Lightroom has a set of tools that you can use to adjust white balance in your images. To see these at work open an image in the Develop module. At the top of your Basic panel are the white balance adjustment tools.
White Balance Options
The dropdown list will show you some options for adjusting white balance – what is shown here will vary depending on how your images are captured. If you capture in raw then the white balance dropdown list will contain the same options as you have on your camera for setting white balance. If you’re capturing jpg images then there are fewer options – As Shot, Auto and Custom.
On the left are the options for a raw image and on the right those for a jpeg image.
The Temperature and Tint sliders also have different units of measure depending on whether you’re working with jpgs or raw images. For jpg images both the sliders range from +100 to -100. If you’re working on a raw image then the Temperature slider shows degrees Kelvin from 2000 – 50,000 and the Tint slider ranges between + 150 and – 150.
Kelvin is a measurement of the color of light – daylight is around 5,500 degrees Kelvin. Lights we consider to be warm or pink/orange in color including tungsten globes are around 3,000 degrees Kelvin and cool lights which are blue in color such as overcast daylight are around 7,000 degrees Kelvin and higher.
Adjust White Balance
To adjust the white balance in the selected image you can select an option from the White Balance dropdown list to use to fix the image or you can use it as a starting point and then fine tune the result.
You can also manually adjust the Temp slider to add warmth or remove it from the image. Drag the sider to the left to add a blue tint to the image (to cool it down), or to the right to add a yellow tint to it to warm the image.
Use the Tint slider to balance out any excess magenta or green in the image. Drag towards the right to add magenta to the image cancelling out any green tint and drag to the left to add a green tint cancelling out any unwanted magenta.
White Balance Selector
You can also use the White Balance Selector to adjust white balance. You can select the tool by clicking on it or press W.
From the White Balance toolbar under the image you can select options that make the White Balance tool easier to use. I suggest you deselect Auto Dismiss as you can then click on the image in various places to attempt to fix it. If you have Auto Dismiss enabled you’ll only be able to click once before the selector is dismissed so, if that fix isn’t perfect then you’ll need to select the tool again to attempt another fix. This is a cumbersome way to work so I prefer to disable Auto Dismiss and put the tool away only when I am done with it.
If you click the Show Loupe checkbox then you’ll see a 5 by 5 pixel grid beside the mouse cursor. The center point in the grid is the pixel that you are currently targeting and which will be used to adjust the image if you click. This grid makes it easier for you to pick the correct point in the image to adjust to. The scale itself can be increased or decreased using the Scale option on the toolbar.
At the bottom of the loupe itself are the RGB percentage values of the pixel under the cursor. These values tell you if the pixel is neutral or not. If it is neutral then the percentages of R, G and B will all be equal – if they are not equal then there is color in that pixel.
To balance the image using the White Balance selector, click on a pixel that should be neutral grey – not white or black. When you do so, Lightroom will adjust the image so that the selected pixel is a neutral grey and, as a result, all the color in the image will change. At the same time Lightroom adds an entry to the image History for that adjustment. This means that you can wind back the history to return to an earlier white balance fix, if desired.
You should be aware that adjusting image white balance is to an extent a subjective assessment – so there is no one value that is “correct”. There are, instead, a myriad of different results that can be achieved so look for one that is it pleasing to you. In most cases viewers prefer to see some warmth in photos as they are more pleasing to the eye if they are warmer rather than cool.
I find that a good approach to take is to experiment with the white balance selector to see the effect on the image by selecting different pixels to adjust to. Then choose the most aesthetically pleasing result.
Split Toning a Black and White Image – learn how to make the Highlights and Shadows Different Colors
Split Toning applies one color to the highlights and another to the shadows in an image.
Good color choices when applying a split tone are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel such as magenta and green, blue and yellow, or red and cyan – although you can choose any combination you like.
To apply the split tone effect, drag on the Hue slider or click the color picker to choose a color to use for the Highlights and then choose something else to use for the Shadows.
Adjust the Saturation of the colors as desired.
Balance allows you to fine tune how the colors are applied to the image – drag to the left to adjust the balance towards the shadow color and drag to the right to add more of the highlight color.
How to use the Color sliders to change color and remove color casts
When an image has a colorcast or a color that you’re wanting to play down in it, select the Color option in the HSL/Color/B&W panel. Here you can select the color to minimize the impact of and reduce its impact by dragging on the Saturation slider to reduce its saturation. Drag to the right on the Luminance slider to lighten the color.
