Keeping Your Subject In Colour

Yesterday I learned how to do two new things in photoshop. One thing I actually learned by accident, and the other thing I learned was what I was actually trying to learn in the first place.

The thing I was orginally trying to learn how to do, was taking the subject of your photo and keeping them in colour and leaving the rest of the photo in black in white. I wouldn't do this kind of edit to any picture, I would only do it with sport photos. I think doing it with any ordinary picture would make it look kind of cheesy and a little dumb. 

The thing I learned by accident was using splashes of colour in your photo with photoshop. The point of using splashes of colour is making one certain colour in your picture pop. I don't think I would ever use this kind of edit on a regular basis either, but it was cool learning how to do it! 

When learning about colour splashes and just keeping your one subject in colour I used a picture that I took at the beginning of this of my sister Danielle playing volleyball. I am using her as my main subject in both of the pictures.

How to use colour splashes:

I learned how to do use colour splashes by watching this watching this tutorial: Colour Splashes. You should check it out if your are interested in using colour splashes!

First Step

So the first thing I did when I accidentally learned about colour splashes was I went to Select, which is located at the very top of the computer screen and selected the option Color Range... 

Second Step

After you hit Colour Range, a Colour Range bar comes up. This is where I realized that the tutorial I was watching was not going to teach me what I originally wanted to learn.  The point of colour range is to pick just one colour to use. There are two ways to pick the colour you want to use. The first way is to just select the colour you want by clicking the colour on you picture. For example, if I wanted to use the colour in Danielle's jersey I would just take my mouse and click on her jersey and photoshop will recognize what colour Danielle's jersey is and  will use it. The other way to select the colour you want to use is by using the colour range tool bar. You click on the select option and colour options pop up. (Demonstrated in image #2). Either way of doing it works well. I tried out both ways and they turned out the same.

Last Step

The last step is making the rest of the picture black and white. You go to the right bottom corner of your screen and select the half black, half white circle. A bunch of selections will pop up. You select the Black & White option and then your picture will be in black and white, except for the colours you chose in colour range to pop out.

Colour Splash Effect

This is how my colour splash picture turned out. As you can see, this is a picture that should not be used when using colour splash because the colour I used is everywhere in the picture.This means that Danielle is no longer the main subject of my picture. In the tutorial video, the guy teaching about colour splash using a picture of fruit. This is a picture that is more commonly used for colour splash because the colour that is meant to be shown is only in one part of the picture, which is most commonly the main subject of the picture. If I was going to use colour splash I would probably use a picture of a flower or something that has a vibrant colour, one that would really pop out, unlike the colour of Danielle's volleyball jersey.    

How to keep your subject in colour:

So this is what I actually wanted to learn how to do. I've seen a lot of sport pictures or even advertisement photos where this is being used, so I thought I'd give it a try. I tried to youtube tutorials on how to do this, but I actually couldn't find any. My search results kept popping up with more colour splash tutorials. So I googled it, and actually found a website that shows you how to do it in the format that I usually use on my blog, which I thought was pretty cool. Here is the link to check out the website I used: Keeping Your Subject In Colour.  

First Step

The steps to do this a very simple - but the whole thing is very time consuming, as I will explain in more detail later. 

First thing you do is go to the top of your screen and select Layer and then select New Adjustment Layer and then Channel Mixer.  

Second Step

Third Step

  

After you select channel mixer, a New Layer bar pops up. You don't have do do anything with this, so you just hit Okay.

Another bar pops up after you hit okay called Channel Mixer. This is the tool where you make your picture black and white. To make it black and white you select the Monochrome button that is on the bottom left corner of the Channel Mixer bar.

Tool Box

This is the time consuming part of this kind of edit. You are now going to use your tool box, which is usually located on the left hand side of your screen. So before you start, you have to make sure your Foreground and Background setting are set to black and white. I don't actually know what would happen if they were not set to black and white, but my guess would be that you missed a step and your picture isn't in black and white. After you made sure your foreground and background are black and white, you use your brush tool. All you do with the brush tool is colour the part of the picture you want in colour! Which sounds easy enough, but it ends up taking awhile because you have to go slow and make sure to not to colour anything that is not your main subject. Some helpful tools that I figured out how to use while doing this is the eraser tool and the zoom tool. The eraser tool is obviously helpful for erasing things.. whenever you colour something other than your subject just take the eraser tool and erase over it. The zoom tool really helps for when you are colouring the little parts of the picture. For example I used the zoom tool alot when I coloured Danielle's fingers because they are so little and would have been very hard to colour without the zoom tool. 

If you don't know where the tools that I just talked about are on your toolbox, I made a picture that shows you exactly where they are. The foreground and background tool I circled in purple, the zoom tool I circled in yellow, the eraser tool is circled in green and the paintbrush tool is circled in purple.  

