textures: Let's learn how to sharpen textures in a black and white photo. I've already applied the preset to this picture. Here's the before and after. Black and White photos are all about light, contrast, and textures. The best way to bring out textures is with the clarity filter. I'll go to our filters, and then I'll apply the clarity filter. I'm going to bring the strength all the way up to really boost this clarity. Here's the before and after of that. You can just see, especially in the white parts of the waves, how much of that is brought out with the clarity filter before, after. Now, I think this looks pretty nice, but it's doing some strange things to the sky and the rocks back here. I'm going to grab my paint brush and I'll paint in black paint to remove it from those areas. There's a built in mask with this filter, so you don't even need to worry about adding a mask. Just paint this away. I think this is painting it away a little too slowly. I'm just going to bring my flow up. There we go. Okay. Now we can see the before and after and how this is only affecting the waves. I'm going to duplicate this with command or Control J. Just so we can have a little bit more clarity still. This time, I'm going to remove it from the white crests of the waves. There we go. Now you can see that before and after and how this is mainly just affecting the water. We can even do this one more time to really enhance this. I'll press command or Control J again. Now the water is just looking so textured and it looks really cool. I'm going to select all of these layers so that I can show you the complete before and here's the after. Before and after. Now, as I'm doing this before and after, I'm noticing some strange areas right up here that I don't think I painted away very well. I'm going to go back to those layers where I missed out on some painting, and I'm just going to make sure that those areas are fully removed. And I'll do the same for this layer up here since this is a duplicate copy. All right before and after, much better. I think this picture is so beautiful and stunning. These waves have never looked better. Now that we know how to sharpen things up, let's take things in the other direction in the next video. 18. Un-Sharpening: This quick video, I'll show you how to unsharpen your photos. I've already applied the Black and White adjustment. Here's what that looks like. What should you do if you want your photo to be less sharp? Especially in Black and White editing. There might be times where you want a softer looking photo to make the image look a little older. Well, this is actually super easy. I'm going to go to our filters and I'll apply a Gaussian blur. I'm going to bring up the radius just a little bit around one pixel. Then I'll just zoom in here so that you can see the difference. Here's what the picture looked like before. You can see a lot more texture on the skin and here is the after before, after. Of course, you could increase the radius even more if you want more of a blurred effect. I'm just going to keep it subtle for this one. I think this looks much smoother and older and maybe you'd be confused at what time period this picture was taken in. Nice and simple. You can do this with any photo that looks a little too intense. In the next video, I'll show you another way to make your photos look older by adding some noise. 19. Adding Noise: Let's add some noise to this photo. I've already applied the black and white preset. Here's the before and after. Adding noise can make your photo look older. It can also just add some extra texture to finish things off nicely as a finishing step. To do this, let's add the add noise filter. Let's raise the intensity nice and high, maybe around 20% to start. Now you can already see the difference. Here's the before and after adding in all of that specking noise there. It looks nice, but sometimes it might be a little bit too much on the face. Here's the before and after. We can actually remove it from the face a little bit just so it doesn't look quite so intense. I'm going to grab my paintbrush and I'll paint in black paint with a nice low flow. I'll bring it back down to around 10%. Then I'll just paint this off of the face a little bit. You don't want to completely remove it from the face or the face will look a little strange compared to all of the noise around it. But just removing a little bit will make it look less intense there. Here's the before and after, and you can see there's some soft, nice noise there. As a finishing touch, I think for this picture, I'll actually lower the intensity a little bit. I'll bring it around 10%. Now you can see some nice noise there, but it's not quite so overwhelming. Very nice. Now you know how to easily add noise to your photos. In the next video, I'll show you a unique way to add a vignette using a blur. 20. Blurred Vignette: Let's learn about adding a blurred vignette to a Black and White photo. I've already applied the Black and White adjustment. Here's the before and after. To add our blurred vignette, I'm going to go into our filters, and I'm going to apply the depth of field blur, which you can find right here. This blur is unique where it has a center point that stays in focus, and then it gradually gets blurrier with each ring that it goes through. As I raise the radius here, you can see what that looks like. I'll just make sure preserve Alpha is checked on so that the edges don't get all blurry and strange. Then we can adjust these rings to change the size of this. In this case, I want to make sure that the couple stays nice and in focus. I'm going to click on the center dot here and I'll just put their faces right in the center, and then we can go ahead and increase the size from there. Now, a little blur for the vignette can look nice, but we shouldn't go overboard with it. I'm just going to bring this down. Maybe to around. Now you can see the before and after of this. We've just subtly added some nice blurring here before and after. I like how this looks on some of the areas. But on her arm, I think it looks a little bit strange to have it lose focus like this. I'll grab my paint brush and just paint in black paint to remove this blur from her arm. Let's keep that in focus. If you want, you can even remove it a little bit from her dress. Here is the before and after now. One thing I like to do when adding a blur like this is to actually add a little bit of noise to make this artificial blur look less fake by covering it up. I'm going to go to our filters. Then I'll click on Add Noise. I'm just going to increase the noise to around 10%. So now you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after of adding in that noise. And there you have it. Now you can make any photo look more focused on the subject without it being too obvious. In the next video, we'll play around with another blur effect. 21. Tilt Shift Blur: This video, I'll show you how to apply a tilt shift blur. I've already applied the black and white adjustment, here's the before and after. The tilt shift blur effect is just another way to bring the focus in toward the subject. The first thing we need to do is apply a filter, and we're going to apply the depth of field filter. Now, by default, this is set to elliptical, but I'm going to click here and change this to tilt shift. Now we can go ahead and blur things. You can see with this effect, the center point will stay focused all across the horizon and it'll gradually get more blurry as we get farther from that point. I'll just check on preserve Alpha so the edges are preserved. Then we can go ahead and adjust where this is positioned. I would like this village right here to stay nice and in focus, and I'd like the rest of it to get blurrier from there. I'm going to lower the radius to around 40 pixels. I still want this effect to be visible, just not quite so intense. Now you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and the after before, after. Now, I like how this looks, but there's one part of this picture that looks a little strange to me, and that's this tree down here. You can see the bottom part is blurred, but then it goes into focus up here. Here's the before and after. I think it makes more sense if that tree is blurry just all across the tree. To fix this, I'm going to duplicate the depth of field blur with command or control J. Then I'm going to open up this by clicking right here on its icon. Then I'm just going to move this blur so that the tree becomes blurred. Now I'm going to invert this blur with command or control I. That way, it's fully invisible, and we can just paint in white paint on this black mask to blur the tree. I'll grab my paintbrush. I'll change my paint to white. Then I'll just paint over the tree to reveal that blur. And we can do this anywhere else where we might have an area that's sticking up into the background. Just like that, we're able to fix that tree. Here's the before and after. To polish off this whole effect, I'd like to add some noise on top of everything just to make this look a little less artificial. I'll go into our filters and apply that add noise filter. Then I'll increase the noise to around 10%. And you can see the difference here. Here's the before and after of adding in that noise, and I'll just select all of our layers to show you the complete before and after. I think this effect works best on landscapes like this, this looks really good. In the next video, we'll learn how to add a dreamy glow to black and white photos. 