Notes Tool, Adding more life to your eyes, Darken Shadows, Descriptive Layer Naming, Desaturated Overlay Drama, Preview before and after, Adjusting Layer Opacity, More Iris Pop, Tone Down and Red Skin, Quick Mask Lips, Custom Gradient, Mapping, Screen Blend Mode, Present Manager

Hi! This is Mama Shan with the Basic Adjustments 2 for our Macho Makeover Project. And we are going to proceed with the Basic Adjustments 2 probably in a non conventional manner. Because we are not going for a conventional type of image, we are not going for standard color correction or tone correction. We are trying to create drama. We are trying to emphasize that Rembrandt lighting.

So this is where we left off. We had cleaned up the skin and use the Spot Healing Brush, the healing brush and cleaned up any dust that was on the jacket. And this is where we are headed. We want the image to become much more dramatic and sharper. So we are going to continue with this procedure for this dramatic effect.

So what I have done, I am going to close this out is I created a new document that is what we did last time. And in order to document this, let me move my Layers Pallet over here because this is really not the original but a copy file of the original. I want to document what I have done so far on this because it is flattened. And this will help you to use this file as a reference. You can come in and I will show you how you can analyze and read your Layers Pallet. It will be evident as we proceed with this. So your layers pallet is going to be a wealth of information. And this little annotation tool over here in the toolbox, is going to help you document things that you cannot document or that are evident in the layers pallet.

So I am just going to click here and say that the background has been healed and spot cleaned. And if you want to write the tools that you used, you can do that that is fine. And then you can just click this little square in the upper right of the note and it will close up over here. And you move your cursor over here it will turn to the hand tool and then let you reposition your little anitation here. Now to delete your little anitations, all you have to do is right click on a PC or Control click on it if you are on a Macintosh and choose to delete note.

Now I am going to proceed with this by working on the eyes. I want to bring some more life and light into the eyes. So I am going to set a levels adjustment layer that is going to overall brighten the whole image and come back and invert it and brush in the lightness where I want it. So click on the black and white icon at the bottom of the layers pallet and choose Levels.

When this dialogue box opens up, all we need to do is move this Gamma Slider which controls the mid tones. We are going to move that over to around 1.75, and click OK.

Next step is to invert this reveal all mask which you can do by simply hitting Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh. So now the set of instructions are hidden. We are going to reveal them with our brush so select the Brush Tool from the tool box, come up here to the top options bar to open the brush picker and choose my favorite style of brush which is an airbrush soft round. Size is not really important because we are going to utilize the keyboard bracket keys to shrink and enlarge them. The bracket keys are right next to the P key on the keyboard. Left bracket makes it smaller, left makes it smaller when you click and hold. Right makes it bigger when you click and hold.

The other thing that I am going to adjust is the opacity that my brush is going to paint the white on this area with. So I am going to reduce that maybe to about 30% to 32%. And of course, we have to come over to our toolbox here and make sure that our foreground and background colors are set to their default, black and white but we need to reveal so we need to switch which you can do by clicking this little icon the background to the foreground or simply hover over your X key. The X key, I am clicking my X key, I can stay out in the document window and it is going to switch. White in the foreground position is going to reveal the set of instructions.

So I am just going to come in here and swipe over this a little bit, whiten up the whites of the eyes. And then I am going to make my brush a little bit smaller and add a little bit more lightness on the iris area of the eye, and the specular highlight there. So as we brush over a second time, that is actually adding another 32%. You know we can keep brushing over and it will add to it until it gets to the maximum of 100% of that brush. And if we need to clean up any overspray, we got it. Click X key and switch the foreground to black, and then you can come in and clean up areas that need to be darker. Remember white is revealing this set of instructions.

Now the next thing I am going to do is, darken the shadows of the image. So I am going to add another levels adjustment layer. And in this level adjustment layer, I am going to click on the black point input slider over here. And I am going to move that over probably to around where it says 25 here. If I drew a line straight up from this point, it is where this column of information is. So I am darkening those shadows.

Now I want to open up the mid tones just a tiny bit as well. So I am going to take the gamma slider and move that over just a little bit where it says 1.13, and then click OK. Let us see the documents and what these are. Even this comes up with the name of the adjustment layer which you can leave on there. And let us be specific here. This is for the iris and whites brightening. And these levels, just click on the name part, you got to be careful not to click on this part or it will open up the big layer styles box. And this one is for darkening shadows and opening mid tones. Open mid tones and that will work. So we are keeping the star stenographer’s pad over here as well. Letting us to know what this is doing here.

