Thanks to William, here’s Creative Crew’s new video tutorial. It’s a smart and flexible technique to coloring black and white images.

Ask your wuestions to WIlliam : waiaung @ hotmail.com

Go to William’s DeviantArt

This is the most extreme method to neutralize your pictures. You can get rid of any color cast and make sure that your grey will be perfectly calibrated to RGB 128/128/128.

Although it may seem complicated at first sight, it will be much easier once you really understand what’s going on.

Member of Creative Crew can require the source image with labeled layers.

(File size 7.2Mb) Practice will be much easier. Ask the image to the Administrator using the contact module.

The first thing to do is to make a copy of the background. Ctrl+J is the fastest way (Command+J for Mac). Then apply the FIlter > Blur > Average.
It creates an average matte of all the RGB pixels in the picture. It means that the matte is the actual Color Cast of the picture, in fact the problem to solve. If we invert it (Ctrl+I, Mac: Command+I), the result color will be the solution.

To better understand where the solution is mostly required, we set the layer’s blending mode to Difference. Difference simply subtract the RGB value in the layer on the top, to the RGB value of the layer underneath. Where the value is RGB 0/0/0, it displays a black pixel.

Since our eyes cannot spot a pure black pixel among millions, it’s better to use a measurement tool. So let’s add an Adjustment layer > Threshold. Drag the value back to 1, and slowly increase it using arrow up on the keyboard. When the first pixel appears, that’s the target. The first pixel may appear with values as small as 2 or 3. If the picture is quite big, it may be necessary to zoom in. Use Ctrl and + to zoom in, and hold spacebar to pan around. Sometimes the first pixel appears not alone. Just mark one out of the first bunch. Make sure that the eyedropper tool is the active tool. To mark the pixel, simply Shift+click on it.

Now it’s time to use that pixel. Hide the Average layer and the Treshold adjustment layer. Open Window > Info and note that a marker #1 is returning RGB values. Sum the three values and divide the total by 3. In this way we calculate the average value. Note it somewhere.
Add an Adjustment layer Curves. Alt+click (Mac: Option+click) on the Curves grid to swap it from 4 to 10 boxes. Go to the three channels individually and do the following.

• Click and do not move the mouse in the top right corner of the bottom left box. It should return input/output values 26 and 26*.
• Click and do not move the mouse in the bottom left corner of the top right box. It should return input/output values 230 and 230*.

* 25 and 25, or 229 and 229 are equally acceptable.

• Click and do not move the mouse, exactly in the middle of the grid, where it should return the value 128 and 128.

Once you marked these point in all Red, Green and Blue, you may want to save it using the Save Curves Preset in the fly out menu, in the Curves panel.
Go to the Red channel of the Curves. Click and slightly drag the point in the center to select it. Sometimes just clicking does not select. That’s why it safer to drag a little bit up or down. Then use the values Input to type the value displayed in the Info panel. Type in output the average value noted previously. Repeat it for Green and Blue.

As result, the whole image now looks more tint. Color cast seems more saturated. No panic.
Use the magic shortcut Alt+Ctrl+Shift+E (Mac: Command+Option+Shift+E) to create a new layer out of all the visible layers underneath. So now you can hide the Curves Adjustment layer and remain with just the Background and the new layer you just created.

Invert the new layer (Ctrl+I) and set it as Blending mode Color. Now decrease its opacity to 25%.
The Color cast seems to be removed, and in fact, it has been mapped with the Inverse action. Then the Blending mode has gradually reduced the influence of the Color cast where needed.

The last touch is perfection. The target for Color cast neutralization is RGB 128/128/128.

Add a new Fill layer and set the color to 128/128/128. Set the Blending mode to Difference. Then add an Adjustment layer Threshold and set the value to 1. Increase it up to 4. Note where the most black pixels appear. Mark a pixel into a quite large black area, so the 128 calibration will not affect just few pixels, but the whole “neighborhood”.
In the Info panel will appear #2 marker. Hide the Threshold and the Grey matte.

