Set up Colors, Tints and Shades in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Setup Colors Shades and Tints in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class on setting up colors, tints, and shades for a project in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at setting up color shades and tints so that we can work faster and smarter in Photoshop. You're going to see how you can find color schemes to use, and then how you can quickly create shades and tints of these colors and save the document so you can reuse it over and over again. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and then secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These reviews help other students to find my classes and to determine if they'll enjoy them too. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started setting up colors, shades, and tints for working smarter in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - Create a color shade and tint: Often when you're working in Photoshop, you'll not only be wanting to work with a color, but also with a tint and a shade of that color, the colors that you could use to add highlights or shadows to an object. Now, in this video, I'm going to show you how you can set this up in Photoshop quickly and effectively. I think this is a really smart technique. I'm starting at Adobe color, which is at color.adobe.com, and you'll sign in there with your login ID for your Adobe Suite. Here in the explorer area, you can get access to preset color schemes. These are color schemes that other people have created that you can borrow colors from, and here in the search area, you can just go and search for anything. I'm going to search for farm and here are colors that are related to farm. I can go through here and just say what colors I might want to use. Now, I'm liking this autumn midwest, so let's go and use that. What I'm going to do is position my screen, my browser here so that I can see autumn midwest on the screen, and then I'm going to click on Photoshop. What I want to be able to do is to say my browser and Photoshop, so you're going to need to squeeze down your Photoshop window just a little bit. We're going to start a new document in Photoshop, and this would be the size document you want to design at. I'm going to use for argument's sake, 1,000 by 700 pixels, and it has a white background. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to make a selection, I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool, going to set this to fixed ratio and I want it to be one to one. In other words, I want a square, and I'm just going to drag out a small square and I don't want it to be exactly in the top corner of the documents, so I'm going to put another one in a minute. Once I've got my square selected, I'm going to choose layer, new fill layer, solid color, and click "Okay." I want to fill this with the first of the colors that I want to use. Now, the colors are over here then all actually in Photoshop. But you'll see here that I've gotten a little eyedropper. Now, if I click and drag this points, I've got my left mouse button press down, you'll see that I can go all the way across to the browser panel behind, and I can select one of these colors. So I'm going to select the green color, and now my little square has been filled with that green color and I'm going to click "Okay." I'm going to open up the last panel so we can see what's happening as we work, and you'll see here that this is what we've got. We've got eye fill layer. I'm going to drag this onto the new layer icon, so I'm making a duplicate of it. I'm going to the move tool and I'm just going to move this to the left. Now, this is going to be my shade, it's going to be my darker color. I'll double-click on the layer thumbnail, and that brings up the color picker. Now, a darker version of this color is going to have less brightness. Right now the brightness value is 44. I'm going to knock off about 15, but I'm going to use a random number, so I'm just going to type 30 in here. This is a shade of this color. Now, if it's not dark enough, I can go down a little bit less. I'm going to turn this into a brightness of 25. Now that looks like a good shade to me, so I'll click "Okay." Now I'm going to go back to my original color fill. I'm going to drag it onto the new icon. I'm going to move it to the very top, and this is going to be my tint, my lighter version. I'm going to move it across and I'm using the smart guides to just position so that they're separated neatly from each other. Going to double-click on the layer thumbnail. Now to create a tint or a lighter version, I'm going to increase brightness. It was 44, let's try something like 65, and we can see it in situ. We can say if this is a light enough version and if it's not light enough, then just increase the value, and when you get what you want, just click "Okay." 3. Pt 2 - More Colors Tints and Shades: This is my first set of colors. I'm going to select all three layers, click on the top one, Shift, click on the bottom one, and drag and drop them onto the new icon. You can see now we get tint copy, shade copy, and color copy. I'm going to drag this down using the move tool so just spacing them neatly up here in the top corner of the document. Now, as we progress I might like these layers each to raid color shade and tint instead of color copy, shade copy, tint copy. What we can do that and we can do it very simply with an action. So I'm going to show you very quickly how to create an action. I'm going to choose Window and then Actions. Here's my actions panel, but I'm going to get back my layers panel as well. Now, you can create a new set for your actions if you wish by just clicking here on create new set. I'm going to call this color scheme, and click okay. Now I'm going to create a new action within this color scheme set. Before I do, what I want to do is make sure that I have selected on the last panel, not one of the layers I want to rename. So I don't want to have color copy, or shared copy, or tint copy selected, I want something else selected. Now let's go to color scheme here and click on create a new action. We're going to call this rename layers, and click "Record." Now we're going to click on color copy. I'm going to double-click on the name and just remove the word copy and press "Enter." Double-click on shade copy, remove the word copy, and press "Enter." Double-click on tint copy, remove the word copy, and press "Enter." Now I've renamed all three of these layers. I'm going to come across here and click to stop recording. You'll say and the actions palette that the action will select the layer called color copy and then it will rename it, and it will continue to do that all the way down. We can use that action in a minute for the next set of colors, but right now let's address this set. I'm going to select the color, I'm going to double-click on the layer thumbnail. Again, I want to choose a color from my author midwest color scheme over here. I'm going to click and drag and now just go and sample a color. So I'm going to use the yellow this time. Click "Okay." Now I need a shade, I'm going to double-click on this thumbnail, I'm going to click on the original color because I want my shade to be a version of this color, but I want it to have a lot less brightness. So I'm going to take this down to about 75 and see how it looks. It looks pretty good, I'll click "Okay." Now for our tint, I'll double-click on the tint. I'm going to click on the color that we want a tint of. In this case, we don't really have any movement in terms of brightness. So we can't actually increase our brightness by much because it's already at 98, so I'm going to take it up to a 