22. Dreamy Glow: Let's add a dreamy glow effect to our photos. I've already applied the black and white preset. So we can go ahead and get started with this. The first step to creating a dreamy glow is to go into our filters and add the lens blur filter. I'm going to bring the radius all the way up and I'm also going to check on preserve Alpha. You could also use a Gaussian blur filter for this, but I found the lens blur actually works a little bit better for this effect. Once you have that set up, we can go ahead and change the blend mode of this blur from normal to scream. Doesn't this look so pretty? Here's the before and after. This blur adds so much light to the photo. I want to change up the lighting just a little bit more to finish this off, and I'll press command or Control M to apply a curves adjustment. I think I want the shadows to be a little bit deeper to balance out all of this lightness. I'm going to go to the shadow node, and I'm just going to bring it over a little bit to darken it. These deep dark shadows will just contrast nicely with the brightness of all of the leaves that we have going on here. Here's the before and after of that. Of course, you can always lower the opacities of any of these layers if you think they're too intense. You can even adjust the opacity of the blur. But I think I like it all the way raised up. Here's the complete before and after. As you can see, this effect is so pretty. I love how this adds light through the leaves on the trees. If you have a picture with trees, definitely try this out. I think this will look nice on a lot of types of photos, but I really like this effect when the photo is outdoors so that this glow looks like sunshine. Great work. In the next video, I'll show you a simple way to add a motion blur. 23. Simple Motion Blur: Let's add a motion blur to give a photo some movement. Here's the before and after with the black and white preset. I think this effect looks especially good in black and white. It's important to add that preset to create the motion blur, I'm going to go into our filters, and I'm going to apply the motion blur. I'm going to really bump up the radius so you can see how this looks, and I'll check on preserve Alpha. You can see that this basically blurs the photo horizontally. If you wanted to, you could change the rotation point. But I think horizontal blurring looks a lot more normal because people are moving in horizontal directions in this photo. I'll leave it at that. I'm going to lower the radius to maybe around 30%. We still want to be able to see that there are people who are moving, but I do like quite a bit of blur for this effect. With that setup, I'm going to invert the layer with command or control I. Then I can grab my paint brush, set my paint to white, and I can manually paint this in over the people. I'm just going to paint anywhere where I see people, and you want to make sure to blur their whole bodies, not just their heads. I think I'm going to increase the flow, just so I don't need to paint quite so many layers. There we go. Okay. There we go. Now you can see the before and after of this effect. Doesn't this look so cool? Like I said before, I think this effect looks especially nice on black and white photos. As you can see, it works on a color photo, but it just doesn't quite have the same impact. But that's just my opinion. Now that you know how to add a simple motion blur, I'll show you how to do a more advanced version of this effect in the next video. 24. Advanced Motion Blur: This video we'll create an advanced motion blur effect. I've already applied the black and white adjustment. Here's the before and after of that. For this advanced motion blur, I'd like to actually blur the entire background like the world is quickly passing by and the man is just standing still. In order to only blur the background, we'll need to make a selection of the man. I'm going to grab the selection brush tool. I'll make it a little bit larger using the bracket keys on my keyboard. Then I can go ahead and start making my selection. But I already made a mistake. I'll D select with command or control D because we need to make sure that we have the man's layer selected so that the selection brush can snap to the edges of the man. That's much better. I'll just paint this all the way across the man. If you select too much, remember, you can just hold down Alt or Option on your keyboard and that will remove the selection. I'm just going to double check around all of the edges to make sure he's nice and selected. I think the selection looks great, so I'm going to go ahead and hit fine up in the context toolbar. This will just soften up the edges. I'll go ahead and apply. And now we have a great selection here. With the selection still loaded, I'm going to go to our filters and apply the motion blur. Go to increase the radius all the way and then I'll check on preserve Alpha. Obviously, this is the opposite of what we want. I'm going to de select with command or control D. Then I'll invert the layer with command or control I. Just like that, we've blurred the background. Here's the before and the after. Now, this looks pretty good, but there is one little problem that you might notice. That's that we have a little bit of haloing going on around the man. You can see right here and right here. You can see the man spilling out onto the background. If you want that, then that's great. But I think I'd like to remove that. If you want to do that, then here's what you need to do. First, I'm going to hit command or Control Z until we just have the simple selection again. There we go. There's no more motion blur. We just have our selection. Now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to right click on this layer, and then I'm going to click Duplicate. This will duplicate the entire layer, not just what we have selected. With this top layer selected, I'm going to add a mask. Now you can see the man is all by himself on his layer. Phase one is finished. As a next step, I actually want to remove the man from this lower layer. The way we'll do that is we'll select this bottom layer. Then I'm going to increase the size of this selection by pressing command or control B. This will bring up this grow slash shrink selection box. I'm just going to raise the radius a little bit. You don't want this to be too much. I think I'll just type in five pixels here. You can see the selection is now hovering around the man. Just to make sure he's fully included every little bit of him. I'll press apply. Now, with that bigger selection and this lower layer still selected, I'm going to go to the top of the screen to edit, and then I'm going to click on In paint. With that finished, I'm just going to de select with command or Control D. Now I'm going to show you that the background no longer has the man on this layer. We fully painted that area. This is perfect because now we can blur this background layer without the man bleeding onto the edges. With that layer selected, I'm going to go to our filters and all apply the motion blur. Then we can go ahead and increase the radius and check on preserve Alpha. You can see there's no more bleeding of the man, which is p. Here is the before and after adding this motion blur. Because we have the man and the background on separate layers. We can actually use this to our advantage and adjust the lighting a bit. With the background layer, I'm going to press command or control M, and I'm just going to darken the background a bit. I'd like to reduce these white areas just so that they don't stand out so much. I'm actually going to come over here and I'm going to lower the white point just so it looks a little bit more gray. That's good for the background. I'm going to click right up here and press command or Control M. I'm going to apply this as a child layer to the man's layer. Now you can see as I raise this, we're only affecting the man. I do think I want him to be a little bit brighter, just so he stands out from the background more. Maybe I'll increase the black point by bringing this over just so the shadows stay nice and dark. All right. Let's take a look at the difference here. I'm going to need to do some tricky selections of our layers. So I'll hold down command or control, and I'll click on the curves adjustments and the motion blur so that we can see a complete before and after. That's such a big difference. I think this looks so cool. Great work on this chapter. Now we know how to add sharpness or blurring to any black and white photo. 25. Black & White + Color: In this chapter, we're going to move beyond pure black and white and try adding just a little bit of color. We'll still mostly be working in black and white, but you can make some pretty interesting effects by adding just a little bit of color. Let's get started. 