welcome back to another very exciting tutorialhere at the photoshoptrainingchannel.com. my name is jesus ramirez, and you can findme on instagram @jrfromptc. in this tutorial, we're going to learn howto color match in photoshop. this is going to be a 3-part tutorial. we will learn how to use adobe stock's visualsearch to find the right images for our projects, then we will learn two color matching techniques. the first method is a quick fast way the beginnerscan use to start color matching in no time, while the second method will give you an advancedtechnique, which will give you precise results. the color that we're going to match onto theobjects in our images is greenery, the pantone
color of the year 2017. every year, since 2000, the pantone colorinstitute has chosen the color that reflects the current cultural climate. the pantone color of the year has historicallyinfluenced trends in all facets of design, including architecture, interior decor, fashion,food, travel and many other fields. we're going to start this tutorial by firstfinding the right image for this project using adobe stock. instead of a regular keyword search, we willuse adobe stock's new visual search. this enhanced way of searching allows us touse the visual contents of an image to find
another. in this project, i would like to create aholiday themed design. i would like to use green and red disposablecoffee cups isolated on a white background. using a coffee cup on white paper, i mockedup the type of image that i'm looking for and took a photo with my cell phone. if you're following along with this tutorial,you can head over to my website photoshoptrainingchannel.com or use the short url ptcvids.com and downloadthis image. there's a link for it right below this video. but, anyway, here we are at stock.adobe.com,and in the search bar, you can click on this
camera icon to bring up the visual searchwindow. you can drag an image onto there, or you canclick on the browse button, which will open up a window where you can find any file inyour computer and upload it to adobe stock to perform the search. i have the coffee cup here. i can select it, click on open and this isgoing to run a visual search. you will notice that the resulting imageswill be similar to what i uploaded--cups isolated by a white background. i can also refine the search by coming intothe search box and typing in a keyword, so
i can type in "holiday" then click on thesearch icon, and you will notice that all the resulting images now have a holiday theme,but the one i like and the one that we will use for this tutorial is this one here. it has everything that i'm looking for, well,except for one thing. it's not the right color. we'll, of course, use photoshop to apply thegreenery pantone color of the year to this cup. but, first, we must save this to the creativecloud. hover over the "save preview" icon and saveit to any of your libraries.
if you have an older version of photoshopwithout cc libraries, then you can save the preview to your desktop. i'll save this image to my library calledtutorial ideas. back in photoshop, in the libraries panel,you will see that the image that we saved from adobe stock is there. if you don't see the libraries panel, go towindow and click on library. from the libraries panel, you can double clickon the image to open it up in a new tab, or you can click and drag it into any open document,which is what i will do. i'm going to adjust the size of the imageby clicking and dragging on the corner handles
while holding shift, then hit enter or returnon the keyboard to place the image. first, we're going to select the greenerycolor, which is the pantone 376c. double click on the foreground color and bringup the color picker window. then click on color libraries, select pantonesolid coated from the dropdown and find the pantone 376c color. you can click on the general green area, thenuse the arrow keys on the keyboard to scroll up or down. keep in mind that if the focus, the blue highlightis on the dropdown, the arrow keys will change the book, not the color, so press the tabkey to remove the focus off the dropdown,
then click on anyone of the swatches and tapthe down arrow key. once you find and select pantone 376c, pressok. create a new layer by clicking on the newlayer icon and we name it "greenery." then, press b on the keyboard to enable thebush tool and paint directly over the coffee you don't have to be precise at all. simply go into the blending mode dropdownin the layers panel and choose hue. this will apply the green color to the cup,and it will not affect the white on the design of the cup. you do see a little bit of the green spillingon to the background and into the surface
where the cup is sitting on. this is because there is red in the ambientcolor hitting those surfaces, so you need to paint on those areas as well to hide thered. i'm not going to take the time to do thatnow in this tutorial, but you do have that option. it will not affect anything that does nothave color. so neutral grays, white and black will beunaffected. in images without white backgrounds, you canuse a layer mask to contain the colors to specified areas, which is what we're goingto do in the next example.
something i want to point out is that thisblending mode, hue, does not adjust luminosity or saturation, so the color may not be exactlyas the greenery we selected. if i create a new layer, rename it "greenerysample color" and create one large circle by using a large hard edge brush. by the way, you can increase the size of thebrush by using the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard. press v to select the move tool and move thecircle over the coffee cup. you will see that the greens are not the same,but this image still works for my purposes, so i'm going to license the image by right-clickingon it from the libraries window and select
"license image." photoshop will ask me if i'm sure that i wantto purchase this image. i am, so i'm going to press ok. the full-resolution version of the image withoutthe watermark will be downloaded on to my creative cloud account, and it will automaticallybe updated in my working document. that's a big advantage over other stock imageproviders. i get to try out all the images before i buythem and i only license what works. i don't have to redo any work. all unflattened versions of the unlicensedimage will be updated once i license it.