This tool also allows you to take one color and alter its hue. So, for example you can target yellow and drag it towards green or towards orange by dragging on the Yellow Hue slider. In this way, any color in the image can be adjusted to one of its adjacent colors.
Five Must Know Features of the Photoshop Brush Tool
Brushes are used a lot in photo editing from removing blemishes and smoothing skin to dodging and burning and painting on masks. Here are five important features of the brush tool in Photoshop.
1. Adjust Size, Opacity and Hardness from the Keyboard
When a brush is selected you can adjust its size without having to open the Brushes palette by clicking the [ and ] keys on your keyboard.
Provided a brush is selected you can change its Opacity by typing a number. For example, type 5 to set Opacity to 50%, type 1 for 10% and 0 for 100%.
To adjust the hardness of the brush hold the Shift key as you tap either the [ or ] keys on the keyboard. Each tap increases or decreases the hardness by 25% in the range 0%-100%. The results of doing this are harder to see as there is no hardness indicator on the tool options bar. However, if you have the Painting Cursor set to Normal Brush Tip in preferences you will see a difference in the brush size as you do so
2. Save the Brush
When you have a brush configured with your preferred settings, save it as a Tool preset. To do this from the Brush Preset list in the top left of the screen click the Create New Tool Preset button and type a name for the preset. Click Ok.
In future you can select this saved preset from the list and just start painting with it.
3. Disappearing Brushes
One of the very annoying things that will happen to most of us at one time or another is to have the brush appear to disappear. Instead of the regular brush cursor which shows the size and style of the brush you will see a crosshair cursor.
The issue is not with the brushes themselves but is with the Caps Lock key. If you disable Caps Lock on your keyboard the more visual brush cursor will reappear.
4. Paint a Straight Line
To paint in a straight line, click at one end of the line, hold the Shift key and click at the other end of the line. This draws a continuous brushstroke between both points.
If you adjust the spacing of your brush by using the Brush panel Spacing option to make it more than 100% you can create a line of dots this way.
This can also be used to remove power lines with the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Click at one end of the power line, Shift + Click at the other end to paint a straight line over the power line and it will be removed automatically.
5. Quickly Show the Brush Panel
You can quickly show the Brush panel so you can choose a brush to use by first selecting a tool that uses a brush such as the Brush Tool, Dodge, Burn, Eraser tool and so on.
Then right click on the image and the brush panel appears automatically. To select a brush and exit the panel in one step, double click the brush to use.
And now it is over to you. What other features of Brushes do you think are valuable for photographers to know?
Using the Tone Curve, you have the choice of preset settings: Linear, Medium Contrast or Strong Contrast. Use these as a starting point for adjusting the image.
Select the starting point then drag the Highlights and Lights sliders to the right to lighten these areas. Drag to the left on the Darks slider to darken the Darks. To bring detail out of the shadows, drag to the right on the Shadows slider.
When you’re printing, you’ll want a good range of tones across your image from the blackest of blacks to the lightest of lights. Use the Blacks adjustment slider to ensure that you will have some black tones.
To see the blacks in the image, hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) as you drag on the Blacks slider and stop when you see the first few colored pixels appear on the screen
Many of the fixes we commonly apply to images come from darkroom processes. Contrast masking is one of those fixes and it can be used to fix an image which is under or over exposed.
Contrast masking is a relatively simple process and it can work wonders with your images. I like it because it generally doesn’t require you to make selections and there is a lot to like about fixes that don’t involve selections.
Here’s how to use Contrast Masking to fix an under exposed image:
Open your image and duplicate the background layer. Target this duplicate layer in the Layers palette.
Desaturate this layer by choosing Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. Right now the default convert to black and white is just fine.
Alter the blend mode of this layer to Overlay.
To invert this black and white layer choose Image > Adjustments > Invert – this gives a negative of the image.
Adjust the layer opacity to suit.
Convert the top layer to a Smart Object by choosing Filter > Convert for Smart Filters.
Now blur this layer by choosing Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Adjust the Radius to adds some sharpening back to the image. Check the preview to get the best result for the image.
Learn how to create uneven lines that look hand drawn to use for cartography and other uses in Photoshop. Make use of Hue/Saturation adjustment to add vintage color, use brushes to create a pattern for the lines. Also, show how to render lines in black and white without any shades of grey and, lastly, how to distort them slightly. This video also shows how to add shadow around land mass and multiple lines of edging for a land mass.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you some line drawing techniques for creating maps in Photoshop. In this video I’m going to show you how you can create the effect that we have here around the edge of this chart. We’re going to draw the edge. We’re going to add this shading and also create these lines so that we can see how this could be created. The pattern in the middle is just a very simple pattern fill. We won’t be covering that, but we’ll be covering everything else in this video tutorial.