26. Sepia: Let's add some CPA tones to black and white photos. CPA toning can look good on a lot of black and whites because black and white photos tend to look bluish and cooler toned and CPA adds a little bit of warmth and age to your photo. As you can see, I already have the black and white preset applied. To create the CPA effect, we're going to use the lens filter adjustment I like using the default color for this because it already has that CPA tone. We can go ahead and increase the optical density as much as we'd like. I'll put it at 75 for this. As a quick tip, I like to raise the optical density pretty high. Then later on, I can go back and adjust the opacity at any time. I just find it's faster to change the opacity and easier to see as you drag opacity up and down. The same principle goes for other adjustments as well. If you apply them heavily, then you can lower the opacity later on. In this picture, I think I will add one more adjustment because I want the picture to look a little bit more faded. The blacks are so dark in this one. I'm going to press command or control to add a curves adjustment. Then I'm just going to raise up the Black point to gray out the shadows a little bit. Like I said, we can always adjust the opacity after the fact, to get it just right. I think that looks pretty good. That's a super simple way to add a tint of color to your black and white photos. Here's the before and after in the next video, I'll show you how to add more than one color to your photos. 27. Split Toning: In this video, I'll show you how to do split toning. I've already applied the black and white preset. Here's the before and after. Split toning allows us to apply a color to the highlights and a separate color to the shadows. I'm going to apply the split toning adjustment. Then we can go ahead and set whatever color we'd like. In this case, I think I want the shadows to be blue tones, and the highlights to be more of a yellow orange color. That's usually a pretty classic look for this. I'll set this to around 20. Then I'll increase the saturation to make this more visible. I'll bring this up quite a bit because it's hard to see, but you can see here we have a little bit more of that orange tone for the highlights. Here the before and after. Next, I'll adjust the shadows Hue. And I want this to be more blue toned. I'll put it to about there around 250. Then I can increase the saturation and this seems to be a little more sensitive. I'll just raise it like that. Here is the before and the after of that split toning. I think I'll lower the layer opacity a little bit to make this more subtle. Here's the before and after now. Beginners tend to overdo effects like this and even I overdo it actually. It's great that we can quickly lower the opacity at any time. With that, now we know how to add multiple colors to a black and white photo. It's very subtle and beautiful. In the next video, we'll do a more bold look by adding a pop of color. Oh. 28. Color Pop Effect: Let's add a pop of color in this video. For this one, I didn't apply the black and white preset yet because we'll add that a little later. The goal for this effect is to have one thing be in color and the rest of your picture to be in black and white. As a first step, we actually need to select the subject, which is whatever part of the photo that we want to be in color. I'm going to grab the selection brush, I'm going to click and drag to select all of these little tomatoes. The selection is a little tricky, so take your time to select all of the little leaves. It won't look right if you leave those out. Just make sure to do a thorough selection. Remember that you can always hold down Alt or Option to remove from your selection as you go. That was a tricky selection, but I think this looks pretty good. I'm going to finish this off by going to the context toolbar and pressing refine. This will just soften the edges, so I'll just press apply there. Now that we have that selected, I'm going to go to the adjustment panel, and I'm going to add the accurate black and white preset. This is done the opposite of what we want. I'm just going to press command or Control D to D select. Then I'll invert the adjustment with command or Control I. At this point, you can clean up the effect a little bit if you need to by painting in black and white paint on this layer. I'll just grab the paint brush tool. With a nice small brush, I think I would like to clean up some of these areas. I'm just going to paint around in white and black paint to add and remove black and white areas to this. I think that looks pretty good. As a bonus, we can change up the color of the subject with a quick adjustment layer. I'm going to add the HSL adjustment. I love using this adjustment to play with the colors. We can increase the saturation or decrease it. We could also change the hue by changing the hue slider. If you want them to be a little bit more orange toned, something like that. Because the rest of the photo is in black and white, this will only affect the part of the photo that's in color. That's it. Now you know how to add a pop of color to a black and white photo. In the next video, we're going to do something a little different and learn a really cool trick using the black and white adjustment. 29. Black & White Trick: This video, I'll share a really cool trick that you can do with the Black and White adjustment. This is just a fun little tip. We can use the Black and White adjustment to change the lighting in a color photo. To show you this, I'm just going to apply the accurate black and white preset. Then I'm going to change the blend mode of this layer to illuminosity. There it is. You can see that nothing changes when I turn this on and off. But what we can do is we can adjust the sliders to affect how the lighting of this picture appears. Now as I move these sliders, you can see the reds in the picture get brighter and darker as I move this up and down. The same goes for any of the other colors too. I'm going to move this downward to darken it. Then for the yellows, you can see we're affecting quite a bit of the picture. A lot of the grass actually is more of a yellow tone than green. For this one, I think I'll raise it a little bit to brighten it. Then we do have some green up in those dark green areas. I'll just slower this down a little bit. Then for the sand, we're affecting mostly the sky. I think I'd like this to be a little deeper and darker to help the white clouds stand out more. The blue slider can also affect these areas and I'll make them nice and dark as well. It looks like the magenta isn't really doing anything. I'll double click to reset that to the center point. Now, I just want to show you how much we've affected this picture. Here's the before and the after. This is such a weird and fun trick. There are a lot of adjustments that allow you to individually change the color hues. But there aren't really adjustments like this where you can individually brighten or darken the colors all in one place. I think this is a pretty cool trick. Great job on this fun chapter. Now you know all about adding color to black and white photos. In the next chapter, I want to show you how you can use black and white techniques on photos that look really boring in color. 30. When Color Can’t Cut It: Sometimes you'll be working with a color photo and you just can't get it to look right. But when you make your photo black and white, all of your photos problems seem to melt away. It's a really interesting technique. I think you're going to like this chapter. Let's get started. 31. Color Correction: This video we'll correct colors by turning a photo black and white. Black and white can save a photo with bad colors. Now, this particular photo was meant to have this type of coloring, so I honestly don't think it looks that bad. But let's say you have a photo like this that you really wanted to correct the coloring for. Editing this normally would be very tricky, but making it look good and black and white is a cinch. An easy way to do color correction is just to remove all of the color. I'll apply the accurate black and white preset. You can see this already looks so much better. Then I'll press command or Control M to bring up the curves adjustment, and we can adjust the lighting. I think I'll make this brighter, but preserve the shadows a little bit. All right, here's what that looks like before and after. It's pretty simple. Sometimes the colors in a photo just can't be saved, so don't fight it. Just black and white it. Sorry. Okay. Now that we know that we can easily color correct by turning a photo black and white. In the next video, we're going to correct bad lighting. 32. Lighting Correction: Correct the lighting by turning a photo black and white. We're going to fix this underexposed image. Right now it's just so dark. To start, I'm going to add a curves adjustment to show you that we can brighten it in color. I'm just going to bring this up. Maybe adjust the black point a little bit to lighten it. You can see that when you brighten a colored photo to this extent, a lot of the times the colors start to look pretty strange. There's a lot of green tints going on and I just don't think this looks very good. But when you make it black and white, it actually looks cool. I'll apply that preset. Now you can see what this looks like with the curves adjustment. Here's the before and after. Be we no longer have those weird colors competed for our attention. We can really just focus on the picture, and I think this looks really nice. I'm just going to open up the curves adjustment now and I'm going to see if we can edit this anymore. I brand it quite a bit. I adjusted the Blackpoint. We'll bring that down a little bit. I think this looks really nice. Making a photo black and white lets you much more dramatically change the lighting in your photo without needing to worry about the colors. In the next video, we're going to fix a dull photo. 