Professional Photographer Dublin | Kyle Tunney

Hey guys,
I hope everybody’s keeping well. I’ve been playing with channels, calculations and layers a lot the past while. So I thought I’d write up a quick photoshop tutorial that you can use on your photos & photography. It’s well overdue as it has been a long time since my last tutorial. This tutorial works best when there is a fairly solid colour in the background!

OK, so below is the before and after of this quick tutorial. This can be used on many different types of photographs with brilliant results. Without further ado, we’ll get cracking on the tutorial. If you’re already pretty handy with photoshop you can skip through to the conclusion for a fast tutorial! You can also download the source/.psd file here or have a quick look at the results.

Choose one of your own photo’s or you can download my photo. Once you have a photo, bring it into photoshop and we can get started

 

Step 1

Open the Channels palette by choosing Window>Channels from the main menu
(by default it’s the tab right beside the Layers palette).

If you click on each channel, you can see the detail on each. For this particular photo, the green channel is best for what we want. Click on the top channel(RGB) to return to the original view and see all layers.

 

Step 2

Choose Image/Calculations from the main menu. Here we shall choose the green channel, blending mode of overlay and make sure that result is set to New Channel.


You will notice the photo has changed to black & white and there’s a new channel selected.

 

Step 3

While your new channel ‘Alpha 1′ is still selected we shall copy this layer. Press ‘Ctrl + a‘ to select all, now press ‘Ctrl + c‘ to copy. Click on the top channel RGB to restore the original shot. Now click the Layers tab and paste your layer ‘Ctrl + v‘. You should have something that looks like this:

 

Step 4

All that is left is to change the blending mode of this layer to overlay.

That’s it, job done.

 

Conclusion

Open your image in photoshop
Go to your channels palette
Choose which channel is best for this image (R/G/B)
Choose Image/Calculations from the main menu
Pick your channel, change blending to overlay and change result to new channel
Copy that channel over to your layers palette
Change the blending mode to overlay

Finishito – Job well done!!

Once you’re happy with that you can start adding little adjustment layers with curves/levels and they will make a big difference to the end result as you can see with some of the following shots.
Let me know what you thought of the tutorial. Also feel free to pop a link to one of your photos you tried this out on below!!

 

Some Results

Thanks for stopping by!