So to get started I’m going to start with a new image. And I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to create a very tall image. So it’s going to be 2,000 pixels tall, RGB color. Background contents of white is just fine, so I’ll just click Ok to create that image.
And what I want to do first of all is to create these lines. And we’re going to do that using a paintbrush. So I’m going to click on the paintbrush and let’s select a brush to use. And what I want is something relatively small so I’m going to start with something like this 4 pixel brush. And then I’m going to choose Window and then Brush to open this brushes panel here. And what I want to do is to set up the brush so it’s going to paint the lines for me. So first of all I’m going to adjust the spacing so that there’s increased spacing between the brush tips. And I’m going to leave the size at about 4 pixels. Then I’m going to shape dynamics because I want the size of the brush to vary.
So I’m going to increase this quite a bit so we start seeing that there’s some variety in the brush here. Minimum diameter I don’t want to change at all. And that’s pretty much all I need to do with the brush right now. And then I’m going to test it. So I’m going to make sure that I have black set as my background or foreground color, which it is here. And then I’m going to click with my brush here and I’m going to Shift click at the bottom because that will create a straight line of brush strokes. And let’s just have a look in here a bit closer at this.
You can see that we now have this sort of dotted line which is different varieties of line. Now if that’s not quite what I want I can just zoom out and we can start again. So I’m just going to undo the brush and perhaps we’ll go back and make the brush just a little bit bigger than it was. So let’s go to brush tip shape, increase the size just a little bit, and perhaps bring down the size jitter or up the minimum diameter so that we haven’t got quite so much variety in our brushes. I’m going to click here and then Shift click to finish my brush stroke.
Now what I want is a sampling of this. So I’m going to use this tool here which is the single column marquee tool, one of the few times you will ever find a need for this particular tool. I’m going to zoom in here so that I can see exactly what I’m selecting and I’m just going to click to select a single line through this image. Now that’s not the world’s best. So let’s just try again. My brush stroke is not completely vertical so that’s causing me some problems here. Let’s start this again. I’m going to click here, and again let’s Shift click to create a straight line. And let’s see if that’s a bit straighter. That will be when we click just to one side of it. So that’s going all the way through the dot.
So I’m just going to choose Edit and then Define Pattern because this is going to be a pattern. And it will be just this dashed line as our pattern so I’ll click Ok. I can now close this image because I don’t need it any longer. And let’s see how our pattern will work.
I’m going to create a new document, this time 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size. And this time I’m going to fill it. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Fill. And I’m going to fill it with a pattern. So I’m going to select Pattern. And the very last pattern in this container here will be the pattern we’ve just created so I’ll click Ok. And there are our lines. And that’s a starter for our map.
Now with our lines we can make these bigger. So I’ve got a background layer here but I can click to make it into a regular layer. And we can just enlarge this. So if we want larger lines all we need to do is to just drag up and down on this to just make the lines a whole lot wider than they are. And because they’re lines we can just size everything like this.
If you want to make sure that that there are no gray areas to the lines, as you can see they’ve got slightly fuzzy sides here, just use Image and then Adjustments and then Threshold. And that just makes the lines black and white. They’re pure black and white now. And if you want a bit of variety, Edit, Transform and then Warp. And you can just adjust the lines with a little bit more of a curve or something through them so that they look a little less like they’re straight lines and perhaps a little bit more hand-drawn feel about them, Ok. Now let’s add our map part.
So I’m just going to grab the Lasso tool and for this exercise just draw a very wiggly sort of coastline that we’re going to use for our map. And white is my foreground color so I’m going to Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill this with white. Now I want an edge around here so I’m going to choose Edit and then Stroke. And I’m going to stroke the edge with black. I’m just going to get all my tools over on this screen. So I’m going to select Black. And I’m going to make this a 6 pixel to begin with. And it’s going to be on the inside of this shape so I’ll just click Ok. And there’s our 6 pixel stroke.
Now I’m going to bring in this size. So I’m going to choose Select, Modify, Contract and I’m going to contract this by 10 pixels because I think that will be enough and then add another stroke. So again, Edit, Stroke. And this time I’m going to just use a 3 pixel stroke, but again on the inside. And then we’ll repeat that again, Select, Modify, Contract by 10 pixels and then repeat the stroke, Edit, Stroke and just click Ok. And then when I press Ctrl D you’ll see that we have the edges around here. But I’m actually just going to undo that Deselect right now because I have another piece to go in here.