Add an Adjustment layer Curves. From the fly out menu load the Curves previously saved.
Type the input value of the Info panel for the three channel. This time, instead of the average value as output, type 128.
Repeat on the three channel and now the Color cast has been removed.

Author: Stefano Virgilli
Adobe® Video Specialist

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Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

The new revolutionary CS4 Adjustment panel, is the positive evolution of Adjustment layers.
Since non-destructive editing became a “must”, the menu Image> Adjustment retired. Adjustment layers, instead, allow to edit images in the most flexible way.

Ten reasons why to use the new Adjustment panel.

Member of Creative Crew can require the source image with labeled layers.

(File size 2.1Mb) Practice will be much easier. Ask the image to the Administrator using the contact module.

1- Edit an Adjustment layer once you added it from the Adjustment panel. Any Adjustment layer can be eventually deleted by simply dragging it to the small trash bin at the bottom of the Layers panel.

2- Adjustment layer can be used at lower opacity than 100%. Just decrease the Adjustment layer opacity in the Layers panel, if you realize that the effect is too strong.

3- You can edit it an Adjustment layer unlimited times. Just use the new Adjustment panel and do not need to double click anything. It is all visible.

4- Every Adjustment layer comes together with a Layer mask. Whatever you paint black in the Layer mask, will hide the effects of your Adjustment layer. Whatever is white shows the Adjustment layer’s effect.

5- Some special effects can be obtained by changing Blending mode to an Adjustment layer. Use the drop down list in the Layers panel to change Blending mode. A nice colorization effect can be obtained using the Colorize mode of a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer, in Blending mode Overlay.
Another interesting one is obtained by just adding a new Curves Adjustment layer. Do not apply any change to the Curves, just change Blending mode from Normal to Overlay or Soft Light.

6- Adjustment layers are in fact layers. So you can actually duplicate (or drag and drop) from a document to another one or more. Whatever you set in the Adjustment layer will be duplicated in the other documents.

7- Form Photoshop CS3 onward, the amazing Select> Refine Edge, allows to control the edges of a layer mask. Now, in Photoshop CS4, it is even easier using the new Mask Panel.

8- Some new Adjustment layer users, are afraid to lose control, because an Adjustment layer works on every layer underneath it. In Photoshop CS3 you should have used what I call “The trick of the pot“, as the shape of the icon resemble a pot. The trick consist of a simple Alt+click in between an Adjustment layer and the underlying layer. When the pot appears, the Adjustment layer is parented to the Layer.
Now, in Photoshop CS4, everything is much easier. All you need to do is to decide, before to add a new Adjustment layer, if you want it to clip the layer underneath or not. It can be quickly set by clicking the icon at the bottom right hand side of the new Adjustment panel.

9- To clip more than one layer can still be a bit tricky. The solution is to put together in a group (folder) all the layers that you want to be affected. On top of them place your Adjustment layer. Then, finally, change the Blending mode of the whole group, from Pass Through to Normal. Immediately the layers included in the group will be affects by the Adjustment layer.

10- Sometimes, struggling in post processing risks to be wasted time. Auto correction can return excellent results on under exposed pictures. Unfortunately, if there are white and/or black areas, Auto corrections do not have space to fix the image histogram. In that case you may want select a target area of the image that does not include any pure white and/or pure black pixel. Select that area using any basic selection tool. Add a new Adjustment layer Levels or Curves. In the Adjustment panel use the side drop down menu to select Auto Options. From the pop up window experiment the three Auto correction algorithms.

• Enhance monochromatic contrast corresponds to Auto Contrast.
• Enhance per channel contrast corresponds to Auto Tone (previously Auto Levels).
• Find Dark & Light colors corresponds to Auto Color.

Auto Color gives excellent result when applied together with the check box Snap to Neutral Mid-tones.
Once you decided which Auto correction works better, click Ok.
Last step, trash the Adjustment Layer’s Layer Mask. The Auto correction selected will be applied to the whole image.

