Using Color to Add Emotional Impact to a Photograph

[ADOBE TV Presents][♪ music ♪] The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost] Hi, and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost, and in today's episode of The Complete Picture we're going to take a look at how we can add color as well as some supporting imagery in order to evoke a stronger emotion with an image and also to help communicate the visual narrative. So, we're going to start with this image right here which I think we would agree it's a nice image; it's decent. It's got this nice play of negative and positive space. The color and the image really tells you a little bit about the image-- the cold ice and everything. But I would really like to achieve something more. So when I was first looking at this image, what I thought of doing was putting it in a Triptych. So, in fact, we can look at this image right here, and I think it works really well as part of these three images in this one series. All of the images are very simple, they're very clean, they have similar colors and tones, and they really play well off of each other as far as the negative and positive space. But alone, this image just wasn't cutting it for me. And for me it was more personal because I was actually in Iceland taking the photograph, and to me it just doesn't express everything that was going on around me at the time. Sometimes that's just not possible. You'll be in a certain location and you just can't capture the entire feeling of the location in one frame. So I started thinking, while I was actually on location, what can I do in order to enhance this? What else did I need to add to this image? So let's take a look again. This is the original image. This was the resulting composite that I created. So here's the original; here's the result. So you'll notice that one of the things that we did, obviously, is I made the image a little bit smaller--the primary subject matter a little bit smaller-- and I placed it a little bit further down in the frame to kind of give it a little bit better balance when it's on its own. I also added some ripples here to kind of show movement, because one of the things that I noticed while I was in the lagoon in Iceland is that everything was in constant motion. Everything is really slow, but it was in constant motion, so I wanted to bring that back to the image. I also added some color in here. And I actually got that color from another photograph, and I just simply made a gradient out of it. We'll go through that in just a minute. But it adds interest to me. To me, now I'm thinking, "Why is the ice glowing?" and it adds a little bit of a sense of mystery. So I really like that. And then I also added some mountains here. Which you can barely see the reflection of the mountains here. But what it did was it added another visual element that helped move your eye around the image. And then finally, I added some pebbles. Actually, I added them to entire image, because you'll notice in the original capture, we've just got some pebbles that you can see, but they're a little bit distracting. So by adding a solid mass of pebbles, I removed those distracting elements and kind of added textural feel to the image that I really liked. Okay, so I'll just show you really quickly this is the sunset image that I grabbed the colors from in order to add the color. Here are the ripples in the pond. This actually wasn't taken in Iceland, but I really, really liked the way that the ripples just moved out from the center location. I've also added--this is kind of some water that's moving, and what I'm going to use this for is kind of like a dodge and burn over the whole image so that it breaks up that really solid background that I have. Here is the image of the pebbles that we'll be using, and here are the mountains. So what I've done just to save some time-- we'll just switch over here to Photoshop. Instead of opening each one of these individually and then combining them, I've already done that. So if we look at our layers panel right here, and we turn off these layers, you'll notice I've already got the ice, I've got the ripples here, we've got this kind of smoky, cloudy water, we've got the pebbles, and we've also got the mountain. So all of these layers are Smart Objects. And just in case you don't know how to do that, when you're in Lightroom, if you just right-mouse click on an image, or you can control click if you just have a one-button mouse, you would go down to "edit in" and you would open as a Smart Object. Not just editing it in Photoshop, but actually opening as a Smart Object. And the reason that I do that is because now in Photoshop, I can resize these images, and I can actually make changes to them in density and in color all nondistructively because I'm actually working with the original raw file. That's the benefit of using Smart Objects. Okay, so the first move, what I want to do here on this base layer is simply use free transform, which is control or command T. And we can just shrink this down a little bit. I'm holding down the "Option" or the "Alt" key as well so that it shrinks from the middle. So that's kind of a handy little shortcut. And then we can scoot that down a little bit. That might be a little too small. I'll go a little bit bigger, but the great thing again about Smart Objects is because I'm working with the Smart Object, I can resize this as many times as I want, and I don't lose any image quality. All right, we'll tap "return" or "enter." That will apply that transformation. But again, I can go back and retransform it later if I find that it's not the right size. Okay, now let's turn on or make visible the ripple layer here. I will also make it active by clicking on it. And what I need to do is I need to mask this out so that it's only showing in the background, obviously, because I need that iceberg to be visible. So let's go ahead and add a mask. We can do