Stunning post-production tutorial 1: Kunlun Dafa – character color matching

Jingse Late Tutorial 1: Kunlun Dafa The understanding and improvement of graphic design technology requires a long-term and unremitting process of learning and thinking. Only by watching more, practicing more and thinking more can you continuously improve your level. By participating in this first photography post-production design competition, I found that the gap between myself and many experts is still very obvious. This is also related to my weak artistic skills, and there are too many technical deficiencies. However, only by discovering the gaps and shortcomings can we have the motivation to work hard to catch up with them. I believe that through long-term accumulation of artistic cultivation, a lot of careful practice, and eager pursuit of knowledge, everyone will benefit a lot from “formal” learning.
Now, I present my humble work, hoping that everyone can understand a little bit of my personal thinking. The method is not the most important, but having a good idea is important. There are certainly many deficiencies in this work, and I hope you will give me your advice and corrections.
Original picture provided by the competition:

Original image
Effect Picture:

Rendering
First of all, I personally think that you should get the original film Don’t start drawing immediately after finishing the drawing. You must learn to “review the drawing” and have a general direction of the effect you are seeking, that is, roughly what kind of “tone” and color expression you want to get, that is to say, you should know the effect you are going to make. Take a “snapshot” in your mind, constantly move closer to this effect during creation, constantly modify and render, and finally achieve a more satisfactory effect. As far as this picture is concerned, the model’s eyes are relatively “cold” and thoughtful, which is definitely not happy. The level of the early stage of shooting is also very high, the clothes are simple, and the “cool” shooting theme is better expressed in the decadent background (given my limited skills, this is just a personal opinion), so the overall atmosphere is brighter or warmer tones. To set the tone for this image, the effect isn’t quite right. Therefore, a general idea came to mind, which was to use the “coldness” of the background to highlight the character’s “beautiful” confidence, and to use the warmer skin color to contrast the character’s complexity and substituting for the “cold and arrogant” eyes.
However, the current situation is that the background is warmer due to the dark red, so let’s “reverse black and white”.
Let’s take a look at the layer screenshot first, as shown in the figure

Layer screenshot
The color adjustment steps are as follows:
Part One (Background Adjustment)
1) Copy the background layer (good practice), as shown in Figure 1

Figure 1
2) Observe the details and levels of the bright and dark parts of the histogram, and find that the preliminary work has been done well Great, no need to adjust brightness and contrast for now. I found that the partial white on the wooden fence behind the shoulder was very eye-catching (the red part indicated in Figure 2) and was not conducive to the overall harmony of the background. I used the color range to select those small pieces of white (Feather 3) and matched it with the mask (erase the wood). Some people may say, can we wait until the end to do this step? I think it’s absolutely fine. It’s normal for individuals to have different understandings and methods. You don’t have to strictly adhere to other people’s steps.

Picture 2

Figure 3
3) Use the eyedropper tool to absorb the dark area of ​​the wooden fence as shown in the picture to get the foreground color, as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4
4) Then use the newly absorbed foreground color to select Fill in so that the white color of these small pieces is relatively consistent with the overall color of the fence. Then the preliminary effect is obtained as shown in Figure 5

Figure 5
5) Next Use the Curves adjustment layer (select the RGB channel, and the channel values ​​​​that are not specified remain unchanged, as is the case throughout the article).�Strengthen the texture of the background (wooden fence) part. As shown in Figure 6

Figure 6
6) Stamp one layer and name it “Stamp 1” (CTRL SHIFT ALT), use the Levels adjustment layer to enhance the brightness of the background (mute) part, and use a mask to erase the characters (be patient with the edges with a soft-angle brush with low opacity, if the pen If you are skilled, you can also use a pen to draw a relatively accurate path and then convert it into a selection, and then feather a few pixels to achieve the same purpose), leaving only the wooden fence part. As shown in Figure 7

Figure 7
7) Create a new color balance adjustment layer , and create a clipping layer with the color level layer below (the purpose is to have an effect on the effective selection part of the layer below, which here refers to deducting the wooden fence part of the character. The method is to click on the upper layer and slowly move the mouse Move to the junction of the layers below it, and press the left mouse button when the mouse changes to a sign with two small circles, one black and one gray, superimposed one above the other. The same method is used if you want to cancel the clipping layer), specifically The data is shown in Figure 8

Figure 8
8) Using optional color adjustment The layer adjusts the background (muzha), and also cuts and pastes the layer below it. The specific data is shown in Figure 9, 10

Figure 9

Figure 10
９ ) Use the hue and saturation adjustment layer (clip and paste with the layer below) to adjust some of the yellowing noise on the wooden fence (upper part of the right arm), click with a straw, as shown in Figure 11

Figure 11
Get red 2, the specific parameters are shown in Figure 12

Picture 12
10) It can be seen that the effect of the wooden fence background is roughly achieved, and this part has basically been adjusted. Therefore, for convenience Manage, create a layer group for the layers of these wooden fence parts, and name it “Wood Gate”, as shown in Figure 13, the first part (background adjustment) is over.

Figure 13
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