From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

B/W conversions, color toning, and snapshots - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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B/W conversions, color toning, and snapshots

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- [Instructor] Camera Raw can convert an image to black and white, add color toning, and create vintage effects, all with a few simple slider adjustments. I'll select the Abandoned Houses and open them in Camera Raw, and I'm going to change the Edit option to black and white. That'll change the profile to Adobe Monochrome, but if I wanted to select a different profile, we could use the Browse button and then choose from any of the black and white profiles. For now, I'll just leave it set to Adobe Monochrome. The Color Mixer panel will automatically change to the Black and White mixer as soon as you're in black and white, but here, we can use the mixer to change the way the original colors in the image are converted to black and white. So for example, I can move the Orange slider to either decrease or increase the brightness value of the oranges in the original file as they become converted to a gray scale value. We can also use the Targeted Adjustment tool, so I can click in the barn and drag to the right to lighten or to the left to darken. Here, I'll darken the reds a bit, but I want to lighten the yellows and green, so I'll click in the green grass area and drag over to the right. To darken the blues in the sky, I'll click and drag to the left. Now, to add a color tone to this image, I'll use the Color Grading panel. Here, we can add color to the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights of our image. We can also use the Blending slider to blend the colors and the Balance slider to shift what is defined as a shadow midtone and highlight. At first, I'm going to add a very vibrant blue to the shadows, and a yellow to the highlights, just to show the Balance slider. As I move it to the left, we can see we get a lot more blue in the image, in the shadows. If I move it to the right, we get a lot more yellow. All right, I'll double-click on that to set it back to the default, and I'm going to add a green to the midtones and shift the highlights towards red. I'll move the Blending slider all the way to the left so that we can distinctly see the three colors, the blue, the green, and the red that I've added to the shadows, midtones, and highlights. If I move the Blending slider over to the right, then there's a lot more crossover between those colors. In fact, if we go all the way to the right, it's difficult to even see the green that I've added to the midtones, because it's been blended with blue in the shadows and with red in the highlights. Okay, I'll reset that and then I can double-click in any of the circles in order to reset those values. Here, I want to make a sepia tone, so I'll move the blue in my shadows over towards the reds, and then use the circle inside the color wheel in order to decrease the amount of red. Then, I'll move the greens more towards a yellow-orange and decrease the value there, as well. I'll leave the highlights as their default, because I don't want to add any color tint into the sky. We can also use these sliders underneath each one of the color wheels in order to darken or lighten the midtones, shadows, or the highlights. All right, I'm happy with that, so I want to save this so that I can come back to it later. I'll click on the Snapshot icon, click the Snapshot, and then I'll call this Sepia. Now, I also want to create a more vintage-looking image. I'll return to the Edit stack and hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows, and choose to reset the color grading. Then I'll change the profile back to Adobe Color, and in the Color Mixer, I'm going to select Saturation and decrease the saturation for the reds, as well as the oranges and the yellows. I'll really decrease the greens, blues, purples, and magentas. Then I'm going to move to the Hue, to get rid of some of the yellow down in the grass, I'm going to move the yellows over to the right. Then I'll return to Saturation and just finesse the amount of yellows that I want in the image. I'll move to Luminance and let's increase the luminance for the reds, as well as the oranges and the yellows. I'll decrease the luminance for the aquas and the blues in the roof and the sky. We can also add a vignette using the Effects panel. There's a disclosure triangle that will show additional options. We can make the vignette have a dark edge, and we can change the midpoint, as well as the roundness and the feather or the softness of the edge. If I don't want the vignette in my highlights, we can use the Highlight slider. We could also make a white vignette and actually make an edge around the image by moving the midpoint, the roundness, and the feather, all the way to the left. If I want to add a little bit of a softness, I'll just back off on the feather. We can also add a Grain effect by selecting Grain and then increasing the amount of grain, the size, as well as the roughness. I'm happy with that, so I will click on the Snapshots again, click the Snapshot icon, and then call this Vintage. Now, these snapshots are going to be saved with the file, and it's very easy to view and select either one of them. When I click Done and we return to Bridge, we can see whatever snapshot I had last clicked on, but when I choose to edit in Camera Raw and return to the snapshot, that other option is always available. So as you can see, converting to black and white, adding color toning, and creating a vintage effect with a vignette is as easy as moving a few sliders in Camera Raw.

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