33. Dullness Correction: Let's fix a dull photo by making it black and white. Sometimes a photo just has boring colors and there's not much you can do about it. In this photo, I wouldn't want to enhance any of these colors. They're just boring and drab. Luckily, even photos with boring colors can be beautiful works of art in black and white. I'm going to apply the black and white preset to start. You can already see that this makes the photo have a much more intentional look now rather than having drop colors, it looks more purposeful because there's just no color there. To enhance this even more, I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and I'm going to make this curves adjustment super dramatic. I think this photo needs more brightness, and I'm going to bring the white point over to enhance that even more. I really want to enhance the white parts of this photo because I think the white edges of the road really enhance the shape of them. Now you can see the before and after of that. You can also see the nice bright head lights reflecting on the road, which I think looks really nice. I'll just select both of these layers to see the complete before and after. Turning photos Black and White really is such an easy fix to make them look more interesting and intentional. All right. Now that we're done with this simple chapter. In the next one, we'll learn about a bunch of different styles that we can use with black and white photos. 34. Black & White Styles: So far, we've learned about a lot of different tools and techniques in this course. But in this chapter, we'll bring together everything we've learned to make some really amazing black and white effects. These different styles are a lot of fun to make, so let's get started. 35. Faded Shadows: This video will do a beautiful faded shadows effect. Making the picture look more faded is a very popular effect and it's also very simple to do. First, you'll need to apply your black and white preset. Then you can press command or control to bring up the curves adjustment. Now, there are a couple of different ways you can do this. The first way is to bring the block point up until you can start to see those shadows fading, and then bring this midpoint of the line down to meet the mid line right here. This makes it so the darkest shadows are becoming more faded, but the midpoints aren't becoming too bright. Here's what that looks like. Here's the before and after. That's pretty simple. But here's another way you can do this. I'll just reset this curve and this time, I'll bring the black point up to fade the shadows, then I'll bring the white point over to brighten the highlights. Here's the before and after of that. By brightening the highlights, we're really making the whole picture feel lighter and softer. I like doing it better this way, but you could also just fade the shadows if that's the look you're going for. That's how you do the faded shadows effect. In the next video, we'll go in the opposite direction and create a high contrast black and white photo. 36. High Contrast: Let's make a high contrast black and white photo. I've already applied the black and white preset. Now we can go ahead and jump in. First, we'll add a curves adjustment with command or Control. For this one, I'd just like to enhance the contrast more by darkening the Black point and brightening the white point. To do that, I'll bring the Black point over. And I'll bring the white point over. As I'm doing this, I'm watching the photo over here so that the white areas don't get too bright. I think I'll bring it over about to there. For this photo, I think I'll also brighten the curve overall by just bringing this area up. Brighter photos tend to look better, so I think that looks pretty nice. In addition to just adding contrast like this, here's the before and after. Another great way to enhance contrast is to do some painting. I'll add a new pixel layer and I'll change this layer to the overlay blend mode. Then I can grab the paintbrush tool and with a nice low flow, maybe around 10%. I can paint in black and white to enhance different areas. For this, I'm going to start by painting in white paint on all of the light areas in the photo that I want to enhance. For example, maybe you want to paint white on the whites of the eyes. I see a few different highlights on the face. Maybe I'll paint a little bit on the bridge of her nose, on this light spot on her cheek. Abe that's already bright, can just get a little bit more brightness. If you want to enhance the shine on her lips, you can paint over them. Now I'll just switch my paint color to black so that I can darken the dark areas. Maybe darkening the eyebrows and the eyelashes, the iris of the eye. I'll just show you what this looks like. Here's the before and after of that overlay painting before and after. Of course, you can lower the opacity a little if this is a little too intense. I think I'll do that. Of course, you could do more contrast painting than this. Depending on your photo, it might not all be on the face of your subject. But basically, you can just paint white on bright areas and black on dark areas to make them stand out more. All right. Now that we know how to create a beautiful high contrast photo. I want to show you how to make this effect even more intense in the next video. 37. Ultra High Contrast: This video we'll make an ultra high contrast effect. Ultra high contrast works really well with architecture. Let's see how this works. I've already applied our preset. Here's the before and after. Not a huge change. There wasn't much color in this photo. To start our ultra high contrast effect, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'm just going to darken the black point by bringing this inward and I'll brighten the white point by bringing this inward. Then we can see before and after of that. I think that looks pretty good, but I wish I could brighten the sky more without over brightening the whole building. Maybe I'll start fresh. I'll delete this curve. I'm going to turn off the black and white adjustment. Then I'm going to select the layer with the building on it so that I can select the sky. I'll grab the selection brush tool. I'll increase the size using the bracket keys. Then I can go ahead and paint over the sky to select it. Remember you can hold down Alt or Option to remove from your selection. Make sure this edge looks really nice. And I think we've done it. Now I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'm going to brighten the white point until the sky looks totally white. I'll turn on the black and white adjustment again. You can see that looks so much better. I'll just place this above that. Next, I only want to affect the building. I'm going to invert the selection by holding command or Control, Shift I. Now you can see we only have the building selected, I'm going to apply a curves adjustment with command or Control M so that I can only affect the building. I'm going to darken the black point and brighten the white point, just as we did before, but this time we're only affecting the building. We can also darken the midtones if we'd like for a more dramatic look. I'll just press command or Control D to D select. You can see what this looks like. Here's the before and after of the building. Here is the before and after with the sky being perfectly white. I think this looks great so far. Now, to make this even more contrasted, we're going to paint on the building to really enhance the curves. I'll add a new pixel layer and I'll change the blend mode to overlay. Then we can grab the paint brush and begin painting in black and white paint. To start with my black paint. I'm just going to enhance this indentation right here, and maybe this area over here. Here we go. Then I'll switch my color to white and I'll paint on the brighter areas like over here and right here. I think I'll add one more pixel layer just to keep this separate and I'll do a little bit more overlay painting. I'm just going to paint a little bit of lightness on the top here. All right, and now we can go ahead and see a before and after of this overlay painting. I love how dramatic this makes the building look. We've turned a regular old black and white photo into a work of art. Let me show you the complete before. And after now, I just love this effect. It's so pretty and mesmerizing, especially on this curvy patterned building. I hope you had some fun with this one. In the next video, we'll learn how to create a gritty sports effect. 