that using a masks panel. Just click right here; that added a layer mask. You'll notice that mask is white. So wherever the mask is white, I can see the contents of that layer-- those rippling water. So all I need to do is tap the "B" key. That gives me my brush. Here I have a very large, soft-edged brush-- just a regular brush; it's not one of the new, fancy, media-tip bristle brushes or anything. It's just a round brush. I've got the opacity set at 100 percent, which is going to be okay initially. Let's just go ahead and paint it out. But see, I'm not really sure where I need to paint because I can't see the iceberg below it. So I'll just make a little guess here--right about here. The other thing I could do of course is I could go ahead and paint the whole thing out if I wanted to, right? When you're hiding and showing layers contents using a mask, it's all nondestructive. So if you paint too far like I just did--I painted the whole mask black-- all I need to do is exchange my foreground and background colors. Just tap the "X" key. Now white is my foreground color, and now white will show those ripples wherever I paint. All right, so let's just paint them in here and paint them here. Again, I'm using that soft-edge brush so that I get that kind of soft transition between what's showing and what's not showing. And I'm going to leave it like that for now. I'm not going to go in and make a super careful selection because I just want it to slowly fade and see those ripples. Okay, now we're going to add this smoky kind of water overlay on top. So we will go ahead and select that layer and make it visible. But there's two things happening. One, obviously it's showing at 100 percent, so I need to blend it. So I'm going to use a blend mode in order to change that. But I also need to take out the color. So probably in the past I would have added an adjustment layer and used maybe a black and white adjustment layer or the channel mixer adjustment layer to remove that color, but because I'm working with a Smart Object, I can also just edit the contents of the Smart Object. Easiest way to do that, simply double-click on this icon right here-- the thumbnail for the Smart Object. When you double-click on that, what Photoshop does is it brings up that Smart Object in the camera raw window. So, fantastic. All we need to do is click right here--the HSL/Grayscale little tab right here-- and say "convert it to grayscale." And then if we wanted to go in, we could change this, but really I like what it's doing by its auto default settings so we'll just click "Okay." Again, it's totally nondestructive, but it is now going to appear as if it is in grayscale. Fantastic. So now we just need to choose a blend mode. And I happen to know that I'm probably going to choose either overlay or soft light because I just want to overlay this on top of it. But I think the overlay--yeah--it's adding too much contrast. I don't really like that so I'm going to back off a little bit and just change the blend mode to soft light. You see how it just breaks up kind of that solid area there. So I really like that. Okay, great. Now let's go ahead and we will add these pebbles. Now, they're obviously not positioned correctly, because I don't want all these squares down here. This image was just shot taken out of a hotel window, looking down. It's actually their pebbles on top of their roof--like a flat roof-- and then it's just the stepping stones so that you can step across them without stepping on the pebbles. Anyway, my point is you can get source images from anywhere, and you never quite know how they're going to merge together with some other image at some point in time. So I'm always taking pictures of things that I find visually compelling. So I would encourage you to do that as well. Okay, but obviously they are way too strong. So I'm going to change the opacity on this layer. I'm just going to start bringing it down. And we can see that when I get down to--I don't know-- somewhere around 10 percent, it's just got this nice overlay, except that, of course, I can still see those squares. So I do need to reposition it. So I'll tap the "V" key that gives me my move tool, and then we'll just scoot it down. And this image was shot originally as a vertical, so I have plenty of pebbles up here at the top. So moving it down isn't going to be a problem at all. Okay, so now, visually, I kind of have what I'm looking for, except I really don't like the colors. You'll notice that I didn't start changing the colors immediately. That wasn't the first thing I did. What I want to do is I want to get the composition set, and then I'll start adding the colors. So I could start adding the color now, but since I already created this, I know that this isn't quite enough. still needed something up at the top of the image. I still needed that mountain to bring your eye around the image and move it around. So let's go ahead and just before we do the color, we'll add this one last layer. It's a Smart Object, so we can transform it completely nondestructively. I'm going to go ahead and rotate that. I'm also going to make it a lot larger. I'm holding down the "Option" key and the "Shift" key. That would be the "Alt" key and the "Shift" key on Windows. The reason that I'm doing that is because, one, I want to scale it from the center; that's with the "option" or the "Alt" key, but the "Shift" key keeps it in proportion, and I do want to keep this in proportion. So we'll just make it--I'm actually rotating it so that this side comes down a little bit lower. So it's a little bit off balance because I like the way that this line now brings your eye around, brings it back down here. And do you notice that I also chose some really soft mountains? Well, I don't know if you'd call them soft mountains, but the shape is nice and soft and flowing. And do you see how that shape is kind of mimicked down here in the shape of the ice? So it's