100, but I can also make it a little bit lighter by just reducing the saturation. I'm going to go here and reduce the saturation to try and get a lighter version of this color that potentially I could use as a highlight color, and I'll click "Okay." Now we've got our second set of colors, let's create just a third set. So I'm going to click on the top one Shift, click on the bottom of these three colors, drag and drop them onto the new icon. Now I've got my named layers. Well, we can rename the layers by running our actions. I'm going to click on my action and just click "Play." Now, my action is set to run step-by-step so it's running a lot slower than your action will, but I just thought I would show you step-by-step how it's going to work, and it's obviously renamed all of these layers. Before I go and create these colors, let's move them. So I'm going to select them, I have the move tool selected. It's going to drag them down here using my smart guides. Let's come back to this color, double-click on its thumbnail. Hold the mouse pointer out here so we can see, I drop a click and drag and continue to press down until we are able to sample the color from the browser behind. There's my color and I'll click "Okay." Now we'll click on the shade, we're going to click on the color that we need to shade of. Brightnesses is 60, let's take it down to 45 and see how that looks. Probably not dark enough, so let's take it down to 30. I think that's a better shade for that color, I'll click "Okay." Now for the tint or lighter version, double-click on it. Click on the color that we want a tint of, brightnesses is 60, let's take it up to 80. Not quite bright enough, I don't think so, I'm going to take it up to 90. That's a better highlight color for me, I'll click "Okay." Now these colors whether they're bright enough or not as a subjective decision, you can make a decision based on whatever you want your colors to look like. But we now have a mini color scheme, if you wanted to, you could go ahead and sample some more colors. Of course, you don't have to stick to just the auto midwest colors if you see some other color here that might be interesting in the color scheme, you can use it. Of course, you can also just go on and create a color of your choice. You can go double-click on here and just choose a color that makes sense to you. So just click on it and then that's going to be a starting color and then you can do your tints and shades. I'm not going to do that, but that would be a possibility too. 4. Pt 3 - Make a Template: Now, this is pretty much all you need to do for your color scheme, but it might be nice to just tidy up your document. I don't need my actions any longer, so I'm just going to close that panel down. The actions are going to be saved in Photoshop so that actions always going to be available to me. What I think would be neater to do is to put all these colors in a folder. I'm going to click on the topmost one, Shift-click on the bottom-most one and click here to create a group or a folder inside the layers palette. By selecting the layers before I click on that group, you'll see that they've all automatically been added to the group. I'm just going to double-click here and call these colors. If I open the flyout here, you can see that all these layers are inside that group. Once you've settled your colors, it's not a bad idea to select your group and just lock it. You see the lock icon here. Now nothing can happen to that group and it's just sit in the top corner. You can access the colors when you're creating shapes so for example, let's just add a new layer. Let's create a shape. I'm just going to drag out a square here. What's going to be a square? Because I still have fixed ratio set. I'm going to click the Eyedropper tool. I'm going to select a color that I want to use for my square. Because it's the foreground color, I can press "Alt Backspace" option Delete on the Mac to fill my square with that color. Then if I want to do so, I could create a shade element from this. Let's go and select the subtract from selection button. I'm going to go to my Lasso tool, I'm going to create an organic shape here. The only thing that's left in this selection is this corner down here. I'm going to my Eyedropper tool. I'm going to select on my shade color, and I'm going to press "Alt Backspace" option Delete to apply that color to my shape. Now that's a very simplistic example of how you could work with shade colors. Of course, you could add a highlight to a shape by just dragging out the shape that you want to add the highlight to, sample your highlight color and then just fill the shape with that. Don't need that any longer, I just did that for an example, but let's have a look briefly at the colors. I'm just going to open this panel up again. I'm going to take the lock off so just click that to take the lock off. If you don't want your panel to be so big, you can just select the group and just hold the "Shift" key as you size this down. It doesn't have to be very big at all because it's really easy to just hit one of these colors with the eyedropper tool to sample them. I'm just going to make mine a bit smaller, close out the panel, re-lock it. Now Photoshop doesn't have the ability for you to create templates. It doesn't have a template file format, but that doesn't mean that you can't use templates. All you have to do is to create and manage the templates situation yourself. What you would do is you would do File Save As, and you would save this as a PSD file. You might call it color scheme template for example. Then anytime you wanted to create a new document, you could just choose "File" and then "Open" and open your color scheme template. Save the file again using a different name so that you don't overwrite the template. Then you would come into your file here, you would click on your layers, you would click on the lock icon to unlock the colors, open this up, and then configure the colors that you want for the document you are creating. You'll come here and select "Color" and then you'll create your main color for this box here. Then you'll go ahead exactly as we've been doing and create the shade and the tint. But these boxes have already been preset for you. The entire system has been set up, so it's going to save you quite a bit of time, even though these may not be the colors that you want to use every time, at least you'll have three-quarters of the system worked out and just selecting the colors and creating tints and shades is going to be the easier part of the process. Your project for this class is going to be to create this three by three box of colors. Go and select colors either from Adobe color or colors of your choice, and also produce a tint and shade of these colors. Now, all you need to do for your class project is to actually show me these. Once you've saved your template file and you're all up and running with that, just come back into this file and just crop off the bits that you don't need and just save a version of the file that just has your little mini color scheme in it so you can post that then as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about working effectively in Photoshop, not only creating repetitive elements that you can use over and over again but also perhaps sometimes creating mini actions that can do some of the work for you. If you have enjoyed this class, when you see the prompt to recommend this class to others, please do two things for me. Give it a thumbs up and write just two or three words as to why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes. It also helps them determine whether this class is one that might be of value to them too. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.