Transcript:
So what exactly can? Netflix’s stranger things serious, teach us as photographers about photo post-production well other than having just a phenomenal color grade that I really do like and a great story. Eighties themed, I’m biased. They also go into this upside-down world This upside-down reality. It’s a reality that runs parallel with their current reality, but only certain people can see it in the show. The exact same thing is happening right now in your images. So we’re gonna tap in to this upside-down world. I’m going to show you a really crazy trick. That’s gonna help you with color. [MUSIC] So without giving away too much information about what Netflix is stranger, Things is all about the phenomenal series, Some great cinematography and just a really cool story. If you’re like 80s stuff, it’s totally up your alley, okay, and that intro that it just created, there took me like three hours to create so. I hope you enjoyed that as well. But in Netflix is stranger things. It’s a story about these kids that basically find an alternate reality or a parallel universe that’s running with their current universe, and there’s some interaction that happens between the two worlds and sometimes one world spills into the other and vice versa and the same thing can happen in our images. If we let it if we aren’t aware of what’s happening, though it can do some reach some havoc on our photos, so and what? I’m talking about here is actually if we press command or control, I on any one of our layers. We’re gonna get the inverted copy of it. This is the upside down. This is the upside down world. Essentially, what’s happening here is it’s taking all of the colors in our image, all the data in our image, and it’s giving us the inverse. So whatever was black is now white. Whatever was blue is now yellow and so on and so forth if we look at the color wheel here and this color wheel. I’m gonna give you this in a download. If you’re on Youtube, you can click on the card above or go into the description, and you’ll go to a page where you can download this color wheel as well as an action that I’m gonna with this video, but if we press command or control, I on this, you’ll see that the background goes black and anything that was red now turns cyan, and what was cyan now turned red and blue to yellow and green to Magenta. So what we’re looking at here is basically the inverse concepts of complementary colors in color theory, and I’m gonna be giving you a crazy amount of information here with this tutorial, but it’s all gonna come together in the end. So this alternate reality, this alternate universe, If we just press command or control, I on there, we get to that there’s another way we can get to that. Though, without doing pixel level adjustments, that’s actually modifying the pixels and inverting them. One thing that’s better than that, though, is using the inverted adjustment layer here. Okay, so the other day I was about to make a black-and-white photo and my typical black and white photo, I put a gradient map on the image that was from black to white in the gradient, but I was playing around with the inverted adjustment layer and when I put the inverted adjustment layer on there, I changed the blend mode to color. Now, what that does, It allows the luminance values underneath to stay the same and only allow the colors from the inverted layer to rest on top of the colors of the background layer and where this comes from is actually from my painting background. If you ever had a color that was fully saturated so 100% red, and you wanted to take away The saturation from that red and the pigment world, you would add a little bit of green to that color so that it would subdue the 100% saturation of red by adding it’s complement to it well in this world in the digital world. We know that the digital color wheel. The inverse color is cyan to red. Keep tracking me. This is some really important stuff. If I wanted to completely make my colors go to black and white. If I change the opacity here to 50% look at that, we now have a black and white image, and this is actually probably the most natural version of a black and white photo that you can get for your image. Why is that because it’s taking the inverted colors blending them with the current colors and giving you the exact tonal qualities of the colors that exist in your image? One thing that I noticed here is that if I did my typical black and white conversion by adding a hue/saturation layer underneath that, and I started messing around with certain colors like I would grab. Maybe this color right here. And then move that up and change the saturation and the hue normally in a regular black-and-white image. What would happen is I would get a richer version of blue, but when I have the inverted layer above it with all the algorithm with all that offset, that’s happening with the colors, I’m actually not getting a black and white image anymore. You’re seeing that there’s some blue color here. Well, what’s happening here is that this is now telling me, hey, dude! This color is so oversaturated that the inverted color that you want to add to. It can’t even reduce the saturation. So this got me thinking. The light bulb went off the other day. I was I showed this image