Smart Variations
Steve Weinrebe
My favorite clown model spent quite a while applying makeup for this shot, and the colors worked perfectly almost all across the board, except that the grease paint on his face is a little too subtle a shade (then again, realistic colors probably don't scare the kiddies as much). I want to add more color and when working in Photoshop that is never a problem; where, and how much, and what color qualities - those are the concerns for the photographer. But with Photoshop CS3 I can easily create a mask and, even better, apply a color adjustment: one that is not available as an adjustment layer but is available as a Smart Filter.Photoshop's Adjustment layers are terrific tools for color adjustments and color correction, and should be the adjustment method of choice, as opposed to choosing adjustments from the Image > Adjust menu. If you are asking why, it is because Adjustment layers are non-destructive, silly goose! And that's the good news. The bad news is that one of the most user-friendly color adjustments in Photoshop, called "Variations", is not available as an adjustment layer. The good news is that in Photoshop CS3 Variations is available as a Smart Filter, even though it's not technically a "filter". (Note: If you are working through this tutorial on a version prior to CS3, not to worry, you can follow all these steps on most recent versions of Photoshop except for the Smart Object/Smart Filter parts; Step 1 and Step 5.)
All roads start with Smart Objects
If you have followed some of my earlier tutorials you know that I love Smart Objects because they allow an additional level of non-destructive editing in Photoshop. Because we want to use Variations as a non-destructive color editing tool, we have to first turn our image, the Background layer in this case, into a Smart Object for editing. There are a few ways to do that but, being a fan of contextual menus, let's make our Smart Object via the contextual menu that pops up when you right-mouse-click (Control-click, Mac [but honestly in 2008 you deserve a 2 button mouse for Photoshop, even on your Mac if you don't have one]).
Step 1:
Right-mouse-click (Control-click, Mac) on the right side of the layer in the Layers palette, and a contextual menu will pop-up under the cursor with a few choices. Click on "Convert to Smart Object."
Build the selection with Color Range
Step 2:
With that groundwork laid, let's make a selection of the clown's face, just the flesh tones, which will mask out all but that portion so that we can make a color adjustment to it. A great tool for making a selection based on color in your images can be found in the Select menu, called Color Range.
The color range dialog will pop up and we can easily select our face colors. You can click in a color with the eyedropper tool, but Color Range really shines when the "Add to Sample" tool (the middle eyedropper with the plus sign) is used to add colors. By clicking-and-dragging this tool around the face, those colors become represented in Color Range as white in the preview. Drag the "Fuzziness" slider downward to include fewer similar colors, and higher to include more similar colors. Here I have dragged Fuzziness pretty low, down to a value of 17.
From the bottom of the Color Range dialog, we can choose different preview modes for the selection we are creating. Here I use Grayscale mode to view the selection as a white mask in a grayscale image, and fine tune the mask, represented by the white area in both the image and the Color Range preview, with the "Add to Sample" tool. (Yes, for the moment at least this would scare the kiddies.)
Improve the mask using Quick Mask
Here is the selection created by Color Range. You can see it's not perfect, but as I always tell my students, "selections are something to build, so never feel it should be perfect on the first pass."
Now let's use Quick Mask to improve the selection so that the unmasked area only includes the flesh color of the face.
Step 3:
Press the "Q" key on the keyboard, or click the Quick Mask icon at the bottom of Tools to go into Quick Mask mode. Because this photograph has so much red in the facial area, the traditional Quick Mask red color doesn't show well. By double-clicking in the Quick Mask icon in Tools, the Quick Mask options appear. Here I clicked on the little color swatch in the Quick Mask options, and chose a blue color from the Color Picker that appeared.
Using the Brush tool, with black as the foreground color (in Quick Mask the Foreground/Background colors default to black and white), I paint the quick mask color onto areas that I want masked (i.e., not selected). If I want to add to the selection, I can paint with white, which will paint "clear" into the mask - in other words paint away the mask as if I were using the Eraser tool.
After exiting Quick Mask, by pressing the "Q" key on the keyboard, or clicking The Quick Mask icon in Tools, we can see that the selection is much refined and isolated to just the flesh colored grease paint on the face.
Apply Variations to change the color in the selected area
Remember that whatever we do in Photoshop only affects the selected area, so when we now choose Variations, only the selected portion of the face will be affected.
Step 4:
From the Image menu > Adjustments sub-menu, choose Variations. Because our image is now a Smart Object, Variations (all the way at the bottom of the adjustments list) is one of only two items that are not grayed-out.
In the resulting Variations Dialog I clicked "More Yellow" two times, and then clicked "OK".
The wonderful simplicity of Variations allows us to see all the instances of adding primary colors from around the color wheel, with complimentary colors (color that cancel each other out) opposite each other. Otherwise I left the defaults as they were. The result, after clicking "OK", is that the Smart Object in the Layers palette now has a Variations Smart Filter attached to it, with a mask created from the selection, that defines the area that Variations affects.
Step 5:
One last tweak to our Variations Smart Filter is to change the blending mode. We can access blending options for Smart Filters by clicking in the small double triangles (an adjustment-slider icon) to the right of the Smart Filter's name. Then, from the "Mode" drop-down menu, I've chosen "Soft Light" for the blending mode, which will blend the adjustment with a contrast boost.
You can see in the final image, below, that the Soft Light blending mode added depth to the adjusted area, and our re-colored face looks happier than ever!
Steve Weinrebe:
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Photography © Steve Weinrebe, Getty Images