38. Gritty Sports Effect: Let's make a cool gritty sports effect. This effect is good for sports photos or gritty lifestyle type of photos. Let's go ahead and jump in. First, we'll need to apply the black and white preset. Then we can go ahead and enhance the contrast of the photo with a curves adjustment. I'm just going to make this slightly darker for the Black point. And then I'll brighten the white point. Then I'll make the whole photo darker overall. Here's that little added contrast. This photo already had pretty high contrast. You can see this really dark shadow here. We didn't need to do too much, but I think that's a good little improvement. Next, we can do some overlay painting, just to enhance things even more. I'll add a new pix layer and then change it to overlay. Then instead of doing contour painting, I'm going to grab the paint brush, and I'm going to paint in black on the background, and then in white on the man. This will make the background recede a little bit more and the man stand out. And I'll just switch my color to white, and I'll paint this over the man to brighten him up. Here's the before and after of that. This is a little bit extreme, so I'll just lower the opacity before and after. It looks like he has a spotlight on him, which is perfect. Next, I'm going to add a little bit of clarity just to sharpen everything. I'll go to our filters, and then I'll apply the clarity filter. This is applied as a child layer. I'm just going to grab this layer and drag it on top of everything, so everything is affected. I'll increase the strength all the way. Now you can start to see this gritty effect here. Here's the before and after. We're really getting hyper detail going on here. The only thing I don't really like with this clarity filter is what it makes the sky look like. It looks like concrete. This gritty effect looks good down here, but on the skide it's just a little strange. Using the paint brush, I'm going to paint in black paint just to remove the clarity from the sky. That's better. To finish this all off, I think I'm going to do a little bit of split toning to add some color to the photo. I'll go to my adjustments and apply the split toning adjustment. I'm going to make the highlights a yellow color and I'll increase the saturation. I think I'll just increase it a bit, and then I'll make the shadows a blue color. I'll increase that just a little bit. Here's the before and the after of that coloring, and I'll just select all of these layers so that we can see a complete before and after. There we have it, the gritty sports effect. Very nice. In the next video, we'll learn how to make a mystical lighting effect. 39. Light in the Darkness: Add a beautiful light spot to a dark photo. Now, this effect doesn't work for every photo, but if you have the right photo, this effect can look amazing. To start, let's just make sure we have the black and white preset applied. Then we can go ahead and make the photo darker with a curves adjustment. I'll press command or Control M. Then I'll darken the black point. Then I'm just going to grab my paint brush and I'm going to paint in black paint to remove this effect from this bright area right in the middle. I'll paint it all over this area and on the path. Now we can see that before and after of darkening that area. The more we darken the outside, the more attention will be drawn into this middle area, and the more we brighten the middle area, the more it will stand out too. Let's go ahead and do that next. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and I'll change its blend mode to overlay. Then I'm just going to paint in white paint over the bright spot to make it even brighter. I'll paint this on the path as well. Now you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. Let's do a little bit more brightening. I'll press command or Control M to bring up the curves adjustment. I think I would like to bring up the black point because there are some dark areas that I would like to be even brighter, and this will just make them look a little bit more gray. I'll raise the black point. Then I'll invert this layer with command or Control I so that I can paint it only on the areas I want to supplied. We have a black mask, so I need to paint in white paint to reveal this. I'll just paint it around the edges like this. Then on the path a little bit. Now you can see what this looks like. Here's the before and after, just adding a little bit of a halo of light. We're almost done. The last thing I'd like to do is actually darken the edges a little more, especially up here at the top. I think this is distracting from the center focal point. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. I'm going to do something we don't usually do, which is painting in black paint directly on the photo, not changing the blend mode, just painting right on here in black, to darken those areas. You can see the more we paint in black, the more those areas disappear. You can be heavy handed with this or just do it lightly. There we go. Here's the before and after of that painting. I think it looks a little strange to have it just subtly gray, so I'm going to paint a little more off that one. To fully darken the edges. Here's the before and after of that. Now I'll just lit all of our layers to show you a complete before and after. And there we have it. That's how you make the light in the darkness effect. It's so beautiful. In the next video, we'll play with the light again to make a dramatic backlight. 40. Dramatic Backlight: This video, I'll show you how to add a dramatic backlight to your black and white photos. If you haven't heard the term backlight before, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a light that comes from the back of your subject. Normally, this doesn't look good for photos because it makes your subject look darker, but in black and white photos, a dramatic black and white can look very artsy. To start, I already have the black and white preset applied. Then we'll need to separate the subject in the background so that they each are on their own layer, just like how we did with the advanced motion blur video. I'm going to need to select the background layer, and then I'll grab the selection brush tool and I'll select the people. Once again, remember that you can always press or Option to remove from your selection, you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to make your brush bigger or smaller. Just make sure to include everything here. I know it's a little tricky to select people, especially with their hair. But don't worry. We'll come back to that in a minute. Just get the main outline of the people selected. And don't forget to remove from the center of his arm. With that finished, I'm just going to press refine in the context toolbar. Then I'm just going to paint this over the edges of the hair. Mainly, we need to worry about his hair. I think her hair looks pretty smooth, so we don't need to worry about that. I'll just press Apply. Now, I'll just press command or Control J to duplicate this layer. Then I'll press command or Control D to D select. Now you can see that the subjects are on their own layer. Now that we've done that, we can add a light source behind this layer. I'm going to select the lower background layer. Then I'm going to go to our tools and select the Ellipse tool. I'll just click and drag while holding Shift to make a nice big circle that sits behind our subjects here. I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. Then going into our layer effects, I can turn on the gaussian blur and increase this. I think I'll need to type in a number here. Let's go with 300. With that, we've added a beautiful backlight area to our photo. Now we can go ahead and refine some of this to make it look more natural. When you have a bright back light like this, it makes sense for your subject to become darker. With the subject layer, I'm just going to add a curves adjustment, command or Control M. Then I'll make this a child layer to them so that this only affects their layer. I do want to make them darker. But I think to do this, I'm going to use the Black point again. I'll bring the Black point inward to make the blacks darker. I think I actually need to reset this. No points in the middle. I'll just bring this in to darken it, and then I'll darken the white point as well. You can see this looks really natural. Here is the before and after of that darkening. The next thing I want to add to them is actually some rim lighting around the edges. I'll press command or Control M. This is still set as a child layer, which is perfect. I'm just going to make this nice and bright. Then I'll invert it with command or control I that I can paint this just on the areas that I want to affect. I'll grab the paint brush and I'll paint in white paint on the very edges of our subject. Now, I want this to show up, I'm going to bring the flow all the way up, and I'm going to use a very small paintbrush here. I'm just going to paint this on the very edges of our subject. This rim lighting is really just reflecting that we have light spilling over from behind them and it just really adds to the realism of this effect. Make sure to paint this all around the edges and in between the arm of our subject, that area right there. There actually is already some rim lighting from the original photo there. Just follow that. I'll just continue to do this all the way around our subjects. With that finished, I'll just show you the before and the before, after. Just a few more layers to really refine this. