- As you may have noticed,
while I was creating this composition,
while I was picking the primary subject
and the secondary subjects and putting them on the stage,
I wasn't really paying much attention to the color.
And that's because I want to make sure
that I have the composition correct
before I spend a lot of time trying to unify the texture
and the tonality and colors in the final composite.
But we're at that point.
So I'm going to start by adding a gradient map.
I'll tap the D key in order to set the default colors
to black and white.
And then click on the Adjustment Layer icon
and choose Gradient Map.
That's going to remap all of the colors in my image
to this grayscale gradient.
But if we want to make a change,
we can just click in the gradient.
And then click underneath the gradient
in order to add a color stop.
I'm going to add a color stop at the 50% mark
for the location.
And then click in the color,
and I'm going to change the brightness to 50%.
Then, I want to add a little bit of saturation,
probably about maybe 10%.
And, then, we can select our hue.
So here I want to select a hue
that I think is going to unify
and reinforce the narrative,
so I'm going to pick a colder tone,
maybe in the blues here but not going too purple.
Kind of like the cyan, so I'll click Okay.
We can see that it's added the color here.
Now, in this case, it's adding the color in the shadows
as well as mid-tones.
I could also add additional stops that are gray
if I didn't want the color added to my highlight.
But when I click Okay, I'm actually going to back off
on this a little bit,
so we're not going to see it in the highlight areas.
So I'll use the Opacity slider
and just start decreasing the opacity,
revealing a little bit of the color underneath
until I like the results.
Let's say 70%.
Now, I want to change the color of the bulbs.
And I'm actually going to change the stacking order.
I'm going to bring them above the gradient map
so that it is not affecting those bulbs.
And, then, to change the color,
I'll hold down the Option key on the Mac
or the Alt key on Windows
and add a solid color fill layer.
I'm going to change the blend mode to Color.
Click Okay.
And, then, I'm going to choose a color that contrasts,
maybe a complementary color to the blue.
So I'm going to select an orange color.
But we can see that it's tinting the entire image.
So I'll click Okay,
and then, with the Color Fill layer targeted,
I'm going to hold down the Option key
or the Alt key on Windows,
and I'm going to click between the Color Fill
and the Bulbs layer group
when I see this square icon
with the downward pointing arrow.
And that's going to clip the Color Fill Adjustment layer
so that it only affects the bulbs.
Then, I can double click in order to refine the color.
I might add just a little bit more saturation
and maybe push this a little bit more towards yellow.
All right, now, I'm also going to unify
all of these elements using a texture.
And that's because the background image was photographed
at a much different ISO than the tree,
so the tree doesn't have the same amount of noise
or grain or texture as the background.
So, in order to unify them, I'm going to add some texture.
And all I've done is I've just scanned a piece
of paper here,
and this is what we're going to be using.
I'll just change the blend mode to either Overlay
or Soft Light.
Soft Light is going to add less contrast,
so I will select it.
And, then, I'm going to decrease the opacity.
But it's really darkening down the image as well,
so I'm going to choose the image menu and then Adjustments.
And I'm going to invert this
so that the paper is a lot lighter.
And, finally, I will add a Curves Adjustment layer
to the top of the layer stack.
We can see that I'm not making use
of the entire dynamic range,
so I'm going to move my black point slider
over to the right.
And, then, I'll move my white point slider over to the left.
I think the whole image is just too bright
for the mood that I want to convey,
so I'm going to drag down the curve
right in the center area here
in order to darken the entire image.
I think that added a little bit of saturation
to the sky,
so I'll change the blend mode
for the Curves Adjustment layer to Luminosity
so that now it doesn't affect the color range there
in the sky.
I also think that might be a little too dark
in my shadow areas,
so I'm just going to move it back over to the left
and maybe lift those shadows
while still darkening down my mid-tones.
So there you go.
A quick composite in Photoshop starting
with a primary subject.
Then building a stage to put it on,
adding some secondary elements,
and then unifying with color and tone.