What I want to do is to fill this shape with the grass so I have that as a pattern. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Fill, and again still pattern but here is my grass pattern here that I created earlier. And I’m just going to fill it with the grass pattern. Now we’re going to see how to create the shading around the edge. So I’m going to deselect the selection. I’m going to make sure I’m selected on the land, which is where the shading is to go, and I’m going to choose the Add Layer Style button here. And we’re going to choose an outer glow.
Now outer glow sounds like it should add some lightness around the edge but we can use it to add darkness. All we’re going to do is to select a dark color. Well we’ll stick with black right now. Now we can’t use screen as our blend mode. We’ll have to use something that will darken. So we’re going to choose multiply. And we’re going to set this if we want it to be full strength at 100 percent opacity. And we can adjust the size which is really the feathering around here. And the spread is how big it is. It would sound better to me if spread were really the feathering and size was the actual size. But that’s what you’re going to use.
So I’ll just click Ok. And now if we want to add this sort of sepia tone to the image, I’m going to make sure I have the image selected, and we’re going to do that with the hue/saturation adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation, click Ok. We’re going to select Colorized because we want to colorize this. And then we’re going to go and pick up our sort of brown color, increase the saturation and adjust the lightness. And you’re just looking for that sort of effect that is going to say vintage map to you. So I’m probably just going to select that for now.
And then I would finish off by cropping my image. We probably don’t need quite as much sea visible. In my image I have a one to one crop set here. That’s why it’s behaving a bit strangely. And there is our final result.
We’ve created lines using a brush in Photoshop. They’re all different size lines and we’ve created this sort of effect of an old-fashioned map. And actually if I just drag this adjustment layer up over the top of the fill we’ll really get that look of a vintage map.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my Photoshop tutorials on this YouTube channel. Subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed it please comment and like this video. You’ll find more videos, tips, tricks and tutorials at my website at projectwoman.com.
Learn how to combine two images to make a collage. Includes use of Blend modes in Photoshop, color range color selection, clipping mask, layer mask, hue saturation adjustment layer, drop shadow layer style.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create some simple collage effects using blend modes in Photoshop. This is the effect that we’re going to create in this video tutorial. I’m going to show you how you can put the pieces of this together in just a few minutes using a couple of images and some blend modes.
We’re going to start off with this image and another one that I shot at the neon boneyard in Las Vegas, and that’s giving us the texture. And we’re going to combine these two images with a blend mode. And then we’re going to extract the color from this original image, this sort of orange color. And we’re going to recolor it using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. But if we wanted to leave it at this point we could leave it just with that additional color. And we’ll also going to add a drop shadow with a different color behind it.
So let’s see how we would create this effect. And I’m going to start with my two images, and I’m going to put one image into the other. So I’m going to grab this neon boneyard image and I’m just going to drag and drop its background layer in on top of this original image. I’m just going to size it so that it’s right over the top. And the first thing I would do with a collage like this is look and see what sort of opportunities I had with blend modes.
So I’ll generally select the first blend mode in the list, Dissolve, which generally gives me nothing at all. And now I can just arrow down and see what happens when I click on each of these blend modes. And all I’m looking for is something interesting. And you’ll generally get a better effect with this if you use images that are a little bit more textural and a little less like something where you don’t really particularly want to bring out of the image exactly what was in it. But you want to discover how these two images can interact with each other and what you can do with them as they interact. So that’s all the way down through the blend modes. And so I’m going to go back up and I’m going to settle on something that I want to use. And generally the most interesting bits are going to be in the overlay or the contrasty area. So in this area and sometimes even with lighten and darken.
So let’s just go up through these and find something that we like. And I’m thinking actually I might like something like this perhaps with the Opacity dragged down a little bit. Now what I want to do is to bring out the orange color in the original flower so that I can lighten them a little bit in this layer here. And what I’m going to do is create a duplicate of the background layer. And I’m going to drag it above the image. So right now all we’re seeing is this original background. And what I want to is to select the leaves in it.
Now the leaves are really bright colored here. So I’m going to choose Select. And in this case I’m going to use Color Range because it’s going to be the easiest way to select these leaves. Now either I can select on the sampled color and add to it this way by just clicking on these leaves or I could use just the reds and just grab the reds. But I think Sampled Colors is actually going to give me a slightly better effect here.