Some other helpful tips on using these tools are:

Eraser and Paintbrush Tool

When using the eraser tool and paintbrush tool you can change the sizes of the eraser and paintbrush. This is something you have to know how to use because the things you are painting/erasing are all different shapes and sizes. It is located in the top left hand corner of your screen. A trick I learned while using this tool is that when you want to change sizes of your brush you don't have to keep going to the left top corner of your screen to change the brush size, instead just right click your mouse and the options of different brush sizes come right to you!   

Zoom Tool

When using the zoom tool you just keep clicking on the spot on the picture that you want a closer look at. To zoom out of the picture, you have to go to the top left hand corner of the screen and click on the icon of a magnify glass with a subtract symbol inside of it.

So that is what I learned in photoshop recently! Its probably not a edit that I am going to use often, but I think its cool and am glad that I now have a better understanding on how to use these tools in photoshop. 

Before 

After 

Curves

While learning more about photoshop, I found a lot of tutorials talk about using a tool called curves. So I decided to take the time to learn more about it. Curves allows you to change the contrast, brightness and exposure all at once, instead of using each of the tools I used in my last photo. Curves is supposedly better to use, because you have more control over the settings. I have not mastered curves completely, but here is all that I learned about curves and another finished product that I am going to share.

Curves tool bar 

Now at first if you look at the curves tool and do not know anything about it, it looks extremely confusing. It is still a bit confusing to me,  but after watching tutorials and reading about it, it makes a bit more sense.

So the main point of curves, is that it gives you the ability to control the light and dark colours in your image.

Channel option, where you choose what colours
you want to change 

In the top left hand corner of the curves tool there is the option called channel. If you look at the above diagram,  you can see the channel bar. It currently says its at RGB. This means that you are controlling the red, green and blue colours in your image all at once. If you click on the arrows on the channel bar, you can also choose other options that are called Red, Green and Blue. These options just mean that you are controlling specifically the red, green or blue in your image.

The line running through the centre of this box is what
you are using.

To actually control the light and darkness in your image you use the line that is running diagonally across the box that is located in the centre of the curves tool. These are the helpful tips that I have learned on how to use curves:
- When you take your mouse and grab any part of the line and you move the line from left to right, you move the the light in the picture
- The top right corner of the box is the lightest part in the image. If you took the line and pulled it down it would make your image darker. If you pulled it to the left it would make the image brighter.
- The bottom left corner of the box is the darkest part  in the image. If you took the line and pulled it upwards it would make the image lighter. If you took the  line and moved it to the right it would make the image darker.



The thing I found frustrating with curves is that there isn't a certain type of instructions to follow when using it. Every picture is different so the levels of colours varies in every image. So you kind of have to wing it and trust your judgement on what looks good on you picture when changing things with the curves tool. Right now, I am finding that I would prefer to use the tools I used in my last blog post compared to this curves tool. But I'm sure with the more I use the curves tool, the more comfortable I will feel with it.

I played around with the curves tool and got many different results:

Curves Trial #1

Curves Trial #1: This picture I hate a lot... I don't really know why I thought it looked good. I think one night I was editing it, and must of been super tired or something and for some reason thought the edit looked good. Then the next morning I saw how awful it looked and knew that I was not done with this picture.

Curves Trial #2

Curves Trial #2: This one was a lot better from the first. I liked it, but I wanted a bit more of a dramatic change. Also I played to much with the red in the picture. If you look at my friend Taylor's face in the picture you can see that it is really red and pinkish and I did not like that. 

Curves Trial #3

Curves Trial #3: This one I liked a lot, but I wanted the photo to still look more darker, and the contrast to be better. I used the gradient effect on it to give the picture a faded look which I liked. I decided to work with this picture a bit more, just to see if I could do anything better with the curves tool.

Curves Trial #4

Curves Trial #4: This one I am pretty happy with. I played more with the blue curves option, changing the red and green curves options along the way so that the picture didn't look super blue. The picture has a more dramatic feel to it which I am quite happy about. I think this picture is going to be another successful finished product.




Before and After Shots: 

Here is also another thing I learned while creating this blog post - How to change a PSD file to a JPEG. You should learn how to do this because the photoshop file is WAY to big. Blogger cannot even upload a photoshop file because it is so large.

Step 1: Go to file and select the Save As option 

Step 2: A save as bar is going to open up. On the format option hit the arrows and select the JPEG option. Then hit save.

Step 3: A JPEG Options bar will pop up. This allows you to change sizes of you JPEG. I didn't change anything when this popped up because I want the picture to stay the same quality that it originally was in photoshop. And that is all you have to do when taking a photoshop file and changing it into a JPEG! 

Here are the links to tutorials that really helped me:

Curves

changing into a JPEG file