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Adobe TV Presents The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost and in today's episode of The Complete Picture we are going to take a look at a technique used to posterize images. By posterizing images, I mean limit the number of colors in an image. Now, the nice thing about this technique is that it gives you a lot more control over maybe just using the posterize adjustment layer by itself. The way that it does that is that we are actually going to use a combination of multiple layers. So, let's go ahead and get started. We will begin on our layers panel. You can see that this is just a single layer image. If I come over right now to my adjustment panel and simply click posterize. The problem is is that when I enter in the number of levels, lets say for example I only want 4 colors in this image. Well,Photoshop by default uses this number of levels per channel. So, I'm really getting 4 colors in red, green, and blue, and when they overlap I get a lot more colors, as you can see in the image, then simply 4. So, I am going to undo that just command or CTRL-Z. Instead, the first thing I will do is I will convert this image to gray scale. Now, whether or not you want to use the channel mixer adjustment layer, or the black and white adjustment layer, is really up to you. I am going to go ahead and use channel mixer for this first example, and in the second example I will actually show you an action that uses the black and white adjustment layer, but that is up to you. What you don't want to do is just simply convert it to gray scale because that is going to take away all of the flexibility. Remember because this is an adjustment layer, I can come back later on and decide how I want this image converted into gray scale. So, for now all I need to do is click on the monochrome button. And it appears as if it is gray scale, but all that color information obviously is still there in the background layer. Ok, now that it's simply levels of gray, when I return back to the adjustment panel, and I add my posterize adjustment, I only get those 4 levels. So, perfect. It is exactly what I want except that they are in black and white and I wanted to have them in color. So, we return one more time to our adjustment panel. I think the easiest way to add back end color is by using the gradient map adjustment layer. So, let's click on that and by default I am getting just a black and white gradient, and my foreground-to-background colors. But if we click in this gradient here, then my gradient editor appears where I can go ahead and choose from one of the defaults, or we can make our own gradient. And since I broke this image up into 4 distinct tones, I probably want to add 4 different colors. So, that means I want to change the number of stops down here. To change the color we simply double click on the stop, and it brings up the color picker. I am actually gonna start down here in the blacks, and it doesn't matter if you start on the left or right-hand side. I will go ahead and start on the right here. Then go ahead and use the little elevator to change the color, which isn't going to have any effect right now obviously because it is black, but it will matter when we pick subsequent colors. So, why am I starting with black? Because I want the darkest color in my image to be black, and then I am going to add an additional stop here, maybe around 33%. You can see right down here under location, we can just type in 33%. And then double click on that stop in order to bring up the color picker. Again, I want to go to those blue tones. So, lets go ahead and bring up a color like this, and we can move this color picker out of the way so we can see what's going on. So, I'll pick kind of a very pale blue color and click okay. We can move the yellow stop over, double clicking on it, and maybe bring up another color. Now, if you are just randomly picking colors, this is fine. If I wanted to, I should just show you that you can drag a stop off of the gradient here. Then if I wanted to pick my secondary color kind of based on this color, I can hold down the option or the ALT key and just drag on that color stop. That way when I double click on it to bring up the color picker, it is going to select that previous color, and then I can make my change this way. So, lets bring that over to gray and click okay. Then for my final color stop here, lets go ahead and double click on that and make it white. Alright, now you will notice that there is not a lot of white here, but that is actually dependent on what the colors were in the original image. Now remember I told you we can go back and change that. But before we do, I just want to point out that if I don't like the colors here, obviously it's really easy to change not only the colors, but you can see when I move the color stops, that I can also change the brightness values here because I am going from darker to light. So, its changing not only the brightness, technically its changing the saturation as well. As I scoot this over we can see that now I have a much lighter kind of bluish-green shade there in my somewhat darker areas of the image right? I've only got 4 colors. So, it is the black, the pretty dark, the medium light, and then the white way up here. But I don't really like how it's breaking because I need a little bit more white. So, lets go ahead and click okay. Then we will come down here to my channel mixer adjustment layer. Because I added channel mixer you can see that I can go in here and change the amounts of the red, green, and blue mixture. So lets just bring that up maybe to like 60 or so, and I might want to add a little bit of green as well. It just all depends on how you want the tones of your image to break. So, the nice thing about this technique is that not only can I change the tones, but I can go back and change the colors as well. Obviously, I can change number of colors by just changing the posterize options. So, its a very very flexible way to take your image to gray scale. In fact, lets go back into the gradient map for one moment. I am going to actually select a preset that I just created. that I like that one a little bit better. I just like the tones in it. How I did that was simply once you set up all of your stops in the gradient editor, you just click new. You can name it if you want, click new, and it will appear right up here in your presets. Okay, one other thing that you might want to think about is if there are certain areas that you don't really like. Like lets say for example you might want to just darken down the sides so there aren't