So let’s just go back to this and let’s choose Sampled Colors here and just click Ok. Now that has isolated the leaves here and what I want to do is to keep these leaves but drop the rest of the image out. And I’ll do that with a mask. And because my leaves are selected, all I need to do is to click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what happens is that the leaves are then masked and left behind and the rest of the image is just dropped away. So this is the before and this is the after. And you can see we have brought in the color from these leaves.
Now if we wanted to we could even lighten this color. We’ve got some of the orange color in. But we may want to brighten it up even more. So I’ll make sure that my image layer is selected and choose Image, Adjustments. And then I could use levels or curves. I’m going to use levels, and I’ll just lighten this is a little bit and click Ok. Now in the earlier image that you saw we had actually colored these blue and it’s very easy to color them blue.
To do that we’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer and we’ll choose a hue/saturation adjustment layer and just click Ok. Now I want this adjustment layer to only affect the red leaves so I’m going to clip this. So with this adjustment layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. And so anything that I do to this adjustment layer here is only going to affect the layer below, just these red flowers. So now let’s double click on the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and now we can go and make some changes to it. And I’m looking for a blue color which will either be at this end or this end of the hue slider. So I can get to either this sort of greeny blue if I wanted or I can get to a sort of purplely blue. I’m thinking the greeny blue will be pretty good here. And now I can adjust its saturation and its lightness from here. So when I have what I like I’m just going to close that dialogue. So that has recolored those leaves to a bluey color.
And finally let’s add a drop shadow behind the leaves. So I’m going to select the leaf layer, and I’m going to choose a drop shadow effect. Now drop shadows might start out being dark but they don’t have to end up being dark. So what I’m going to do is go and find a really cool color for this drop shadow. And I’m thinking a really, really bright pink will do me. So let’s choose that. And I want to up the opacity of this. I could set it to normal so it’s going to be a very, very pink shadow. And then I’m going to adjust the settings for this. Spread is going to be the size of the shadow and softness or size is going to give me some softness. But there’s a very small sweet spot here on this that I can very, very easily exceed. So I’m just going to add my shadow in. And I think I’m going to multiply blend mode my shadow, not apply it with the normal blend mode. Although I could use normal for example with a much lower opacity if I wanted to give it this sort of pinky color. I might leave it at that.
So there’s a way of creating some interesting collage effects. And all we’ve done is grabbed a couple of images and put them on top of each other and blended them with something that counts as being an interesting blend mode. And then I isolated the orange flowers in the image and brightened them up. I also added a drop shadow in a very contrasty color. And I added to a hue/saturation adjustment layer that only effects these orange flowers to use the brightness of them but to color them a different color. And you can do all sorts of things by just combining images. And that gives you lots of practice at making color selections, using clipping masks, using masks, using blend modes and just having a little bit of playtime and a little bit of fun creating interesting effects in Photoshop.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel and please like and comment on the tutorials if you would. Also visit my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials on Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop and a whole lot more.
Learn to make lines thicker or thinner using a Filter in Photoshop. This is useful for adjusting scanned line art images, as well as, for thickening up lines on images which you have converted to a line drawing inside Photoshop.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can easily make lines thicker or thinner on line art images that you either scan into Photoshop or create in Photoshop yourself. In this video tutorial I’m going to show you a really quick technique for making lines a lot thinner or a lot thicker. And this is handy for images where you’ve actually converted it to line art or where you’ve got line art like this that we’ve actually scanned in.
To make the lines thicker choose Filter and then Other and then Minimum. And with Minimum you can then select the minimum radius which is going to make the image lines a lot thicker and you can test these out. Generally just one or two pixels is like all you need to do. And this is the original image and this is the thicker lined image. So let’s perhaps take this up to 4 and I’ll click Ok. And that has just thickened the line. So if that were all we wanted to do we could just save this and be off. But let’s have a look and see how we can make the lines thinner.
I’m going to choose Filter and this time, Other, and this time we’re looking at Maximum. And we’re just going to set the maximum line width. And so we want this down to something that gives us the lines that we’re looking for. So here I have it set to 5. This is what it was. This is what it is now. If I go a bit smaller the lines are going to get thicker. If I get bigger the lines are going to get thinner to the extent where they actually totally disappear. So you need to find this sweet spot here for your particular image. But if you do want to make the lines that are fairly thick right now to be a little bit finer then you can do that here with this tool. And these are again Filter, Other. Maximum allows you to set it so it’s smaller and minimum allows you to set the width so it’s larger.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on my YouTube channel. Please like and comment on this video if you do like it. And look out for more videos, tips, tricks and techniques on my website at projectwoman.com.