Now the next thing I am going to apply to this is a very common technique to add contrast to an image. What we are going to do, is come down here and select the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer. And take the saturation slider all the way to the left so that you have a gray skill version of the image here and click OK. Now when I change this blending mode, of that layer, and come down to this group here which where the exception of pin light and hardness, all of these other ones, are basically to create contrast of the image.

So if you use this over a black and white image or even a color image, the light areas of the current layer or adjustment, are going to react with the light areas of the underlying layer to make them brighter and the dark areas of this particular look right here, I am going to make the underlying pixels look darker. And shades in the image, that are close to 128 that level, middle gray, 50% are going to do nothing.

So I am going to set this to overlay right now and you can see that it has done exactly that one. You clip this on and off. The dark areas have become darker and the light areas have popped a little bit, like this. And let us come down here to our background layer and hold down the Alt key if you are on a PC, Option on a Mac and click the visibility icon and view column. So that it shuts off all but the background, and then do that again, Alt click on it. So we can kind of see where we started and where we were headed, where we come thus far.

What I need to do now that I have got basically the tone or the mood of the picture, I might want to adjust the opacity a bit. And on this layer, let us name this also, we will leave hue saturated, we will say hue desaturated because that is what we did.

Let us take the global opacity down a bit. Now you can click on this tick mark to change opacities. You can type in on opacity. You can also hover the word opacity and it gives you what is called the little scrubber bar. That is a thing you are with these double arrows and I can just bring that down like this until I get the number where I want it. At around 65, 64, that looks good. It is very nice.

All right now, we are going to come back and these eyes, we want them to pop and especially with brown eyes, you got to be careful when you are using these techniques because they will totally black out. And if somebody has very dark eyes, you can bring more life into it by just adding a little bit more texture and light into the iris area. So we are going to add another levels adjustment layer for specifically just the irises of the eye and this time, not so much for the whites of the eyes. Because what we have done so far, has also increased that brightness by putting this overlay layer on it. So come down here again to the add fill adjustment icon and we are going to choose Levels here. And we are just going to click okay. We are not going to adjust anything in here. When you do this it is called a null adjustment layer because we have not changed any settings on it.

But how we are going to utilize this is to change the blend mode of it. We are going to change it to screen. Now this section in here affects the underlying pixels to lighten them for the most part and that is what screened us. You can see that, that has popped the whole image. Well this is not what we want. I mean it still looks kind of cool but it is not what we are using it. We are using this just for the irises. So again, that procedure of inverting the mask is necessary. Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh. Let me get my brush here and again, it lower opacities. I am looking up here. It is like driving a car before you start moving, you need to look into you rearview mirrors and over your shoulder. So that is fine. I will leave it at 32% but I want to switch my brush to white so I can come over here and click that if you need to and I will start brushing this in.

Now I am going to zoom in a little bit using the Spacebar and Control key held down which toggles the zoom tool then I will click and drag around this area so I can kind of zoom in. let me move my image over here. And then left bracket key to get my brush to a good size here. And let me just click and drag, and release, and then click and drag over this a little bit more, so that I have a little bit more luminosity showing through those eyes. Let us click this on and off what we just did so we can see how that has popped in. Let me want to clean up and be very careful when you are doing this and zoom in so that you make sure you know what you have brushed away. See I got a little brightness over here that I do not want. We are going to name this, levels to screen which is like dodging iris and again, you can play with the opacity if you need to, it is all up to you. Let me take it down there. The beauty of it is we can always come back and change this as we go on.

I am going to zoom out on my document right now, and now what I am going to do is, I am looking at the image and the skin is looking a little red. And we are going to cancel out some of the red by calling upon the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer again. And we could just move the saturation down here. And what we are going to do is specifically target the red. So, click on the edit window up here where it says master and choose the reds. And when you go in there, we can use the scrubber bar or type it in. We will just come down to around a negative 18 to 20. And you got a little preview button here as well here which you can shot on and off. So you can see by just moving the saturation down a bit that we have cancelled out some of that saturated look of the reds. But we still have some reds in there but we will get to that in a minute.