important to me that I'm picking different elements that are going to work well together and that there's actually a specific reasoning behind why I pick a certain kind of mountain or element. It's because it's going to fit with the overall mood of the image, and it's going to enhance that mood. Okay, so let's tap "Enter/Return." All right, now it's way too harsh, so remember this is really going to be a reflection, so we'll just set the blend mode here to overlay. Still too harsh, but that's okay because we can combine that with our opacity--bring our opacity down. But look, we've also still got some of the sky here, so we are going to also need a mask. I actually think that's a little too high. Let's bring that down a little bit more. Yeah, maybe like 35--maybe 40. Okay, we'll bring that to 40. We'll add our mask. Again, we can add the mask on the mask panel or the bottom of the layers panel--up to you. We'll add our mask, tap "B" for the brush tool. We've got our big, soft-edge brush. But look, I'm painting with the white, so I need to exchange these colors. I'll tap the "X" key, or you can use this little double-headed arrow right there to make sure that I'm painting with black because black is going to hide. And I'm just going to paint out that sky. Okay, now the problem is, because it's a reflection, I really don't want it that sharp. Not only that, but it's taking away. If I left it that sharp, do you see how now the two elements and the image are fighting each other? I need a primary element, and I want a secondary element. The mountains are the secondary element. It's just the element that's going to add a little visual interest and move your eye around the frame. So let's add a blur. And one of the great things about working with these Smart Objects is that you automatically get Smart Filters. So when I add a Gaussian Blur-- okay, that's going to be a bit much. Oh, you know what else? Look what I can see. This is giving me a big visual clue that I'm on the mask. So let's back out of here; we'll hit cancel. We'll go to our image, right? We wanted to blur the mountain, not the mask. So we click on the thumbnail for the mountains, we go up here to "Filter" "Blur" and then "Gaussian Blur." You can pick one of the other blurs if you want to. I just wanted a nice soft blur; that's why I picked Gaussian. But look, it disappears at that blur. So let's bring it down. There's three, maybe six. I still want to be able to tell it's a mountain, though, so maybe eight or nine. And click "Okay." Now, because it is a Smart Object and this is a Smart Filter, I can go back at any time. I can double-click where it says Gaussian Blur, and I can change the parameter. I can also go back in and just turn it off so it's all nondestructive. A very, very flexible way of working which is important to me because while you're doing these composites and you're trying different things, you want to make sure that you can kind of go back and forth a little bit. I rarely get all of the images together in all the right positions the first time I try this. It always takes a little bit of finessing so I always try to use the Smart Objects and the Smart Filters even though it might make my file size a little bigger and it might take a little bit more time. Okay, great. I do like that. I think it's looking really good. But again, if you had to you could go grab your move tool. You could move part of the image over if you needed to reposition it. We could free transform it; although, when you free transform, the Smart Filter is going to be hidden for a moment. We can just never see that again, so that's okay. And I think I just want to add a little bit more of an angle there. Okay, great. As soon as I hit return, it went ahead and it applied that blur for me. But now the color. All right. The color is kind of driving me crazy, especially this layer right here--the ripples. It's really making this kind of this green color that I don't really like. I also think it's just a little bit too strong. So I'm going to back off on the ripples. So I've got the mask targeted in my layers panel for the ripple layer. I'll grab my brush again, and I want to hide it a little bit around here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change my opacity to 50 percent. And we can do that by just tapping the "5" key. And then I'm just going to slowly paint it out of this area here. And the nice thing about this too is when I paint out the ripples, did you notice that now I can see that kind of pebble texture a little bit better? And it's a little bit smoother down there, and I just like the look of that. All right, as for the color, let's go back here to Lightroom for one second. I just want to make sure that you guys see this is kind of the image that I drew the colors from. So when we go back to Photoshop--basically what I did is I opened this file, and then I made a gradient using the eye dropper, sampling from this image. So when we go back to Photoshop, I don't want to sit here and make the gradient. It would take 10 minutes, and we don't need to do that. So what I've done is I've saved the gradient. But let's go look at it. Now there's two different ways I can add this color, as far as the gradient goes. I can either use a layer effect on a blank layer-- well, actually, on a layer filled with 50 percent-- or I can simply go up and add a gradient layer. I think I'll do this near the top. So I'm going to target the top of my layer stack because I want this gradient to affect everything in the layer stack. So we'll go to "Layer," we'll go to "New Fill Layer," and then "Gradient." Now here's the important thing. If I just add a gradient on top, it's just going to be solid. All I'm going to see is a gradient; I won't see the photograph underneath it. So we have to change the mode. So let's come down to something like color. We can always change the blend mode later. What I'm doing--this mode right here--you're