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and I'll do some overlay painting. I'm just going to dodge and burn a little bit. With white paint, I'm just going to add some whiteness, maybe on the edges a little bit. My paint brush is still fully set to 100% flow. I'm just going to bring that back down to around 10%. Now, I can gradually add more lighting in a few areas. Just to soften the edges that I just painted. Then I'll just switch to black and I'm going to darken a few areas that are extra far away from the light source. In the middle here, I'll darken. Just really darkening up all the shadowy areas. Here's the before and after of that extra painting. Just for good measure, I'm going to add one more pixel layer. I'm going to paint in white paint directly on this layer to add even more back lighting, especially on the hair right here. I just think this looks too dark. I'm just going to paint in white paint to lighten that area up. I think that looks better. Here's the before and after of that. Now I'll just show you the before and of all of those child layers. Now it makes a lot more sense that they have a light coming from behind them. I just think this looks a lot more natural. To finish, I'm just going to add a vignette on top of everything. I'm going to go ahead and use the rectangle technique for this. All of those layers are selected right now. I'm just going to select the top layer, and then I'll click and drag to add a rectangle on top of everything. I'll make sure we have no fill and a black stroke that's nice and big. I think for this one, I'm actually going to make this super big. I'll type in one than. Then I'll go to our layer effects, and I'll check on the Gaussian blur and bring this up. Let's go with 500. Very nice. I'll lower the layer opacity down about halfway. Here's the before and after of that. I think I just want to resize the edges a little bit. I'll click on the up here so that the bounding box will disappear as I make these adjustments. I think I'll bring that out a little bit. Our subjects head is pretty close to the top, so I think I'll bring this up. I think that looks good. Here's the before and Maybe he'll bring this edge down a little as well. And with that, we've turned this boring photo into a work of art. Now you know how to add beautiful and dramatic backlding to a Black and White photo. To finish off this chapter, I'll show you a great method for making your Black and White pictures look vie. 41. Vintage: Let's make a vintage black and white photo. I've already applied the preset to our photo. Once you've done that, the first thing I like to do to make a photo look more vintage is add textures to it. Let's go ahead and start with that. I'll go up to the top two file and then down to place. I'll select all three of the textures that we have in the exercise files, and then I'll press open. Now these images are loaded into my cursor. I'm just going to click and drag to add each one of these on top of our photo. Me sure to cover the entire photo like that. T I'm going to move the black and white adjustment on top of everything because I don't want any of these colors to be transferred. Everything should stay nice and black and white. Now I'll go ahead and adjust these layers so that they blend in with the photo beneath it. A great way to blend things is to change the blend mode. With texture one selected, I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. You can see this has blended the two layers together beautifully. We have all these little spots, a few scratches. I think that looks pretty cool. Here's the before and after. Let's move on to texture two. If I change this one also to multiply, you can see the photo is starting to get really dark. In fact, with the very first layer, it already made the photo darker. Instead, I'd actually like to make the photo look a little lighter if I can by changing the blend mode to screen. Well, now this looks way too bright, what should I do? Well, here's a little trick. We can invert this layer with command or control I. This has reversed the colors in this layer. Now all the dark spots have become white, and you can see this if I change the blend mode back to normal. Instead of a white background with dark spots, we have a dark background with light spots. When I change the blend mode two screen, only the light spots stay. It's not making our photo any darker. Here's the before and after of this one. In fact, it's making the whole photo look lighter, which is nice. Let's do the same thing for this last layer. I'll turn it on. I'll change the blend mode two screen, and then I'll invert it with command or control I. Now up here, you might notice that an assistant has appeared, and this is a total tangent. This isn't that important, but I just thought I'd share it with you. It says the assistant has rasterized the layer because it was not a raster layer. I just wanted to quickly explain what that means in case you're confused by this. Whenever you go to file place to add images into your document, the placed images are actually image layers, and image layers can't be edited normally. Only rasterized layers can be edited. If your assistant doesn't automatically do this and rasterize your layers, all you need to do is right click on your layer and then go down to where it says Rasterize. Then you should be able to edit your photo like normal. Now, normally, when we just file open our photos, those photos are automatically rasterized, so we don't need to worry about this. Honestly, I wish that Affinity always just rasterized any layers, any photos that we bring in because it's annoyed that they're not rasterized by default. But I just thought I'd explain that to you in case you were confused why the assistant was appearing. Tangent over. Now that we have all of our textures blended in. I'm going to select all of them by holding shift and clicking on the last one. Then I'll just lower the opacity so that we can see the photo a little better. As one last thing to finish off the textures. If there's any spots that you're not really liking, you can go ahead and select the layer that has those spots. In this case, the dark spot is coming from texture one. Then you can go over here and select the in painting brush, and with it set two current layer, you can paint directly on this layer to remove those spots. The assistant is rasterizing this layer because we actually didn't edit this one before. We only edited these top two by inverting them. Once you have that all painted away, you're good to go. I didn't actually think it was that necessary to remove those spots in this photo, but there might be other photos that you're trying to turn vintage where spots appear on your subject's face, and it might not look very good. I just wanted to show you that. With all of those textures in place, I think this is looking really good. We just need to add a few more adjustments to finish off this vintage effect. For the first one, I'm going to select the black and white adjustment, and I'm going to apply a lens filter on top of that to create this CPA look. You can lower the opacity if you'd like, but I like the default settings as they are, so I'll leave that alone. Next, I'm going to fade the shadows even more. They already look pretty faded, but I'll just add a curves adjustment, and we can go ahead and adjust the black point by bringing it up a little bit. I don't want to overbrighten the photo though I'll bring the mid tones back down to the center. Here's the before and after, very subtly lightening up the shadows. I also really like adding a vignette to a vintage looking photo. I'll grab the rectangle tool. I'll just do this technique where we say, no fil, we increase the stroke width, I'll increase this one to one d. I'll go to our layer effects and apply a Gaussian blur. I'll just type in 300 for this one. I'll lower the layer opacity. Then with the eye button turned on, we can go ahead and adjust the edges here, maybe bring it out a little bit from the sky. Here's the before and after of that. Next, I think I want to add even more haziness to this photo. I'll add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab the paint brush and I'll just paint in white paint. We'll need to turn this back to white. There we go. With a nice big brush and a super low flow, I'm just going to add this haziness over a few areas. This is also lightning. You can paint this white color over areas you want to enhance like the buildings. Little building back here. Here's the before and after of that. Just some natural fading. We're almost done. The last things I like to do to make a photo look older is I like to blur the photo a little bit and then add some noise. First, I'll go into our filters and apply a gaussian blur. I actually want this to be applied to the photo layer. I'll bring this down and place it right above the photos layer. I'll zoom in here. We can increase this to around 0.3. Here's the before and after of blurring that. Then I'm going to add noise on top of this layer. I'll just bring this up to around 20%. Now you can see those two layers working together. Here's the before and after. I think that looks really good. I'm just going to select our layers now. Not the Black and White adjustment. But all of the rest, there we go, and here is the before and after. This effect works best when it's with a photo that looks like it could be from the olden days, not a guy holding his Macbook. Just keep the subject matter in mind as you're doing this. But I think this effect turned out really nice on this old village. With that, we finished learning about these really cool Black and White effects. We're done with the chapter and we're almost done with the course. To finish it off, we'll do some really fun start to finish projects in the next chapter. 