it will keep all the distortions, masks, filtersand adjustments that i've applied to it. now, if you want a more accurate color match,then you will have to use a more advanced method. i'm going to disable the coffee cup layer,the greenery layer, and this white bg layer. now we're looking at another adobe stock imageand the green circle. if you want to follow along with this image,type this number and hit adobe stock search and download it to your library or throughdesktop. for the advanced color matching technique,we're going to work with the lab color mode. my guess is that you're currently workingwith the rgb color mode or the cmyk color
mode. you can go into the image menu. under mode, you can see which color mode hasa check mark next to it. that is your current color mode. in my case, i'm using rgb. change the color mode to lab. click on "don't merge" and "don't rasterize." this is the easiest color conversion to do,and it's non-destructive. no matter what color mode you start with,it will always fit within the lab color mode.
keep in mind that not all adjustment layers,filters, and tools will be available in this color mode, so you must convert it back torgb or cmyk once you have completed the color match. one of the biggest differences between laband rgb is that lab separates grayscale information completely from color information. this allows us to work with color separatefrom luminance. in other words, we can alter the color ofan object without affecting detail. this graphic shows you how each of the threechannels work. the l channel or lightness is the easiestto understand.
it controls the luminance values of the image. it has no color values at all. the lightness values range from zero to 100. the "a" channel is a color balance betweengreen and magenta. the center is neither one. notice that these are the same colors as thetint slider in camera raw and lightroom. the "b" channel is the color balance betweenblue and yellow. these are the same colors as the temperatureslider in camera raw and lightroom. the warm colors are positive numbers--magentaand yellow, while negative numbers are cool--green
and blue. a numerical value of zero is in-between bothcolors. it's 50% gray, neither green nor magenta,or neither blue nor yellow. now that you have a basic understanding ofwhat the lab color mode is and how it works, we will apply the greenery color to this couch. you shall already have greenery as your foregroundcolor and the greenery sample color layer. if not, you can follow the steps in the previousexample to get both. start by selecting the color sample tool whichis nested under the eyedropper tool in the tools bar or what i prefer to do is selectthe eyedropper tool then hold shift on the
keyboard to switch to the color sample tool. notice how the cursor icon changes as i holdthe shift key. the color sample tool will create point samplesthat display the numerical values of the colors that we have selected. before selecting any colors, make sure thatyou have 11 by 11 average under sample size in the options bar. this will help us get a more accurate representationof the colors we have selected. by default, the eyedropper tool samples onlyone single pixel, which may not give us the best representation of the colors we're selecting,especially on noisy or grainy images where
you could quite easily click on a noise pixelor any other unwanted artifacts. hold shift and click on the greenery color. notice that photoshop place the point samplelabeled number 1 and it also open up the info panel which shows us the sampled color's numericalvalues for each channel. click on the color that you want to change,in this case, the red couch. make sure that you don't select the shadowor highlight. try to get the best representation of theprecise color that you want to change or at least the best representation that you canget. the center of the couch will do.
this will place a point sample labeled number2 and, of course, the info panel remains open and it displays the numerical values of thetwo colors that i have selected so far. the values under label 1 represents the greencolor, and the values under label 2 represent the red color. to apply the color match, we simply have tochange the values from the red couch to match the values of the green pantone color. the best way to do this is by using a curvesadjustment layer. but before we create a curves adjustment layer,let's first make a selection around the couch so that we contain the adjustment to onlythe couch and not the rest of the room.
click on the quick selection tool and clickand drag on the couch to select it. if you accidentally select an area that youwere not supposed to, hold alt, option on the mac, and click and drag to deselect. in most cases, you will need to refine theselection, but in this example, this rough selection should work. with the selection active, click on the newadjustment layer icon and select curves. this will create a curves adjustment layerwith a mask targeting only the couch. in the properties panel, click on the targetedadjustment tool icon to enable it. this tool allows you to select a precise pointin the image to adjust.
as you hover over the image, you will seea circle moving up and down the curve. this circle represents the precise point inthe curve of the color that i'm hovering over. in this case, the point of the curve thatwe're interested in is where the red color is under sample number 2. click in once or place a point in the curvewhere this red color falls. unfortunately, this does not add a point tothe “a†or “b†channel. to add a point to all three channels, we needto hold two modifier keys as we click. first, we set the curve by clicking on thereset icon, then hover over point sample number 2 and hold shift ctrl, that's shift commandon the mac, and click.
