Toplearning: Class no20 || Colour adjustments in Adobe Photoshop

Hello and Welcome to complete beginners guide to Adobe Photoshop

We have mainly been looking at various tools that enable us to use the program, get hands on with image layers and create various elements in the canvas area. In Photoshop, there is a huge range of color adjustments that can apply various effects to your photos and graphics. As you design in Photoshop, you will often need to use color adjustments in order to satisfy your creative decisions. In this tutorial, I'm going to discuss adjustments in Photoshop. I'll be showing you where to find them, how to use them and demonstrate a few common color adjustments. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a good understanding of how Photoshop can apply various color effects to your images. So to follow along with this video, you will need to open this document I have prepared especially for this tutorial. This document can be found in the essential practice folder in the project folder. Now you can download this project folder for free. The download link is in the description. So with the project folder open, click essential practice, open the adjustments folder and open the adjustments PSD and you should have something that looks like this. So what exactly are adjustments in Photoshop? Well in Photoshop, there are a wide range of adjustments that enable us to tweak the appearance of color on an image. When we think about changing or tweaking the color of an image layer, we can come up to the main menu to the top, click Image and come to Adjustments. As you can see here, there are a wide range of adjustments to choose from and we'll be taking a look at these shortly. So here in this document, we have two image examples. In the last Post, we learnt about smart objects. Here we are going to look at how adjustments are applied to a raster image layer and a smart object layer. So let's start on the left here with this raster image layer. Now before we perform any adjustment in Photoshop, we must first have the layer selected in the Layers panel. So I'm going to come over to the Layers panel and I will need to select the bird raster layer in the Layers panel, like so. So with the layer selected, I can come up to Image, scroll down and place my mouse over Adjustments and reveal all the options. So I'll start by clicking Brightness and Contrast. Upon click, up will pop a menu box. So this is the principle for any adjustments you're about to apply to an image layer. Every time we activate an adjustment, we will always have a properties menu to toggle the effects. So now it's a simple case of tweaking the handles. I'll adjust the Brightness and the Contrast. As we tweak the handles, we can see the effect happening live in the canvas area. So once I'm happy, I'll click OK. And there we have changed the brightness and contrast of the image layer. Now if we are happy with that, great. But if not, I can press command Z to simply undo that effect. So let's try another adjustment. So I'll come up to Image, scroll down and place my mouse over adjustments to reveal all the options. This time, I'll select

Hue/Saturation. Upon click, here I have the Hue/Saturation menu. Here I can toggle the Hue, Saturation and Lightness, like so. I'll click OK, and there I have drastically changed the colors in my image. But I don't want that so I'll press command Z to undo. Back up to Adjustments, I can apply Black & White. Here I can toggle all the color channels to tweak the Black & White effect. If I want that effect applied to the image, I'll click OK. But on this occasion, I don't so I'll just click Cancel. Back up to Adjustments, I can apply and Invert adjustment. I'll undo that. Back up to Adjustments, I can apply Threshold. This one is interesting to get a high contrast of black and white. I'll cancel that. Back up to Adjustments, I can apply a Gradient Map. I can select from various gradients or toggle my own. We can get some interesting effects there. Though again, I'll cancel. Next, I'll choose Selective Color. Now this one is interesting because you can toggle the properties of specific color ranges. For example, I'll choose the color Red and attempt to toggle the color of the red dots in the image. Notice as I toggle the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black handles, only the red colors in the image will change. Pretty cool, right? So I'll cancel that. Lastly, I'll come up and choose Replace Color. Now this one is particularly interesting as you can isolate particular colors within the image and just tweak them. For example, I'll choose the blue background with a color picker and I'll change the Hue, Saturation and Lightness of just that color in the image. Pretty cool. And I'll click Cancel to go back to my original image. Now an interesting tip to keep in mind when using adjustments, let's say you only want to apply an adjustment effect to a particular part of your image. Well here you can use the selection tools to isolate part of an image layer and then apply an adjustment to just that. For example, I'll come over and select the Polygonal Lasso Tool from the menu. I'll draw a selection around the dot texture on the wings. So now I have an active selection with the dashed line. My layer still selected in the Layers panel, I'll come up to Image, Adjustments and choose Hue/Saturation. Notice when I tweak the Hue, Saturation handles, the adjustment is only being applied to the selection. I'll press OK and then command D to deselect the selection.

Easy. So that's just a taster of how you can use adjustments to change and tweak color of an image layer. Now there are a lot more adjustments to choose from. I suggest you take some time to explore these for yourself and see how they work for you. Now it's important to mention at this stage that using adjustments like this on image layers is destructive. What I mean by destructive is that once you apply an adjustment like this to a layer, you will essentially change the pixels in the raster image. If you make a change in any way to a raster image using the adjustments like this and save your document, when you open your document back up you will no longer be able to go back to the original image. So you must use adjustments in this way very cautiously. I highly recommend you only use adjustments like this when you know you are fully happy with the outcome. Now if we move across to the right and take a look at the smart object layer, let's now try and apply the same adjustments to this layer. So I'll come over to the Layers panel and select the bird smart object layer. Now if I double click on the smart object thumbnail, we will open a new tab and we can see that this smart object contains three layers. A bird layer, a shadow layer and a blue base layer. So I'll close the tab and come back into the worksheet document. So with the smart object layer selected, I'll come up to Image, Adjustments. But now we can see something quite different. All of the adjustments are grayed out. This is Photoshop telling us we cannot use any of the color adjustments on this layer. So on a smart object layer, we cannot use any of the adjustments. We can only use these adjustments on raster image layers. So why is this? Well as mentioned earlier, these adjustments are destructive. They work to change the pixels on raster images. As this is a smart object layer, this layer is linked to image data elsewhere so the effect will not be able to take hold. So now you must be wondering, well how can we possibly apply adjustments to a smart object layer? Well this takes us on to the next post. In this post, we learnt how we could apply various color adjustments to raster image layers. In Photoshop, there is a feature that allows us to apply color effects to our layers in a non-destructive way. These are called Adjustment Layers. In the next video, we are going to learn about Adjustment Layers and see how they work.