PhotoShop LAB Color Free Beginners Tutorial
Introduction to LAB Color | Influences | Tutorial | Saving your Image | Twirl Filter | Finished Poster
Using LAB Color for Movie Posters in PhotoShop.
Its common to learn LAB color in PhotoShop by making subtle changes to a landscape image in order to improve its richness and vibrancy, but perhaps its better to start out with something that requires more drastic alterations before moving on to such subtleties and there's perhaps nothing quite so drastic in terms of imagery than the horror genre. This is also a good way to get anyone new to PhotoShop thinking not just about how to improve the tone and depth of an image but also about how to manipulate the mood of an image.
Here's a spoof movie poster that we quickly rustled up in PhotoShop using LAB color with the before and after.
In this instance, we used an old photo from a trip to the panda enclosure at China's Beijing Zoo, partly because the subject is pretty cute and tranquil and very much the polar opposite (no bear pun intended) of the haunted final effect and partly because the black and white of the panda is well suited to the aesthetic that we're aiming for.
In this tutorial we look at some of the 'hows' of using Lab Color but we don't go into any detail on the 'whys'. First let's have a look at what our influences were when designing this poster. Or you can skip right on to the LAB color tutorial itself.
PhotoShop LAB Color and the Horror Movie Aesthetic in the 2020s.
If you have been watching any of the recent (and immensely popular) horror movie boxsets such as American Horror Stories (Hulu / Amazon Prime 2021) or Brand New Cherry Flavor (Netflix, 2021) you can't help but have noticed that the graphic artwork for these series is incredibly striking and effective at setting the mood. For a lot of the artwork they both use a strikingly eerie hot red against black which creates a stunning visual impact and which is a massive attention grabber. There is, of course, a long tradition of movie posters using black and red as their primary visual contrast, but these two series appear to take the vividness of the colours to new heights.
The colour contrast and depth of these graphic posters teleports us straight out of the familiar world and into an unfamiliar environment of otherness where anything can happen and usually not anything good. This black and red is literally the new poster boy descendant of the film noir blacks and whites of the poster graphics used for movies such as Sin City in the early 2000s. This new horror aesthetic appears to be at the forefront of a new style for promoting the brand of contemporary fright films whilst the choice of font and font color in Brand New Cherry Flavor in particular is reminiscent of the genre of pulp horror fiction. The poster respects its roots whilst simultaneously bringing the genre right up-to-the-minute. Another good example is Lovecraft Country (HBO / Apple TV, 2020) which makes use of a similar hot red against black aesthetic in at least one peice of its artwork, albeit more subtly (I'm thinking of the poster of the car driving away through the woods from Episode One, Sundown with the jet black sky and hot red highlights on the car and the fields to either side. Plus the red and black tenticles reaching out of the shadows).
For anyone with an interest in the visual arts, you can't help but ask how this hot red effect is being accomplished.
So, how does the every day world get transformed graphically into something which invokes the horror genre in a manner which is bang up-to-the-minute, eye-catching and attention grabbing? It's an important question (for me at least) since it was the graphics rather than any buzz around these series which sparked my curiousity initially and tempted me to start watching.
Whilst there are numerous avenues of approach to creating such effects, there aren't many which don't require you to be a professional graphic designer and/or an accomplished illustrator.
One of the easiest ways by far is the use of LAB color in PhotoShop and we are going to walk you through how we used LAB Color to create the Brand New Panda Flavour parody movie poster.
In fact, one of the many great things about PhotoShop LAB color is that it allows you to significantly change the mood and tone of an image with minimal editorial intervention.
PhotoShop LAB Color Beginners Tutorial
So, in this quick PhotoShop tutorial we are going to take a look at how to use LAB color to turn any photograph of everyday scenery from something quotidian, peaceful, tranquil (and even cute) into something edgy, foreboding and sinister. We will do this in just seven fairly easy steps.
- Step 1) With our photograph of choice open in PhotoShop, we are firstly going to create a new layer so that we have both a background layer and a new layer. Go to Layer > New > Layer. Don't forget to name your new layer.
- Step 2) Secondly, we are going to switch our image from RGB color to LAB color. Make sure that you have the new layer selected for this. Go to Image > Mode > Lab Color.
- Step 3) Thirdly, in order to create our effect we need to adjust the curves of our new layer. Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves.
- You will see that the Curves dialog box has opened up and that it has a drop down box with three items in it (Lightness, A and B). The L A B is where we get the term 'LAB' Color from, but I suppose it's also called that because it allows you to work on image colour with the scientific precision of a laboratory technician.
- Step 4) In LAB color we adjusted the curves to roughly plus 90 input for both channel A and channel B. To do this, move your mouse pointer over the histogram to drag the line to the right until the input reads something close to 90. Be sure to do this for both channel A and channel B, but leave the Lightness channel unchanged.
