Saturated Reds – Photoshop for Video Episode 91

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Hi, my name is Richard Harrington and today we are going to tackle one of the tougher subjects on creating graphics using Photoshop for video. The color red can be problematic because of its saturation levels. Often it bleeds when you put it on to the video screen and I have encountered a lot of producers where very fearful about using red in their shows but sometimes you need red whether be the clients logo or just simple fact of nature. So let us show how we can work with red and push it so it goes all the way up toward limits without exceeding. Here is how.

So we have a photo here and we are going to go ahead and create a very saturated version of this. To do this will cross on the hue saturation adjustment layer and I am going to go ahead and push so it gets more saturated. Now that is one pretty good job and I want the image to be nice in red. I will click okay and we rename this layer boost. Next I want to isolate the individual red in the photo so let us do select color range and we will click on the red here and hold down the shift key and drag. What I am trying to do is create a selection that in composes most of the red inside of the image. You can go ahead and click here as needed and play with the fuzziness to taste. If you get an area, you do not want simply option click to subtract and it will narrow that back down. You see it does a pretty good job. I will click okay and now we have just the red, it is pretty much selected. If you see something you do not want, you can grab the lasso tool and hold down the option key for the selection and it will actually subtract so here we go we could just select around this area here that we do not want. There we go and you see that is removed from the selection. I will go ahead and feather that just a little bit select modify feather which create a gradual blend and will do a five pixel feather. There we go add the hue saturation adjustment layer and this going after just a red so we can roll back making it greener or redder do not go too far it looks on natural so just a few degrees on hue. Let us do about a negative eight, and a little bit of the saturation boost there and click okay. So here is our original image here is our new image with very vivid red for the tomatoes. Now how do you know it s going to work well, you going to take advantage of one of the filters built in the Photoshop and that is, the NTSC colors filter. Now the tricky part here is running it on this image, so we are going to make a merge copy to run it and then test. I will do select all and I will choose to make a new layer we just simply say edit, copy merge which copies everything that is visible and then paste and it will place that right on top. So you see on the top there we have flatten copy. On this flatten copy, we could say filter video and NTSC colors and what you are looking for is any area whether was a shift now if we do command the for undo redo you could see it right here. If you look down at the bottom here you see that it is actually toggling the colors and unfortunately we are getting a pretty ugly posturization there see so what we could do here is fix these more suddenly. I will go ahead on this top layer and simply strip away all the color and make a level adjustment and what I am going to do here is just try to push this to a little bit of a black and white selection. And you see how the posturization is really starting to stand up there and that is pointing out some of our brightest problem areas. I will click okay and will just blur that a little bit, soften it up and load that as a selection, go to channels, load it. It is an active selection. We can come back and add another hue saturation adjustment later and what we could do now is just pull down the saturation in those problem areas and if necessary darken them a little bit and that should do the trick. Now the good news is that process can actually be automated so I am going to throw this away and we will do that all over again making it simpler in the actions pallet if you open it up you will see video actio

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