going to see it's going to correlate to this mode in my layers panel in just a minute. So we'll click "Okay." Now let's go look at that gradient. Here we can use this drop-down menu to choose from already created gradient, but you can also click anywhere in the gradient area, and it will bring up the gradient editor. So you can see I have several gradients here that I've created. These are custom gradients that I've just actually gone down here to this area and added different color stops, and then you can double-click on a color stop and that will actually bring up your color pickers. You can go and create whatever gradient you wanted to. When you are done creating a gradient, you simply click "New." So this is the gradient that I created from that other document. I had the other document open, and I every time I brought up the color picker, I just sampled from that open document. And I know it's probably overkill with the color stops in it, but that's okay. All right, so we click "Okay" and here's the thing. It's not in the right spot, but I'm not going to go back in there and try to move all those color stops. Because you'll notice that your cursor is the move tool, so I can simply move this gradient around and it will just move in my image. So no need to go and readjust those color stops. All right, I can also change the angle if I wanted to, but I kind of like it more straight up and down here. And then I will click "Okay." But two things are happening. One, it's spilling over in this area here. It's not just confined to the ice, and the color is kind of mushy. It's not doing what I really want it to do. I want to give it some punch. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start playing with some of the other blend modes. And the easiest way to do this is if you have the move took selected, so I'll tap the "V" key again, or any of these tools right up here at the top. If you use "Shift +/-," it will actually move you through the blend mode on your layers panel. So I can now use "Shift +/-" and it will start taking me through all those different blend modes until I find one where the color is going to add more punch. I'm not really--oh--see? There we go; it's hard light. All I had to do was move through them, and then stop when I find one that works. And it is a little bit too much of an angle, so no problem; we can double-click on the gradient icon here. And then if I want to change that back to exactly 90, I can do that. Because I wanted the red over here. I know it's kind of picky, but I like that kind of glow It makes it more mysterious. What is causing that glow? All right. It's all out here too. Gross, we don't want that. Click on the mask for the gradient fill layer, grab our brush tool. We're painting with black; black is going to hide, but I'm only painting with 50 percent, so let's tap "0". That will get me to 100 percent. And again, nice, soft-edge brush. Look at that; I'm painting the gradient out of everywhere that I don't want it. All right, I've got a little bit smaller brush. I can just use the left and right bracket to come down along here. Now let's take a look. So there's before, and there's after. I think you can see, it's a totally different mood. It's almost like now there's something alive inside that ice that wants to get out. And then as the last, final finishing touch, I think it's a little odd that it's so confined to that area, so what I'd like to do is I'd like to put this kind of red and orange-y color just a little bit up here, as if the mountain is also getting hit by that color. So I'll just duplicate this. Hold down your "Option" or your "Alt" key and just drag up. Now we've got a duplicate, but it's in the wrong spot. I don't want it there, so what I'll do is I'll just fill this whole mask with black. And you can do that with "Shift + Delete" or on Windows "Shift + Backspace". I'm going to fill it with black at 100 percent. So now, this gradient fill isn't really doing anything-- this gradient fill there. What I need to do is grab my brush again, get a really big brush, and because I just want a tiny little smidgeon of color up there, I'm going to decrease the opacity down to like 20 percent. I did that by just tapping the "2" key. My opacity is now 20 percent. I need to make sure that I'm painting with white, so I'll tap "X" to exchange it, and then I'm just going to paint a little bit in here. But look, it's getting all smudge-y. What is going on? The reason it's getting all smudge-y is because that area of a gradient is kind of a darker blue area. I don't want that. So how is it that I'm going to reposition this gradient? Because the nice colorful area is actually down here, right? We can see the gradient fill layer below it. So what I need to do is actually double-click on the icon for the gradient fill. That brings up my gradient fill dialog. And then look, I can move it up. And see what I'm doing is I'm moving up the gradient. It might be a little hard to see, but see how the color is shifting there? I'm moving that gradient so that the colors appear up here as opposed to down here in this portion of the image. All right? And if it's too little or too much, we can just go in now with our paint brush and either add to or subtract from that mask. But I think you can see--and in fact, if we return back to Lightroom-- that there really is a very big difference from this original image, which does stand on its own and conveys a very different kind of feeling than this secondary image with the secondary illustrations or secondary photographs added to it as well as the color for the emotional impact. Well, excellent. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you'll join me again on the next episode of the complete picture. [♪ music ♪] [Executive Producer, Bob Donlon; Producer, Karl Miller] [Director, Kush Amerasinghe; Post-Production, Erik Espera] [ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS]