Just Being Silly With Hue/Saturation

Here ya go. You walk up to a building housing several attorneys. Each has a separate door leading to their offices. First impressions are important, so who gives a better initial reaction? If we start from the right and work our way left we first have a green door. Green! Go! This attorney wants clients to believe he/she’s a “go-getter”, Type A, nothing’s going to stop ‘em from doing what’s best for you. Next we have a red door. Red! Stop! This attorney’s going to stop what’s happening to you. She/he’ll stop the baddies who have done you wrong. The last door is blue. Blue! Soothing! Calm! This one wants to put you at ease. To let you know everything’s going to be alright. To settle you down into a “good place” where things can get done. Obviously today’s image is a play on images in several categories. If you notice, the doors are RGB (Red, Green and Blue). The colors we use all the time as photographers working in Photoshop. (At least most of the time.) It’s probably also obvious that it’s the same door duplicated twice and slid over a little and a little more. Today’s image is a simple picture. It doesn’t even have any sharpening applied, color cast correction, vignette or any of the other things typically done to an image to be included in a posting. Why? Because it’s not here for the great artistic contribution it makes to the world, but to demonstrate how many tweaks it takes to make a point. There are four steps to making today’s image. To learn more about the steps, hit the “read more”.

First, the sidewalk was way too hot. The Quick Selection Tool (W) was used to select the lightest portions. Right click on the selection and pick Save Selection. That makes an Alpha Channel Mask that we can use at any time during our work. CTRL clicking on the Channel Mask icon in the Channels Panel renews the selection. Applying an Exposure Adjustment Layer with the Mask in place allowed for the lowering of the exposure and altering the OffSet and Gamma to only the cobbles of the sidewalk.

Before combining the three copies of the image a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer was applied to the wooden frame of the door. The original door is in the center, it was red. Another Mask was made using the Quick Selection Tool (W) of the doorframe. A blue copy was made by dragging the Hue slider to a value of -140. The green copy was a result of moving the Hue slider to +120. Each copy was saved as an individual file for use later.

The blue copy was opened and the Canvas enlarged using Image/Canvas Size with the Relative tick box selected. The canvas was expanded to three times the original width. The other two copies of the door were opened and copied into the expanded canvas. The Move Tool (M) was used to slide the copies to the right, filling the canvas.

Content Aware Fill was used to make the transition between “buildings” more smooth. It was also used to remove any leaves that showed through the composite and a little on the cobbles.

Today’s image is a goof, but it shows how the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer can be used to change the appearance of objects.