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Hi Crew,

I’ve created 2 presets adjustment layers to add a green filter to your pictures.

Click the following link in order to download the two adjustment layers, compressed into a .zip file:

Download Green presets

Use the 2 Adjustment layesr as described:

1- open a picture with a medium contrast between shadows and highlights

2- Layer> New Adjustment layer> Hue/Saturation

3- Load the Hue/Saturation preset from the .zip

4- Set blending mode to Overlay and set Opacity to 50%

5- Layer> New Adjustment layer> Levels

6- Load the Levels preset from the .zip

7- Set blending mode to Multiply and set Opacity to 20%

8- Layer> New Adjustment layer> Levels

9- Load the Levels preset from the .zip

10- Set blending mode to Screen and set Opacity to 30%

11- Layer> New Adjustment layer> Levels

12- Load the Levels preset from the .zip

13- Set blending mode to Color and set Opacity to 80%

Try to experiment yourself by changing the opacity of the adjustment layers, and create new different results.

Click on the thumbnails to watch the pictures.

Enjoy it!

Stefano

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

In this tutorial, in a short while, we will learn hot to to set the black and the white point, by using the eyedroppers contained in the Levels panel. This could be very appropriate for some scanned pictures.
Thanks to my friend Alberto Gambarelli for the beautiful picture.

First of all we add a new Level’s Adjustment Layer, by clicking the half black and half withe icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. A new Adjustment layer will be added above the selected layer (in this case just above the background).

Now we have to sample in the image to set the black point. It should be hard to do, because we don’t have the Superman sight to check the darkest pixel. Someone use the trick to move the black slide, of the input levels, to the right by pressing Alt key on the keyboard. But I prefer the following clue.
For the black: pretending that everything should be bright, which area would be the last to become white? Just move the white slide to the left and you’ll see the answer. Don’t choose any eyedropper and Shift+click on the spot to put a mark (#1), then bring the slide back to 255.

Now we can repeat the same, but opposite, for the white point.
Pretending that everything should be dark, which area would be the last to become black? This time move the black slide to the right in input levels and see the answer.
Don’t choose any eyedropper and Shift+click on the spot to put a mark (#2), then bring the slide back to 0.

Pick the white eyedropper (last on the right) and click on the mark #2 in the picture.
In this manner we set the white point. In the Info panel we can see the values before, and values after the click.
Repeat the same for the black point clicking on the mark #1. We have set white to 255/255/255 and black to 0/0/0.

If the final effect is to “strong”, I suggest to decrease master opacity of the adjustment layer.
In the picture we can se the values changing again. This last tip is specially indicated for whom want to print the picture. Who else need to publish it on internet could skip this last step.

Photo by Alberto Gambarelli

Tutorial created by Stefano Virgilli
Adobe Video Specialist
Adobe Certified Instructor, Photoshop
Adobe Certified Instructor, Premiere Pro
Adobe Certified Instructor, Illustrator
Adobe Certified Instructor, After Effects
Adobe User Group Manager

Adobe Certified Instructor After Effects

Adobe User Group Manager

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

One of the hardest work for the photographers is to take perfect shots of the white bride’s dress. In fact, many times, all the details are to exposed with digital cameras. Photoshop offers some great tricks to improve the quantity and the quality of the details.

The first step consist in making a copy of the white dress. One of the easiest manner is to use Selection> Color range…Click once on the dress and regulate the Fuzziness. We can change the previews by the Selection preview menu. Click Ok when we’re done.

To quickly copy the dress in a new empty layer just Ctrl+J shortcut. Now go to Image> Adjustment> Shadows/Highlights, and set a high Highlights amount, and a little wider Tonal width. Increase also Midtone contrast. Click Ok when we’re done.

If we aren’t satisfied with the result we can increase the quantity of the details just duplicating the layer (ctrl+J) and setting in Multiply blending mode. If we see non-needed color we can choose to desaturate this last layer by shift+ctrl+U.