42. Final Projects: Nice job, everyone. You're almost to the end of the course. But before we finish, we'll bring together everything that we've learned to create three start to finish projects together. These projects are a great way to solidify everything that you've learned so that you can be totally prepared to create amazing black and white photos all on your own. It's going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 43. Castle Project: In this video, we'll do a spooky castle project from start to finish. I chose this photo because it has a lot of beautiful texture and detail with all of this beautiful stonework, the windows, and these gargoyles over here. I also really like the upward angle. I think it makes you as the viewer look small, and as you look up at this, it just looks extra ominous and spooky. I think this will work really well with all of our edits as we make this even more creepy looking. Let's get started. To begin, let's add our preset. Here's the before and after of that. Next, we can go ahead and start working on the lighting. I'll press command or control to add a curves adjustment. For this first curve, let's add an S curve to add a little bit of contrast. Here's the before and after of that. I'm going to add one more curves adjustment, command or Control M. I'd like to brighten the highlights of this photo a little bit more. I'll bring over the white point, but then I'll bring the mid tones down to meet the line so that we're only really brightening the brightest areas. Here's the before and after of that. I think this lighting is looking really good so far before after Very striking. At this point, I want to do a little bit of targeted lighting work. We can do some overlay painting to do this. I'll add a new pixel layer and I'll change the blend mode to overlay. Then I'll just grab the paint brush, and we can paint in white and black paint to brighten and darken areas. I'm going to have my flow set to around 10% so that I can gradually add this painting. I'll press x on my keyboard and we can go ahead and start by painting black on the edges. This will cause these areas to recede a little bit and draw our focus in toward the center. I'll press x on my keyboard and I can brighten the center area to draw more attention to it. I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of our overlay painting. To make this extra spooky, we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to add a vignette around the edges to add more darkness. Then we're going to add fog after that. First, let's add our vignette. I'll go to our shapes and select the rectangle tool. I'm just going to click over here to deselect this layer just so that's out of our way. Then I'll click and drag from edge to edge to add the rectangle. I'll remove the fill, Let's go over to our stroke size and bring that up. Looks like we're going to need to raise this quite a bit. Let's try 500. Then I'll go to our layer effects, and we can go ahead and apply a Gaussian blur. Let's make this 400, nice and soft. Very nice and I'll just lower the opacity down. That's looking pretty good. We can go ahead and adjust the edges if we'd like. I'll click on the eye, so that disappears there. I actually really like how this looks already. I'm not sure it needs much adjusting. Yeah, I think I'll keep it just how it is. Here's the before and after. Now we can add the fog. I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and I'll grab the brush tool and we can begin to paint in white paint. Let me just reset this so it's white. To start, I'm just going to paint white on the very bottom edge of this. I think that looks pretty good, but we can always adjust the opacity a little bit. I'm going to add another pixel layer just to keep this separate. I'm going to bring more fog into the edges of the photo, it's rolling in from this left side. A great thing about keeping these layers separate is now I can lower this one's opacity even more to really get the effect that I want. I think this looks really good. Here is the before and after adding in that fog effect. To finish this off, I think adding a little bit of a blue tint to the shadows would really bring this all together. So I'll go to our adjustments and apply the split toning adjustment. And I don't really want to mess with the highlights. I'm just going to turn the shadows blue. I think this looks really good. I'm just going to lower the opacity a little. Here is the before and after turning that a little bit blue. I just love how this effect turned out. I'll show you the complete before and after before and after. We added a lot of darkness to this, but then we lightened it up with the fog. I think this looks very spooky and cool. I hope you enjoyed this project. The next one, we'll do a really fun project with a pop of color. 44. Balloon Project: Let's do another project together as we make this hot air balloon really stand out. What I was looking for for this picture was a colorful subject against a plain background, just to make it easier to make our selection for the color pop effect. One other thing I liked about this picture was that we had that, but we also had all of this beautiful texture down here with the buildings and all the overlapping objects. I think this will add beautiful interest. To get started, before we add the black and white adjustment, we're first going to select the balloon to separate it. I'm going to grab the selection brush. And with a larger brush, I'll just select the balloon. That was pretty easy. The tricky part is actually selecting this basket down here with the tiny people. Just do your best to make a selection. You can use a super tiny brush to add in the people. But don't worry about getting all of these really tiny details. That's not really going to matter. I think the selection looks pretty good. I'm going to press refine in the context toolbar and then I'll press Apply. All right with our selection made, I'm just going to go to our adjustments and all apply the black and white preset. I'll deselect with command or Control D, and then I'll invert this layer with command or Control I. Just like that, the color pop effect is looking great. Next, I really want to enhance the colors in the balloon by making the sky that it's sitting against a more pure white color. To do that, I'm actually going to select the sky. I'll just temporarily turn off the black and white adjustment so we can see this better. I'll select the background layer. Then we can begin to make a selection of the sky. There we go. Nice and large. That has a pretty good selection of the sky. I'm just going to zoom in here. I'll hold Alt or option to remove a few of these objects that accidentally got selected. This area is a little tricky right here. With a nice small brush, I'll just hold Alt or option and drag across this little pole thing. I think that looks pretty good. With the sky selected, I'm just going to press refine. I'll apply that. Then I'll press command or control M to add in a curves adjustment. To make the sky white, I'm going to bring the white point over. But to remove the color, I'll also turn the black and white adjustment back on. Now you can see what that looks like. I think having a wider sky really does help the balloon stand out more. I'll de select with command or Control. Now that we have the sky worked out, let's turn our attention to the buildings next. I'm going to add a little bit of contrast to the buildings. I'll press Command or Control M. To start, I'm just going to make a little baby S curve to add contrast. There's the before and after, very subtle. Then I want to do some overlay painting, just to enhance the contrast more. I'll add a new pixel layer. I'll change the len mode to overlay. Then with the paint brush tool, I can paint in black and white to enhance the different areas. With black paint, I'm just going to paint under this overhang right here on this side of the building. Any areas that are d, I'm just going to make them even darker. In a few spots. Then I'll change my color to white by pressing x, and I'm going to paint on this side of the building and on all of these little white coverings here. Now you can see the before and after of that. I think this added contrast is really nice. But one problem with adding all of this beautiful contrast is that it takes the tension away from the balloon. I don't really want