- Step 5) We reduced the opacity of the new LAB color layer to 66% so that the blacks and whites of the panda's fur showed through from the original background layer. In the Layers tab select the Opacity slider and use your mouse to decrease.
- Step 6) For the Panda's left eye we created a new layer to add a small white circle to cover the eye area using the Ellipse Tool (hold down the SHIFT key whilst you create the shape in order to get a perfect circle). Then we increased the contrast (Image > Adjustments > Brightness /Contrast) and reduced the opacity of the layer to 43% to create the glassy eye effect.
- Step 7) The Panda Poster Font: For the text we used the font Gill Sans Ultra Bold 70px (75px for the first letter of each word) and we used RGB 255 222 0 for the font color to give us a yellow fairly close to the one used in the artwork for Brand New Cherry Flavor. It's not exactly the same font used in the series but it somehow does the job.
We used the Move Tool to position and rotate the text (for this select your text layer and then select the Move Tool. Put your mouse at one corner of the object area and when you can see a curved double arrow you can then hold down your mouse and rotate the object text manually).
That's the majority of the work done in creating our PhotoShop movie poster in just these seven steps. Now we need to look at saving our work.
Saving a PhotoShop LAB Color Image
Unless you are considering starting your own design agency or production company, you might not want to save your file as a high resolution .TIFF or .RAW file and there aren't an awful lot of options for saving whilst our image is still in the LAB mode. So in order to save it we will need to change the image back to RGB mode. To do this go to Image > Mode > RGB Color. You will be asked whether you want to merge your image layers or not when you select RGB Mode, and if you want to keep a layered version for future editing you can select no. You can now save a copy of your image as a .jpg, .gif or .png etc. Go to File > Save As and select the file format you prefer.
Using the Twirl Filter in PhotoShop
The eyeball twirl effect in the top right of the movie poster was really an afterthought and only uses LAB color at one point in the process. If you want to find out how it was done then read on. But if you don't want to read on then here's the finished poster.
We didn't go for a 3-D effect here to make the eyeball into more of a sphere, but instead went for something which also looks a little bit like a wormhole into another dimension.
In this section, we are going to use the panda's head as the source to make an eyeball. Yes, you read that right, we are going to turn the panda's head into an eyeball! Here's the before and after:
- Step 1) From the original panda image we cut out an ellipsis of the panda's head using the Elliptical Marquee Tool. We then created a new transparent image and copied and pasted our head into the new image. We kept this new image small and manageable at just 200px by 200px.
- Step 2) We then used Twirl Filter distortion to make the iris from the circular cutout of the panda's head. Filter > Distort > Twirl.
- Step 3) Next we made the pupil for the eye. We created a new layer and changed the default colour to black. Then we added a circle to the layer using the Ellipse Tool (remember to keep holding down the SHIFT key for a perfect circle). We centered and positioned our pupil into the centre of the iris.
- Step 4) In this stage, we added a little bit of light to the iris using Filter > Render > Lens Flare and selected 50-300mm Zoom, repositioned the light source (or Flare Center) and adjusted the brightness just using our judgement as to what worked best.
- Step 5) Next, we added a basic red reflection to the pupil of the eye. The color was changed to red (RGB 255 0 0) and then we used the Rectangle Tool to create a small red rectangle. With our new rectangle selected we then used the Transform Tool to Skew the shape into a triangle. In order to do this you use CTRL and T (CMD T for MAC) to open the Transform Tool and then right mouse click in Windows and select Skew. Using Skew will allow you to select the corners at one side of the rectangle and pull them inwards towards the centre right of the shape to create a triangle. Once you have your triangle click on the Move Tool and apply your transformation. Move the image to where you want it to be on the pupil and then resize to fit using your mouse.
- Step 6) Next we are going to add our new image of an eyeball to our movie poster. Select a circular section of the eyeball image using the Elliptical Marquee Tool and copy. Paste this as a new layer into the poster image and place it in the top right area. Move the new layer to the top of the layer stack.
- Step 7) Finally remove the B channel from LAB color by using Blending Options (right click on the Layer, select Blending Options and uncheck the B checkbox.)
Here's the eyeball before and after we removed the B channel in LAB Color.
As you can see, the alteration of LAB color here was the effect which really integrated the eyeball within the overall aesthetic. And, although we didn't really create a very sophisticated or detailed eyeball (or even one in proper 3D), it still feels right at home within our spoof movie poster.
Another great way to integrate the tone of a new layer in PhotoShop is to sample shadows, midtones and highlights from the background layer using a Curves Adjustment Layer. We will be adding a tutorial on using a Curves Adjustment Layer in the near future.
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