Tutorial created by Stefano Virgilli
Adobe Video Specialist
Adobe Certified Instructor, Photoshop
Adobe Certified Instructor, Premiere Pro
Adobe Certified Instructor, Illustrator
Adobe Certified Instructor, After Effects
Adobe User Group Manager

Adobe Certified Instructor After Effects

Adobe User Group Manager

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Firstly, this tutorial serves to understand that not all the white and black photographs are the same. Secondly, I understand it uses 4 examples of white and black obtainable with Photoshop. In this case I used Photoshop CS2, but with the previous versions it is possible to obtain the same result.

Note: This tutorial was written when Photoshop CS3 wasn’t released yet. Now everything is much easier. Thank to the new Black and White Adjustment.

1-As shown, using the hue/saturation adjustment and bringing the saturation to zero, the result for the images CMYK give lot of problems. (see photograph)

2- The hue/saturation tool nevertheless, is not excluded initially. In fact, activating the checkbox color in the lower right part and carrying the saturation to zero, the result is considerably better. (see photograph)

3- The result in step 2 with the hue/saturation tool with the activated colorize checkbox, is a bright white and black, with good contrasts. I think better appearance of the simple Mode>Grey scale black and White.

4- Nevertheless, the best black and white, (in my opinion and I enclose an image to demonstrate it) is converting the image in profile color Lab. The letter L from the acronym L*a*b*, is for Luminance and represents the transposition of lights and of shadows excluding the color. (see photograph)
Once converted in Lab, we have to take out the L channel in the Channels palette. Quickly we can activate the selection of all canvas (Mac: Apple+A, PC:Ctrl+A), make a copy (Mac: Apple+C, PC: Ctrl+C), create a new document (Mac: Apple+N, PC: Ctrl+N). The dimensions will be based on the area copied, choose the color profile CMYK, and paste (Mac: Apple+V, PC: Ctrl+V).

Tutorial created by Stefano Virgilli
Adobe Video Specialist
Adobe Certified Instructor, Photoshop
Adobe Certified Instructor, Premiere Pro
Adobe Certified Instructor, Illustrator
Adobe Certified Instructor, After Effects
Adobe User Group Manager

Adobe Certified Instructor After Effects

Adobe User Group Manager

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

From a while, during my Photoshop training courses I dedicated myself ardently to the spread of the work flow for photographic post production based on three key passages:
1) Contrasts adjustments (the highlights and the shadows)
2) Neutral tones balance (color cast on grey)
3) Increasing or decreasing the saturation

The work flow of the photographic post production can be performed with many adjustment tools as:
Brightness/contrast - Color Balance - Hue/Saturation,
or Levels - Hue/Saturation,
or Auto-Adjustments - Sponge.

This tutorial is very brief and introduces a new method to decrease color cast on neutral tones.

The picture has a really intense orange color cast. I took this picture of Christopher Columbus’ statue along the “lower pavement” in Funchal (Madeira Island).

No need to be a colorimetric expert to understand that, the light effect due to the night orange lights is to much.

The goal is to decrease color cast, of course, without changing the “meaning” of the picture.

In fact, a strong yellowish light was illuminating the statue.
Check out the definition of “Colour cast” on Wikipedia.

First of all we duplicate the background layer. Then we apply Filter>Blur>Average, that will transform the picture’s layer into a colored “stain” by the average pixels’ color. Then we have to invert (ctrl+i) the obtained color in order to see the opposite color.

Now we change blending mode to Color (read also Blending modes tutorial) and decrease master opacity until we obtain our goal.
And that’s all!

Tutorial created by Stefano Virgilli
Adobe Video Specialist
Adobe Certified Instructor, Photoshop
Adobe Certified Instructor, Premiere Pro
Adobe Certified Instructor, Illustrator
Adobe Certified Instructor, After Effects
Adobe User Group Manager

Adobe Certified Instructor After Effects

Adobe User Group Manager

Creative Crew Seminar by Stefano Virgilli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.creativecrew.com.sg.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.