From the course: Learning Photoshop Compositing

Color grading with Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop Compositing

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Color grading with Photoshop

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- [Instructor] In this mini project, we're going to have some fun playing around with shafts of light. My subject is inspired by the Monolith from the very famous movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." And would you know, it has a Wikipedia page so you can read about that there if you wish. Here's my starting point. First thing I want to do is apply some color grading to make the scene more moody. I'll right click to the right of the layer name and convert it to a Smart Object. There are many different ways in which we can do color grading. I prefer to do it in the Camera Raw filter. So I'll come to the color grading tab. I'm going to use a tried and true approach of using complementary colors, colors that are diagonally opposite on the color wheel. So for my midtones, I'm going to move towards orange. And for my shadows, I'm going to move towards blue. To desaturate both of these, I'll get this inner circle and bring it closer to the center. In addition, I'm going to come to the color mixer, and for the saturation, turn down the yellows, greens, aquas, and blues. One last thing I'll do here, and that is on the effects panel, add a darkening of the edges with a vignette. So now I want to place my monolith, and this is nothing more than a rectangle with a 3D effect on it created in Illustrator. I'll choose my rectangle tool. I want its dimensions to be four by nine, aspect ratio of four by nine. And I'm going to fill it with black. And I want that black to be a solid RGB black, completely non-reflective. And I will also add a dark gray stroke so that when I come and extrude and bevel, we can see just a hint of dimension. I'm going to bevel it to a depth of one inch. Okay, so I save that as an AI file, and then place it in Photoshop as a linked or embedded Smart Object, and then scale it proportionally and position it in the scene. All right, that's where I'm going to leave it for this movie. I'll add the light in the next movie.

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