Cross D. Photoshop Finishing Touches / Technique 38. High-Contrast Fashion Look

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Photoshop Finishing Touches
Authors: Cross D.
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Technique #38. High-Contrast Fashion Look

Here's another popular effect that's often used to create a high-fashion, high-contrast look. It tends to work best with portraits, but of course, you could try this effect on many different types of photos.

key concept

filters

blend modes

layer masks

Here's the original image I used.


Step One.	Press Command-J (PC: Control-J) to duplicate the Background layer.
Step Two.	Choose the color you want to use for the Diffuse Glow filter and make that color your Background color (yes, I said Background not Foreground). In general, you'll probably want to use white, or a very light color chosen from the image. Once your Background color is chosen , go to Filter>Distort>Diffuse Glow. As always, feel free to play with the numbers here, but I'd suggest starting with a pretty low value for Graininess and fairly high numbers for Glow Amount and Clear Amount. Click OK.

Step Three.	If the effect is too pronounced, lower the opacity of the layer (I used 70% in this example). If you want to bring back the original colors just a little more, try changing the layer blend mode to Luminosity and lowering the opacity slightly.
Step Four.	You could stop after the Diffuse Glow filter, or add a little more of a bright highlight in the next two steps. Click on the Background layer to activate it and from the Select menu, choose Color Range. From the Select pop-up menu in the Color Range dialog, choose Highlights, then click the Selection radio button at the bottom, and click OK. This will select all the highlights in the image.

Step Five.	Add a new layer at the top of the layer stack by clicking on the top layer, then clicking on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Press D to set your Foreground and Background to the default colors, and press Command-Delete (PC: Control-Backspace) to fill the selection with white. Press Command-D (PC: Control-D) to Deselect. Lower the layer's opacity until the effect is not quite so obvious (I used 45%, in my example). Again, you could stop there or, if you like, bring back a little bit of the shadow details in key areas such as eyes and lips ( assuming of course, you're working with a portrait). To do this, Command-click (PC: Control-click) on the two layers above the Background layer to select them and press Command-G (PC: Control-G) to put them into a Group. Then, click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to add a layer mask to the Group. Using the Brush tool (B), choose a soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker, set the Opacity to 2030% in the Options Bar, and with black as the Foreground color, paint over the shadow and detail areas.

Variations

To create a slight color tint, I added a Solid Color adjustment layer above the Background layer (by clicking on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette), chose the color I wanted, changed the layer blend mode to Color and lowered the Opacity to 70%.

Variation 1: Solid Color adjustment layer

And just to show that this technique is not only for portraits, here's the same effect applied to this photo of two windows .

Variation 2

Technique #39. Convert to Black & WhiteVersion 1

Here we'll use a Channel Mixer adjustment layer to change a color image into a black-and-white (grayscale, in the world of Photoshop) image. First, we'll apply a generally -accepted rule of thumb for using Channel Mixer, then we'll experiment with the results.

key concepts:

adjustment layers

Here's the image I'll use in this technique.

Step One.

Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, and from the pop-up menu, choose Channel Mixer. By default it will display the Red channel at 100% and the others at 0%. Turn on the Monochrome checkbox and start experimenting with the three Source Channels sliders. The rule of thumb that works well for many images is to aim to have the three numbers add up to roughly 100.

You can experiment with a variety of combinations, but be careful to avoid blowing out any areas of the photo (unless you want that to happen). In this example, the settings for the three channels were quite different but still added up to around the 100 mark.

Step Two.

Okay, so there really isn't a Step Two, unless you consider clicking OK a step. At this point, the Channel Mixer is making the photo appear in black and white, but we're still in RGB mode. I would recommend saving your document as is (in RGB with the adjustment layer), then using Save As to create a copy, flattening the layers and changing the mode (to Grayscale) of the copy. That way, you still have the original with an adjustment layer that you can tweak at any time.

Variations

In this example, I added a Gradient Map adjustment layer (above the Channel Mixer adjustment layer), using a simple black-to-white gradient.

Variation 1: Black-to-white Gradient Map adjustment layer

Here I changed the blend mode of the Gradient Map adjustment layer to Luminosity.

Variation 2: Luminosity Gradient Map adjustment layer

This time I changed the blend mode of the Channel Mixer adjustment layer to Hue.

Variation 3: Hue Channel Mixer adjustment layer

In order to fade the effects of the two adjustment layers (to make the photo have a slight color tint), I selected both layers and, from the Layers palette's flyout menu, chose New Group from Layers. Then I lowered the Opacity of the Group (folder) in the resulting dialog to 75%.

Variation 4: Faded adjustment layers