We also have, this is a Macho Makeover and naturally Joe has got very red lips. But I think I want to tone down the color of the lips. And the way I am going to approach this, is to just brush a quick mask on it so that I can have a selection active while I call upon an adjustment layer. We have not done that yet in here and this is another way that you can utilize of presetting your mask for adjustment layers. So over in the toolbar, this icon here, the rectangle with the circle in it, if you click on it, you will enter quick mask mode. And you would not know you have entered quick mask mode. Nothing changes on the screen except for the title bar which tells you, you are in quick mask mode.

Now for this, I am going to very importantly up the opacity. Because when I paint that quick mask on, I want to be able to see it and I wanted to be at 100%. This is basically making a selection with the brush. And I do not have to be too careful about it because it is after all, going to end up being a layer mask.

So, with black as the foreground color, so maybe I need to go and show you how to do preferences for the quick mask. If you double click on this icon here, it opens up the options, where you can say that you want the color to indicate the selected area or the masked area.

In this case, I want to represent the selected area. And I think by default in Photoshop, it maybe checked as mask. So you definitely will want to come in here and make sure we have got this radial button selected. So click okay. Notice up here, it does not say quick mask anymore. In other way, you can invoke quick mask, just hit the letter Q. It is easy enough to remember quick mask. Just make sure that it says quick mask up here before you start painting. And with black as the foreground color, we are just going to paint a little bit over this lip area here.

And then we are going to hit the letter Q again, or come over here and hit the quick mask icon either one, will transform that brush stroke into an active selection with the marching ants. Now this point, as I said, we want to tone down the color of the lips a bit. So we are going to choose another type of adjustment layer called Selective Color. When this dialogue box opens up, let me move it out of the way. We have not made adjustments yet but you can see that little white mark on the thumbnail, on the selective color adjustment layer, that is where our selection was.

So this time, when we start playing with settings, instead of it showing over the entire image, the setting changes or instructions are only going to show in that white area which represents the selected area.

So the first thing I am going to try is choosing the method of relative. So, click that radial button that is not already selected. And what we want to do is cancel out some of these reds and in this particular area or channel, you can see that all the different colors are listed; we are specifically going to tweak the red pixels and on this first line where it says cyan. Cyan is actually the complementary color of red. So if I added more cyan, it would remove some of that red because it is canceling it out by adding more of cyan. That is the nature of complementary colors.

So on this line, if I were to move the slider to the left, which would be a negative number in decreasing the cyan, it would make things more red. I want to increase the cyan amount. so I am just going to pump it up a little bit, maybe to a plus four and I am going to further twick this and come down to magentas. And just move this over a tiny bit, say maybe negative two and then on yellows, let us see what increasing that does, little bit maybe to a plus seven.

And then the black down here, that it is going to control the intensity of the red or like this, if I were to move this slider to the right, it is going to darken it. But if I move it to the left, it is going to lighten it. So I am going to significantly move this one over to about negative 24. And I can switch and see what that would look like with absolute on and that brightens it up a little bit. But I do not think I am going to choose relative. Again this choice is kind of subjective. I use both methods depending upon what I am trying to achieve. So sometimes it is just a matter of taste. So I can click preview on and off, and we can see that it is significantly reduced the redness of the lips and it has also brighten them up a bit sot that they are not quite so dark. So I am going to click okay and there is a little bit of spill of that onto the skin area which I can clean up with the mask.

Remember, look over in your toolbox and you got to ask yourself the question, do I want to reveal or conceal this particular adjustment the set of instructions. What I want to conceal, so I need to have black as the foreground color. So click your X button to put it there and left bracket key to reduce and paint it in at 100%. I am going to just clean up the over spray of that set of instructions. Then we can click the visibility icon on and off on the view column and see it before and after. We can also further adjust by lowering the opacity to see how that looks and let me do that a little bit, I will just use my scrubber bar here.

And part of the process is looking at before and after when you are adjusting an image. We clean the shadow area, maybe a little darker there. And there we have it for the lips.

Now the next step that I am going to do, is apply another type of adjustment layer called the gradient map and we are going to actually create a custom gradient to overlay on this image, to just influence the color a bit, making it a little bit more of golden or that ravier of gold that you often see in images of a portrait. It is either done of people with a tan.

So I am going to come down here and click on the create fill adjustment icon. And I am not choosing gradient. It is really important that you go all the way down here towards this gradient map. I think I need to move my layers pallet up a bit. So you can actually see that choice. So click on create new fill adjustment icon, black and white circle, and right here, is gradient map.