these white spots here. Don't forget that you can always add additional layers, right? So, I can add a layer and paint on it, and I am not ruining the original, but if I paint with a dark color it will go ahead and bring those white tones darker and make them a different tone. Here in this case it would kind of this lighter brown color. All I would have to do is click to add a new layer and grab my paint brush by tapping the B key. I probably don't want it set up to 100%. So, if you tap the 3 key you'll get 30%, and if you tap 4 you'll get 40%. Then simply click--Now we better look at what we are going to brush with. We are going to paint right now with white, which would make everything lighter. If you see that, that is not what I want. So, lets undo that and we will tap the X key, and that exchanges our foreground and background color. Let's just make sure that we have got soft edge brush that we are painting with. Now when I click and paint you can see how all I did was I added-- In fact, lets option click here on my layer. You can see that I just added a little bit of dark area. Now that might be too hard to see. So, what I am going to do is I am just gonna quickly go to my preferences to transparency and gamut, and we will just turn that off. Now, its a little bit easier to see that I just shaded down this area. Well that plus this is actually enough darkness, or it adds enough darkness to actually take those brighter colors into the next posterize level down. So, I could paint again, and if I wanted to add more we could paint across the bottom, paint across the top if you want to, just to kind of add a border into your image. Of course, if you paint enough or if we tap the 0 key and paint with a 100%, well that's painting with 100% black. So, we can actually go in there and create kind of a very unique border all the way around our image as well. Okay, so if this is something that you like to do and you do it a lot, lets just scoot over to this next image. I want to show you that just anything that I do more than like 2 times a week or something I would create an action for because I don't want to sit there and manually have to add each one of those adjustment layers. So, you'll notice right down here in my actions, I have got a posterize action. In fact, I have 2 of them. One of them adds the sequence of adjustments in black and white using the black and white adjustment layer, and the other one uses the channel mixer adjustment layer. So, instead of having to go and add all those adjustment layers manually, all I need to do tap the play button, and it added them all for me. So, obviously it's too dark, but we can go in to the gradient map. In fact, it's already targeted. So, using the adjustment panel we can go and maybe select maybe a different color range or color tones in order to apply them. And we can go back to the black and white adjustment layer, and maybe we could try to get some definition. If you look at the thumbnail here. The boot in its original form actually, there is a lot of reds and yellows, but they're all very similar in color. What I am trying to do is I am trying to separate those colors as I convert this to gray scale. So, what I would do is I would actually take the reds and try to pull them up. So, let's turn on the black and white adjustment layer. See I am taking the reds and pulling them in one direction making them lighter, and I am going to take the yellows and try to pull them in the other direction and make them a little bit darker. So, what that's done is its just kind of changed the conversion to gray scale, so that when I posterize this and add my gradient, it's going to break it in different areas. I think that might have gone a little bit too much. So, maybe we bring the reds down a little bit. Let's go ahead leave it. So, this brings another point, which would be a cool technique. That is you could also go in and add like a curves adjustment layer if you didn't like the way that the image was breaking in the colors. So, we could just to the background layer, add my curve here, and we could bring the blacks down a little bit. See now you can really fiddle with exactly how your image is breaking. I just want a little bit more in the blacks, and we'll bring that up a little bit more in the light areas for added contrast. So, obviously how you decide to break your image is up to you and what colors you use, but this is really the most flexible way to do it. Of course, if we wanted to we could even-- like if this background is getting distracting, we could add another layer and just paint lighter or darker to force it into the color range, or we could go back here just to our background layer and grab something like the quick select tool. We can just kind of drag this around here and around there. Then maybe we need a little bit more selected right in here. That might have been a little too much Let's zoom in, yeah it's like a little bit too much-- No, it did a good job at the heel there. So, let's just pull in as well. Okay, great, zoom back out. Now, what we could do is let's turn on all of the other layers there. Alright, and if we don't want to see this background, we could paint on it or we could create a new layer right here. Then we could-- Let's drag that down underneath the curve there. Now because we've got this selection, obviously when I paint with a brush, and I am painting too much because remember I set that opacity back up to 100%. But if I set it to maybe 20% and paint, we can just paint that in. In fact, if we wanted to, we could even go in and make these a little bit different down here. See how it's pulling the shadow as well, and just add a wee bit of kind of a separation there. Then if I just tap the the X key again, we can just get rid of that little area right there. Oops, tap X key again and just paint in right there and maybe right there, oops too much. X key again, do that, and then we will deselect it. So, don't forget that you can still have access with all of your other tools to make your selections and selectively paint in different areas. To really customize your conversion from a full range of colors down to maybe 3 or 4 colors. Well, excellent. I hope that you see how that approach not only allows for that maximum flexibility, but also kind of grants you the power to quickly go in and customize the colors that your using in the image. My name is Julieanne Kost, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of The Complete Picture. [Music playing] Executive Producer: Bob Donlon Producer: Karl Miller Director: Kush Amerisinghe Post-Production: Erik Espera Adobe TV Productions