here. This photo right here. I showed this photograph right here and someone said well. Blake, that’s great, but gets a little oversaturated in the yellows and I was like well, me it is. I know it is because I can look at it and I can see that. I did that as an artistic effect, but I wanted to say to myself, okay, that this person was so inclined to tell me that that yellow was oversaturated. How would we know that that yellow is actually oversaturated well? If we take that inverted layer, we change it to the color blend mode so that those colors start to cancel each other out, and we change the opacity to 50% I can clearly see that that yellow is oversaturated because it’s showing through the black and white color that is a clear and present identifier to me that that color is oversaturated. If I look at the other colors in the image, the blues and the magentas they weren’t oversaturated, even though they might appear like they have a high saturation of color, they are not oversaturated, but the yellows clearly are so. How exactly do we fix that then? Well, there’s the hue/saturation adjustment layer here if I put that underneath the inverted layer, and then I use the targeted adjustment tool I can then click on the color that’s a problem and I can start to reduce the saturation of that color to get this more to a black and white looking image. That’s just to assess the fact that I’ve got a problem with that color yellow, So if I turn off that inversion layer, you can see that we now have subdued the saturation of the color yellow Look at that now it’s not oversaturated, however, it doesn’t have the same artistic expression that I would like it to have. So there are some negatives to this, all right. With this alternate reality, we can see now that we have a perfect black and white image, which means that none of our colors are oversaturated. I want you to take this kind of this. Knowledge as you know for face value for what it is now. If you’re trying to do something for an artistic expression, that’s great, do it all right, but if you’re oversaturated and your art and the artistic expression is overtaking the eye, and it’s annoying the eye that is when we have a problem do. I think that this is really annoying to the eye, not necessarily, but I would take the best of both worlds here. Maybe change this to 50% and I’d be happy with that yellow color. Which then that tells me, okay. Where do we know that you want to be artistically expressive with that yellow Blake, but take it down, All right, It’s a little bit too yellow. There are other cases, though, like in this image, where we have a blue background that is very vibrant blue and these yellow balloons that are screaming at us and the colors here are just they’re nice, but it’s just so oversaturated that it’s it’s killing my eyes, so what I’m gonna do with this is I’m gonna do that exact same inversion, so I’m gonna put the inverted layer on there. I’m gonna change this to the color blend mode, and I’m gonna drop the opacity down to 50% So what that should do is, and that should tell us, okay. We should have a black and white image here. If none of our colors are oversaturated. If we look at this, it still looks like we have somewhat of a color image or at least a selective color image. Where this artist from this. Adobe Stock Image that I got really wanted us to pay attention to those yellow and cyan colors in the image. So how can we subdue that, though, without using the hue/saturation adjustment layer and think like a painter? This is the really critical part. I’m gonna click on the background layer. I’m gonna make a selective color adjustment now. What the selective color adjustment does is? It’s exactly like mixing paint. I told you before that if I ever had a hundred percent red when I was painting and I wanted to subdue that red. Naturally, I would add a little bit of green pigment to it so that it would tone down the red a little bit and make it not 100% saturated. We can do this same thing, Just like a painter would in Photoshop. So I’m gonna click on the cyan color. The cyan color in the background is really what’s bothering me right now. So if I add more cyan to it. By increasing the percentage of cyan, that’s existent in the color cyan, we’re gonna get a much more saturated version of cyan and it’s making my eyes just water. It’s too much cyan, but if I bring this down and I add a little bit of red to that cyan, I’m gonna tone down the nature of that cyan color. I can also go down here to the black, so I can make that color more intense by adding more black to it, or I can make it less intense by adding a little bit of white to it. And then if we take off that inversion layer, we still have a beautiful cyan there, but you notice what it’s not doing. It’s not blowing out our eyeballs like this sine would have been as it’s showing through the upside-down world. Something’s bleeding through that upside-down world. Two things are actually it’s yellow and cyan, so we can do the same thing with the color yellow, so with the color yellow here if I want to subdue the nature of that color yellow. I don’t want to add more yellow to it. I want to add some blue to it. So I’ll increase the percentage of the color blue that exists within the color yellow. And