Now when we click on that, it is going to apply the last gradient you use or default setting you had and apply it to the image that you see in the document window. So your document may look different than mine when you call on this particular adjustment layer.

We are going to create a custom gradient. So really it does not matter how it appears right now. The only thing I would like you to do it this point in time, whatever the colors are appear, is to click the dither box. And that only helps in printing so that the transitions between the gradient colors do not produce a banding type of effect so that they look smooth by virtue of introducing some little dither dots.

So just check the dither box and then click right directly in the preview window, so that your gradient editor comes up and you get the benefit of the full gradient editor. I am going to cancel up here for a second to show you what happens when you click just this tick mark. You only get the picker here. You do not get the editing features. So click in the window so you actually get the editor that has that particular pallet or library listed in here as well as the features to edit.

Now these are just the default gradients that I have loaded in. you may have the different set but I am starting out with the default ones. And I am going to create a custom gradient by clicking on the first stop down here no matter what it is, you can do the same. And I am going to double click on it so that it opens up the select stop color picker. And I am going to type in this hexadecimal numbers to dial in this particular gradient of mine that I like really well and you can do the same.

So the hex of decimal numbers represents this particular color are 000004 and it just gives you this black color, click okay. Then I am going to come over here to the very right stop, and double click on it, and swipe into the hexadecimal fill of the select stop color box, and I am going to type in the letters FFE and then number 3, letter B, and 2. And that is going to give me this very creamy color, click okay.

Now this is highlighted and notice there is a little diamond shape in the middle. This little diamond acts like a midpoint where you can click on it and actually drag it to the left or the right, and it is going to affect how that transition looks, and what point is going to disperse the colors.

The position of it or location is down here. And we want that to be 50% for this. And it is hard to tell when you highlight them because they do not look like they are highlighted but for example if I click this stop, you will see the location changes to 100%, and shows the color over here. If I click this stop, it shows what the color is and the location is at zero.

Now working in this editor, you might inadvertently add some stops because it is so easy to have a stop just by clicking, like this. And it has a stop. Now there is a delete button in here that will delete it. See the roof of this stop is highlighted now so if I click delete, it will delete that stop. But here is another easy way to delete a stop that you no longer wish to be on this line. Let me click another one and that is just simply click on it and drag on it. Just drag it off a bit, off of the line, and it will disappear.

There are also, some transparency stops that are located at the top of the preview bar here. And this look like upside down stops. What they control is the transparency of the particular color. I am going to show you how that works when I add another stop in here. I am going to target the middle area at the bottom line and click to add a stop. And that is automatically going to come up, in the color of the last stop. And we want to create a Tri-tone gradient here so I want to change this color to something different. So I can double click on this stop here or just click on the color swatch a bit here. Either way, it is going to bring up the select stop color box for that particular stop. So we are going to dial in our midpoint color here and that is a hexadecimal value of 924a0f. And that gives you this nice brown color, and click okay. So here is our tri-tone gradient here.

Now if I want to save this in my current pallet right now, I can easily do that by changing the name custom and give it a name. I recommend this to name your actions and this particular one as actually Mama’s ambers. So I will click that and click the new button. You have to remember to click the new button because that is what is going to put it inside of the editor here. Now if I want to save this in a more permanent way, even though there is a save button here in the gradient editor. When I click that, what it is going to do, it does not give me any options for saving just that single gradient, I can name this set, but what it is going to do is save everything that is currently in this window.

So we are going into and area, that is going to give you a little bit more control about which presets you want to save and where to save them too. I am just going to click okay for now and click okay in this. And while we are here, let us set this to the correct way we want it to look. Because right now, it is just looks dark. What I am going to do is employ one of the lightning blending modes on this. So I am going to switch from normal to screen, and I am going to lower the opacity. Now at this point, it just looks like a tri-tone toned image. But I still want some of the original color to come through but introduce some of this ravier gold toning to the image.

So I am just going to reduce this to about 20%. Actually let me just type in here and I can type 20%. We can click before and after. So it just has a little bit of a highlight. And again, this is to taste if you want it a little golder, increase the opacity for the gradient map layer. But I am going to leave it down at 20% here.

Okay. Let us go into the presets manager right now. Because if you have to reset your preferences or reinstall Photoshop your custom gradient is not going to be saved at this point we actually have to send it somewhere. And where you go for that, it gives you the most control for any preset in Photoshop is under the edit menu to the preset manager. This lets you dial in by clicking this arrow any of the presets that you want to create custom once for and save.