this creates a point on the lightness channelas well as the “a†and “b†channels. now we can target the specific red color andchange it to the exact green that we want. this process is very simple. simply click on the point and change the outputnumber into the appropriate value of the color we selected. one thing to note, however, is that, currently,label number 1 is giving the values of the gray background, not the green and that isbecause we have this layer selected--the curves adjustment layer. if i click on the greenery layer, notice thatthe values changed.
what we need to do is we need to click anddrag the curves adjustment layer to the very top of the stack. now that we have the curves adjustment layeron top of the stack, we can see the right numbers displayed here in the lab label number1. also, note that there are two values beingshown on each of the labels. the value on the left represents the originalvalue. the value on the right represents the adjustedvalue after we make the adjustments. so you only need to focus on the values hereon the left for label number 1 and the values on the right here on label number 2.
so we need to make 50 into 70. to do that, make sure that you're on the lchannel--on lightness. click on the point. you'll know that it's selected because notonly you clicked on it, but you can see that the point is now filled in. it's no longer an outline of a square. so, with the point selected, under output,type in the number 70--this number here. then press enter on the keyboard to acceptthe change. now we need to work on the "a" channel, sochange the lightness channel into the "a"
channel. the point is selected; under output, we'regoing to type in -37, hit enter. now we need to go into the "b" channel. the point is selected; under output, we'regoing to type in the number 73. so now, we have 70, -37 and 73. the adjustment layer changed the values ofthe red couch to match those of the green notice that the -38 doesn't quite match the"a" channel. it doesn't have to be precise. if you want to be precise, you can selectthe point and notice that the value to your
output is -37, but that's not what's displayinghere under the value number 2. if you want those two to match and be 100%precise, just use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard, so i'm just going to pressthe up arrow key a few times, and now i'm at -37. it really didn't make that much of a differencein the way the color looks on screen, but this is how you would get those numbers tobe precise. sometimes just typing the output value herewon't give you the exact same results under the adjustment layer and the sample points. so i'm going to press enter to accept thechange, and now, they match.
you can see on screen that these colors arepretty much the same. there is one problem. the highlights have a yellow tint to them. so we can fix that by going into the "a" channel;we're already there. click in on the top point you see here onthe white point and dragging that down. if you recall from the earlier example, the"a" channel controls green and magenta. the negative values are green, which is whyi'm dragging this point down. and as you can see in the output, we are inthe negative values. so now we're removing that yellow highlightby adding green.
also, one thing to note is when you're workingwith a curves adjustment layer in the rgb color mode; you do not want to have pointsthat are side by side because they'll flatten out the image. you'll lose a lot of detail, and the imagewon't look right. in the lab color mode, this is not a problem. you can have two points side by side. i'm going to, now, click and drag the curvesadjustment layer below the greenery example, so it doesn't affect it. then i'm going to click on the greenery samplecolor layer and click and drag that layer
on top of the couch so that you could seethat the colors match exactly. obviously, the shadows are going to be darker,and the highlights are going to be brighter, but the color that we sample matches precisely. i'm going to disable the layer. now that i made the adjustment, i'm goingto need to switch back into the rgb color mode, and one thing to note is that adjustmentlayers will not convert from one color mode to another, so what we need to do in thiscase is merge the document so we have it on one single layer. obviously, this is a destructive effect, andwe lost all the other layers.
one thing you can do to work around this problemis to do a merge yourself before actually converting the document, so i'm going to showyou how to do that. i'm going to press ctrl alt z, command optionz on the mac to undo. so what i'm going to do is i want to, first,select a visible layer so we can select the curves adjustment layer or the backgroundlayer. then i'm going to press ctrl alt shift e,that's command option shift e on the mac, and that merges everything on to a singlelayer. so, now, i don't really need the curves adjustmentlayer anymore. i just have this layer that contains the colorchange, and i can delete the curves adjustment
layer, and i can make the color mode changeto rgb. photoshop is going to ask me if i want toflatten the file. i don't want to do that. i don't want to merge, so click on "don'tmerge," and i don't want to rasterize it, so click on "don't rasterize," and there itis. i don't have the curves adjustment layer anymore,but i do have all the other layers in case i need them. and, of course, the couches are now the pantonecolor of the year 2017--greenery. and that's it for this tutorial.
i hope that you enjoyed it and that you learnedsomething new. make sure that you leave all your commentsor questions down below. if you create an image using this tutorialor any other of my tutorials, feel free to share it on instagram with the hashtag #ptcvids. i often do a search for this hashtag to seewhat you're all up to. if i find your image, i will leave you a comment. also, don't forget to subscribe and clickon that like button. if you have a friend who you think will enjoythis tutorial, please share this link with them now.
thank you for watching, and i'll talk to youagain soon.
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