then I may be able to make those a little bit lighter too. And then if I drop the inverted layer off of there, look at that, okay, so here is artistic expression. Just screaming at you. It wants you to see these colors. The problem is, these colors are more than likely out of gamut. So if you tried to print this, it wouldn’t look so good If we add that selective color adjustment layer, look at that that actually subdues the nature of the color allows us to enjoy the image without it, just bleeding into our eyes and killing our retinas there with colors that really shouldn’t exist in this world. Here is another image. I’m gonna click on this image and I’m going to show you The action that I’ve created. It’s called inverted layers and it’s called the super saturation finder, so we’ll, press play on this action and what’s it gonna do? It’s going to give you that saturation assessment layer that goes on the top or that inverted color layer that inverted layer set to the color blend mode at 50% opacity. Then it’s gonna tell you. Hey, if you want to, if your image is black and white, it probably means that the colors in your image are pretty good and not oversaturated, but if you’re seeing a color pier through, you might want to look at the red and cyan relationship or the blue and yellow relationship or the green and Magenta relationship and see if you get this color to not bleed through the upside-down world, So I’m gonna go ahead and click on this. This is in the more than likely the Magenta area because Magenta and Pink are very close to one another. So if I add a little bit of green to that by reducing the amount of Magenta, I’m adding green, and then I might even be able to reduce the amount of cyan and then maybe increase or decrease the intensity of that color. Now let’s click on this. See that pink before was very vibrant pink. Now it’s not so vibrant this like this. I think my eyes go directly to the pink and they don’t go to the woman’s face. I’m distracted by the color, and I can’t enjoy the portrait here. I can enjoy her face. More and it pushes back and subdues the amount of Magenta coming forward and in my face, so I’m using this inverted world to assess the colors in my image. Does that mean that if I make an artistic expression where color is oversaturated because that’s what I want it to look like that. That’s a problem, not necessarily, but if I look at my image and I see that there’s a problematic error, that area that is distracting me from enjoying the image, I can use this assessment tool to see if that color or any of those colors are bleeding through the upside-down world to a point that it becomes a distraction. So if we look at the case of this image, that cyan is overpowering, we can actually probably go into that cyan, and we can even reduce it a little bit more, okay, and that actually makes a more enjoyable image. If I turn this off, You’ll see the potency of that saturation of the cyan is so much that it’s swallowing this portrait of this young woman who wants to be excited about her birthday. If we subdue the saturation a little bit, we can enjoy the image a little bit more in a photograph like this. The saturation of the pink is taking us away from the portrait that helps in an image like this. The saturation of the yellow bleeds through that upside-down world. But I enjoy the yellow here because of the interaction that it has with that little space inside the image, but I think we could definitely benefit from reducing the saturation on this image. A little bit more in the case of this photo. This actually shows us here that nothing is really oversaturated here. We have a little bit of yellow, That’s bleeding through in the background there, but that draws us into that area and makes that area a really enjoyable place to rest our eye and it’s not taking away from the entire conversation that’s happening between me and this piece. So we use this tool as an assessment tool, we use this upside-down world as an assessment, so that’s what Netflix is. Stranger Things can teach us as photo postprocessors there is an alternate universe to every one of our photographs, and it’s the inverted colors or think about it this way from an artistic perspective, it’s just all of the compliments of the current colors that are in our image and we can use those for many different things. I also invite you to download the color wheel that I showed you here as well as the inverted action. So if you can’t remember those steps, all you got to do is press play on this action. It goes over everything you need to know and even give you some tips on what you might need to offset by using the Selective color adjustment layer. If you’re on Youtube, click the card that’s above or in the description below. If you’re on Facebook, it’ll be in the description above if you are on f/64 academy, you’ll see it in a button above the video. So my name is Blake Curtis. Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this. If you like this tutorial, please subscribe. I come out with new content. All the time hit the little bell next to it. So you get notified when that new stuff happens. Tell a friend and leave a comment below about maybe some of the things that you’ve discovered in the inverted world. [music] you!