So this one was a gradient so I am going to select gradients and that gives me the list or preview of all of the gradients that I currently have loaded in Photoshop or that are available at this time. It also has a fly out tab where I can view this in small list, suppose to small thumbnail so that it pass the names of them. And if I want to save just one or more of these, I can click on the gradient and then Shift click to add consecutive or nearby adjacent ones or hold my Control key down on a PC, Command key on a Mac to also save a set to include that it is discontiguous or not adjacent.

We just want to save the Mama’s Ambers. We do not need to save these because these are default gradients, already saved in Photoshop. This is the only custom one in this group right now. So I will say save set. Like I said a set can be one or more. And I suggest creating a folder in your documents area, outside of the Photoshop application or program files to save a set. Now I am just going to title this again, Mama’s Ambers and leaves the extension.grd on there, and click Save. Now I have already got it save there so I will just replace it. Or I can actually save it again directly into the Photoshop preset area, which why do we not do that. So I am just going to click Save Set. And right now, it is going to my documents folder into a folder I called my Photoshop presets.

What I want to do is go into my applications folder. So in order to do that, I need to set this directory and go to My Computer and then go to my C Drive and then go to My Program Files which is right here. And I am just double clicking, going inside of all of these nested folders. And then you want to go to the Adobe folder and find your program and as you can see I have quite a few programs and versions of Photoshop products. So I want to find CS3 which is right here. And once I get inside of this program or application folder, I am going to see a folder called presets. So I will double click on that and then inside here, you are going to see the various folders that Photoshop has provided for you to save these presets.

Now, what is different about saving your presets inside of the program or application folder is that even if you do not have that particular preset, gradient, custom shape, action, whatever it is, that you are saving, currently loaded in, you can now select it from the dropdown menu of the fly out tab of that pallet. That was a mouthful. I hope you followed me.

So I am going to select my gradient’s folder, double click on it so I get inside of it. And then again, you have to rename it. It just says untitled gradients which is not going to do you much good, and I am going to say Mama’s Ambers plus rename it again. So now it is actually inside of my application folder. And I am going to click Done.

So what does this do? Well, let me show you what it does. Right now, when I click on my gradient window up here, I have already got that gradient in there. But let us say, I deleted this or switch the gradients. Actually let me just click load and let me load in the regular ones. Hold on a second, that is not what I wanted to do. I want to click the fly out tab of the presets and choose reset gradients just to show you how this works and click okay. Do not append.

So now that custom gradient has disappeared from our list here, and click OK. And let us just go in here, and click another gradient so we get rid of that. So it is not here. I click the fly out tab. It is not listed in this list down here yet. Because what you have to do, is close out Photoshop and restart it. And when you do that, it will be there. So I am going to pause the video and do those right now, just to prove to you that this is how it works, and be right back.

Okay I am back. I close out Photoshop and I have reopened it. And now, we are going to check to see if it is in the list. So there are couples of ways you can get into the fly out tab of the gradient pallet. You can click on the gradient tool and then come up here and click on the tick mark and then click on the fly out tab of the pallet, and low and behold, there is Mama’s Ambers. You can also click on the window, open up the gradient editor, click on the fly out tab and there is, Mama’s Ambers. Let us close this out. We can also come back to the gradient that we applied here. Double click on it to open up the gradient map editor because the gradients are tied to the gradient map function, and click on the little tick mark here. And again, click on here and look at the list; it is in Mama’s Ambers. You can also come down here, create fill adjustment layer. And you can choose either gradient or gradient map but we will go into gradient map, and that just added a new gradient map which I will delete in a minute.

What we want to do is come in here to the current library and even though we can see it in the fly out menu, it is not loaded into this list yet. So on either of these cases, or not either of the many areas that you can load it into the current library, you need to click this fly out tab. This is a very important little tab in many of Photoshop’s pallets. So this fly out tab, we will just come down here and click on Mama’s Ambers, it is going to give you a dialogue box asking if you want to replace with the gradients from this group here and you want to choose append in this case. We do not really want to wipe out all our default gradients. We are just going to add this one little gradient to the current library.

And then just scroll down here and there is Mama’s Ambers loaded into the library. So I am just going to delete this second gradient map here. So there is our lesson on loading presets for gradients.