to do that. To dull the contrast down a little bit. I'm going to add the dreamy glow effect. I'll go to our filters and apply a lens blur. I'll drag this out so it's no longer chil layer. Then I can raise the radius all the way and preserve Alpha. Next, we can go ahead and change the blend mode to screen. You can see the beautiful, dreamy glow effect. I'm just going to lower this down. I want the lightness to stay. I think that looks really beautiful, and it has toned down that contrast a little bit, but you can still see some beautiful contrast. It's just a little duller. We're almost done. As a last step, I want to bring the focus more to the balloon by blurring everything but the balloon. To do this, I'm going to do a funny technique. I'll select the top layer. Then I'll right click and go down to where it says Merge visible. This will take all of these layers and put them all on a single layer. With this single layer, I can very quickly grab the Lasso tool and draw a little rough selection around our balloon. Then I'll press command or Control J. And then command or control D to D select. We can delete the merge visible layer now, and now we have the balloon all on its own layer. Because it's all on its own layer. Now we can add a blur underneath this layer and it will only affect all of the lower layers. You can see what that looks like. This balloon stays nice and in focus, and since the sky is all white anyway, that rough selection, you really can't see it. That's pretty cool. I'm just going to raise the radius to one pixel, and I'll check on preserve Alpha. You can see what this looks like. Here's the before and after just giving it a subtle blur. Really quick, I just wanted to point out that now that the balloon is on its own layer, we could easily resize it if we wanted to with the move tool. Just don't overlap it or you'll see the sky. In addition, we could also add any adjustments that we want to this layer as child layers to affect the colors or the lighting. I just wanted to point that out. Now that this is separate, you really can do whatever you want with it, which is pretty nice. And with that, we're done with this project. Here's the complete before and after. Great work. Aren't color pops so fun? I just love how this one turned out. In the next video, we'll finish off this course with a beautiful vintage looking wedding portrait. 45. Wedding Project: You made it the last project of the course, Let's make a beautiful wedding portrait together. I love this picture. They're posed so nicely against this blurry background. They already have some nice back lighting. The way they're arched, add some nice movement, which always makes pictures look more interesting. To start this edit, let's add the black and white adjustment. For this project, I really want to play up the back lighting to make it look more intense. To ASMxra back lighting, let's actually select our subjects to separate them from the background. Just to make the selection easier, I'll turn off the black and white adjustment for now. I'll select the background layer. Then we can grab the selection brush tool and begin to make our selection. I'm going to really take my time selecting around all of the flowers. And we can refine this just like we usually refine hair once we're done with it. I think our selection looks pretty good. I'm going to press refine. Like I said, I'm going to paint over the flowers and the hair. I'm quickly just going to paint all around the edges here. Hare is really tricky to select. But I think Affinity is doing a pretty good job here. For the flowers, I actually think this looks pretty good. Maybe I'll just paint over this area right here. But I think Affinity made a good selection. I'll press apply. Then I'm going to right click on the background layer and I'll press duplicate. Now we have two exact copies here and I'll apply a mask to the top one and then I'll press command or control D to D select. I like adding a mask to our subjects to separate them from their background because this just makes it more flexible if I ever want to add or remove from the selection. I think this just makes it less destructive of a way to separate your subject from their background. That's just the way I'm going to do it this time. I'll turn the black and white adjustment layer back on. Now that we have them more separated from their background, we can go ahead and add back lighting. I'll select the bottom layer, and then I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'll hold shift to make a perfect circle, and we can go ahead and add this behind our subjects. I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. Then I'll lower the opacity. We can go ahead and go to layer effects and add a gaussium blur to this. I think I'll increase this to 300. Now you can see the before and after of that. This back lighting is so beautiful. I think I'll actually duplicate this layer with command or control J. This begins to make this area look way too bright. But if I just bring this down, then we can add more light to this bottom area right here. Before and after. Now you can see them both together. Here's the before and after. Very nice. To enhance this even more. Let's add more rim lighting. I'm going to select our subjects layers and I'll press command or Control M. We can make this a nice bright curve and then make it a child layer to our subjects. Now you can see this is only being applied to our subjects. But to turn this into rim lighting, I actually want to invert this with command or Control I. That way, I can paint in white on this black mask to reveal this brightness just on the edges. With white paint. I'm going to go ahead and paint this over the edges, especially the hair, I think looks really nice with this rim lighting. With a smaller brush, I'll just bring this on the edges here. You can't really see it on the black suit, but there are some bright spots that I'll just brighten a little bit more. With that, I just finished painting the rim lighting. Here's the before and after. With this adjustment layer still selected, I'm actually going to take a larger brush and I'm just going to brighten their faces a little bit. Just so we can see them a little bit better after to enhance the lighting even more. I think we need to make our subjects just a little bit darker to contrast with the back lighting. I'll press command or control. I'm just going to make this a little bit. No by much. Here's the before and after. With that, we finished with the back lighting. I think this looks really beautiful and natural after so pretty. Now that we've finished with all of that back lighting. The next thing I want to do is make the photo look a little bit more vintage. Let's start with the contrast. I'm going to add a curves adjustment on top. Then I'm just going to reduce the contrast by raising the black point. I'll also brighten the white point a bit, just to make the photo overall a brighter. Before and after. Next, let's add some textures on top of this. I'm going to go to file place, I'm going to select these two textures I'm just going to click and drag these over the entire photo. There we go. These have been placed underneath the black and white adjustment, which is perfect. That's right where I want them. I'll turn off texture two, and I'll select texture one. For this first one, I'm going to change the blend mode two, multiply. We have about those beautiful dark spots. Then for texture two, I'm going to change this one to screen, and then I'll invert it with command or Control I. Now we have these beautiful white folds and scratches all over it. This looks really nice. I'll hold shift to select both of these layers, and I'll just group them with command or control G, and then I'll lower the opacity of the whole group to make this look more subtle. I don't want this to be a distracting effect. I think I'll lower it quite a bit for this one. To finish this off. I think it'd look nice to add a little bit of color and a little bit of a vignette. To add color, I'll need to put this on top of the black and white adjustment, and I'll just add a length filter adjustment. I'll lower this down. I think that looks pretty good. Now we can finish this off with our vignette. I'll grab the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag this out. I'll say I want no fill and a large stroke. Let's go with 1,000 for this one. I'll go to our layer effects and apply a gaussian blur at 500 pixels. And I'll lower the opacity down. Just like always, we can adjust the edges here. I think I'll lower this down to take it off of her dress like that. Maybe I'll bring this out just a little bit on each side. I want to make sure this isn't darkening them at all. I'll just select all those layers so we can see it complete before and after. This is such a fun effect that can really be played up like this, where we can make it as subtle as we'd like. It's just beautiful. Great work on this project. 46. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I am so proud of you. I know that was a lot to learn. I hope you enjoyed these tutorials, and I can't wait for you to make your very own black and white masterpieces. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.