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In this Photoshop for Designers course, Nigel French focuses on the tools and features in Photoshop designed for choosing, applying, and editing color. The course looks at concepts such as the color wheel and color harmonies as well as the practicalities of using the Color Picker, leveraging the power of color channels, and the characteristics of different color modes in Photoshop. The course includes exercises on correcting color, enhancing color, shifting and replacing colors, working with spot color channels, hand coloring black and white images, and designing with a reduced color palette.
Let's hand-tint a historic photograph. And this is a very easy version and then in the next movie I'll have a much more involved version. But this really is a lot fun and it's very, very simple. If you take a look at the Layers panel, you can see how this is constructed. I'm going to start out by deconstructing the finished version, holding the Option or Alt key and clicking on the eyeball. So we have a historic photograph and then on separate layers, we are applying, we're just literally painting on a blank layer to create the areas of color.
So we have the skin, the hair, the lips, etcetera. And each of these layers is set to the Color blend mode and the Opacity is adjusted to just bring that down to what looks like an appropriate amount of the color. So I'm going to take you now to the starting version and step number one, create a new layer, choose a color that you want to paint with. And if we don't get the right color to begin with, no matter because it's very easy to change. So I'm going to start out just by painting and now it looks terrible right now.
But I just want you to see how the image will instantly be transformed as soon as I change the Color blending mode, which of course, I could have done first. But I like the dramatic effect of doing it like this and then changing the blend mode to Color. When you do this, make sure that you don't color especially that you don't color in the whites of the eyes or the teeth because that can not look so good. So it looks very, very crude, but then all we need to do, come over to the Layers panel, choose Color as the blending mode, and then reduce the Opacity of that color.
Now when you have just one color, things do look a bit odd. So you do need to go ahead and apply the other color elements before you can really evaluate whether or not you have the right color. If you have applied too much of that color, you can just come and choose your Eraser tool and rub it out, and this is the great benefit of working on separate layers for the individual areas of color. Good idea to name the layers. So I'm now going to switch back to the finished version. We'll fast forward to the point where I've applied the different color for the different layers.
I've named the layers, I've changed the blending mode of each of those layers to Color, I've reduced the Opacity accordingly; I have fixed up any errors using the Eraser tool. Now let's say that we want to change the color. Let's say that we want not a blue dress but we want a purple dress. I just come and choose a new foreground color, I make sure I'm on the right layer, and I either lock the transparency and then press Option or Alt and the Backspace/Delete key, or I forget about locking the transparency altogether and I press Option+Shift or Alt+ Shift and the Backspace/Delete key.
And that's going to apply paint to the non-transparent pixels, i.e., you cannot paint outside the lines. And then you can adjust the different colors, the different percentages of those colors to your liking and in no time at all, you have a beautiful hand-painted portrait.
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