All language subtitles for 5. Contrast adjustment

Now let's work on the contrast of our photo,

making it more three dimensional and refined.

We have already set the contrast to a large extent during the development

stage and capture one, but now we can fine tune

it and enhance it further.

There are several tools for adjusting contrast in Photoshop.

They are also found under this icon

for adjustment layers.

The basic tool would be

the brightness contrast tool, where we have two sliders

responsible for brightening

and the other one for adding contrast.

However, in this tool we have the least control over

how much we brighten the highlights or darken the shadows.

And that's precisely what the contrast enhancement does.

It brightens the brightest points of the photo and darkens the darkest ones.

So we want to have a bit more control over them.

So this is the simplest tool,

but we will be using a little bit more sophisticated

as levels or curves.

Let me show you briefly how levels work.

We have a graph here representing the brightness of our photo.

On the left side, we have the dark areas in the middle.

The middle zones and on the right, the highlights.

Of course, these three sliders

are used to edit each range.

If we want to brighten the highlights,

we move the slider to the left

right in our photo is being brightened.

Most of the time we do not want to exceed the boundaries of our graph because then

the highlights will start to creep and we will lose all the details in them.

So we don't go that far.

We usually stop at the beginning of our graph here.

The same principle

usually applies to the shadow slider.

We usually bring it to the edge

of the graph and stop right there.

So actually in this photo, we shouldn't

move it at all because it already is at the beginning of our graph.

So our maximum contrast would be achieved by having the highlights

and shadows exactly of the graphs boundaries like so

in the middle.

We have a slider for Midtown's

which allows us to slightly brighten

or darken the photo.

So that's levels.

And the second tool,

which is perhaps the most flexible

in terms of controlling light and shadow, is curves.

We have it right here.

Let's remove the levels

and this is how the curves layer looks like.

We have our graph

the same as in levels,

and this line

is used to control

the brightness of highlights and shadows.

We can add points to the line and move them up or down.

So if we want to brighten

the highlights, we are two points on the side of the chart

where the highlights are and move it upward.

It's at a point and we can move it

up to brighten the highlights.

Similarly, we darken the shadows by adding a point

somewhere on the shadow side

and pulling it, pulling it downward

like that.

Now we have

a bigger contrast on our image,

and I think contrast created

using curves is more balanced than in levels.

So let's reset our curves layer and do it the right way.

So we want to make subtle adjustments here

and observe the photo to see if it benefits from our editing.

So I want to

brighten the highlights

just a little bit and maybe

bring back the shadows

to the point they were before.

Like that, I think I would leave it at this level.

I slightly brightens highlights, subtly enhance the shadows.

That's all I can do because the contrast was already pretty good from our

development stage and capture one.

I think another issue

with our photo is the background, which is a bit too

dark, has an unattractive color and basically flattens our image.

I would like to lighten and living it up

to make our subjects stand out more

so we will need to somehow select our background.

The quick mask mode won't be useful

in this case because we need something more precise.

And here, the artificial intelligence of Photoshop comes to help,

allowing us to automatically select

the background or the model itself.

First thing we need to do is we need to flatten the image

using the shortcut command alt shift and

e. This

is a difficult shortcut but is very useful.

And this creates a stamp of our image above all the layers.

And now we can select the magic wand tool

or press the shortcut. W

is the magic wand

and now the select

subject option appears up here.

We click on it and Photoshop

automatically selects our model,

but we still need to refine the selection a bit,

especially around the strands of hair.

Let me show you the best way to do it.

We go to the set menu up here

and while holding the shift key,

we choose the select and mask option.

We have a dialog box.

We choose the overlay view.

It will show us the selection more clearly.

We want to have the smart radius option checked.

We move the slider

closer to the center and

we choose the brush tool.

Now we use the brush to guide Photoshop

on where it needs to think a bit more

and select our hair more accurately.

The points along the edges of the face

and the hair.

And we are done.

We click okay and we have a fairly precise selection of our model.

Now we need to convert the selection into a layer mask,

which we will use to lighten the background.

Let's select our curves layer.

We can see in our mask that right now the model is editable

because it's white and not the background.

So we need to invert the colors of the mask, making the background white

instead of the model.

With the mask selected, we press the shortcut command. I

and we have a ready to use mask

where our background will be editable by the curves tool.

Right.

So let's let's brighten the background by creating a point

in the middle

We can add a second point

in a darker area to lighten that area more than the highlights.

Let's see what it does.

Let's even it out a bit.

So the darker parts are lightened a bit more

and the brightest not so much.

Let's see what we have done.

All right.

I think we have the brightness well adjusted,

but we still have an issue with the color.

It's a bit too muddy to my taste and we will address it

using the hue saturation tool and utilize the same mask we created for curves.

We click on our adjustment layers,

select hue saturation,

and now we need to copy our mask from curves.

It is very simple.

We just hold the alt key and drag the mask from curves to hue saturation and

accept done.

Now we can change the color

or saturation of our backgrounds.

We move the saturation slider to the left

and our background becomes more neutral,

which makes the subjects stand out more from the background.

Let's have a look on the white as well.

We can set custom color of our backgrounds area

which are offset to white and let's see, the background is desaturated, it's

neutral and skin tone is more pronounced and stands out

just like we want it.

Okay, I think that's it.

At this stage we have the background light and the contrast of the photo enhanced.

So now we are ready to move on to the color grading stage.