Enhancing Underwater Depth And Vibrancy

Hey there everybody Joe here good to see ya, I've got a Painting submitted by Donette and She would like me to take a look at this and offer advice Here is the problem that Donette describes It doesn't match her vision the image feels somewhat static and lacks the vibrancy and energy So this isn't like a specific Technical problem. We're just gonna try to identify how to generally enhance This picture in giving you the feeling of the experience that happened. We want motion. We want depth we want color Okay, so let's take a look at the picture. It really is a beautiful picture Flip over to my to my digital app I'm using here. I've already got it loaded in and I'm just gonna try to pick out some things and Adjust some some colors and Other elements so immediately I see something that I like to call the outline effect. This happens a lot by Accident no one really intends to make the picture flat, but here's something that flattens it Pretty pretty common So if you look at the sea turtle beautiful job on the lighting, I like the contrast Then the turtle itself has good three-dimensional qualities But if you look at how the paint was blended right up to the edges, we can see a very consistent outline of shadow most of the way around The turtle it's it's subtle. It's not a big thing It's just little but when you have gradient shadows that match the outline of a foreground object Coming from the layer behind that's hard to Hard to describe it. Let me show you what I mean. Let's try to make this turtle Look like it is on a separate layer out in front of the Layer behind it. So I'm gonna Make my line as tiny as possible And I'm gonna grab With my little color sampler tool. Let's grab that top edge color. Let's use that I'm just gonna make the head bigger forgive me for destroying the Lovely anatomy of your turtle All right, I'm just bringing the color up to go on top of that slightly darker edge I know this seems like splitting hairs and we are doing Strokes that are not a lot bigger than a hair but I'm hoping that That you'll see that this does in fact make quite a difference now Let's take see this gradient right and you see that shadow how it just goes right along The back of the turtle, you know, it's not like that can't happen It's just that when it back down accidentally outlines Something even with just a gradient you get this effect now while we're at it Why don't we add a mid tone mid tones are wonderful things? If you look at these if you look at these bushes, sorry If you look at these Not bushes the coral the green coral This is a separate thing that might be something bothering done it with this picture The absence of color where dark blends to light So that's what you know, I've previously called a transition color. Let's call it a mid tone. But when you when you mix a Bright color like here with darker shadows Paint will really subtract it. It has a subtractive Reaction when you mix those so we can end up with less color here than what might be ideal What maybe you saw in real life? So I'm gonna take that color and enhance it and then use that down here to hopefully get rid of the outline effect on Great job I'm gonna sample that color Where I can find the mid tone. I just want the value and that value is gonna be pretty gray Hopefully I'll be able to turn it More green. Let's go Right Let's try that and what we're gonna do if you can see when I sampled that color this shows the RGB values It was way over here to the right on gray value. We're gonna bring it down here and just just Enhance that color. Okay, so Stroke size maybe a touch bigger so I get done In time for dinner and we're gonna have that color in there All the way down to that shell and then I'm going to take this one All the way to the show this doesn't have to be done I'm not showing the right way this is just Strategy to really get rid of that outline effect on turtle You know, it's not gonna match your nice paintbrush texture, but it's gonna be enough for us to observe I changed my mixing mode I've got an algorithm built into this that makes it like paint does but I'm gonna cheat a little bit and make it not get darker Paint darkens when you blend it and that can be a problem. There's a nice shortcut of using a digital app is Change So I'm gonna zoom out Look at it. There we go We can see a little bit of difference already where the turtle is popping forward in front of those forgive the crude Mixing, you know, it doesn't have very nice texture like Donna But this is just examples of things that can be done with the colors Won't be too hard on me, right? Okay, now I'm gonna go like this. I'm gonna zoom in here sample the color on the back of that turtle and We're going to make sure that The back of the turtle also goes all the way over see I'm drawing all the little no outline There we go so these can be very subtle things to look for but you can go across the whole painting and Make sure that you don't see the outline effect. So anywhere I see it. I'll try to Adjust now. I'm gonna go along this bush because I see it there. So I'm gonna grab this color here And then let's grab this color here and go up a little bit with that one See how it's a little bit dark above that tiny thing. See the problem is not Not that it's in one tiny spot. It's very consistent across the entire edge and our eyes Like designed to see lines. We see that line. It's it's a real obvious Thing at a glance and it has a way Shutting down the depth We'll grab that same color in there All I'm doing is Overlapping where I see that outline effect. You can see more here. Let's try going the other way. Let's adjust the background on this one Let's sample This color beautiful job, by the way Donetsk on your glow Man, the light rays in this are incredible great color mixing. You know if I zoom out Great job, not getting the look of fog on your light, you know, it takes some careful color You know, you really got to add color to these in order to get them to not look like lots of great job transitioning From those rays to the atmosphere of the water. That's that's hard Okay, I'm just pulling this in And then we're gonna see a more three-dimensional transition Between you know from Maybe I said that long, you know, just one separate layers without Anything pulling them together and flattening. Okay. Now I'm gonna put more mid-tone in here. So let's sample that same Mid-tone. I grabbed earlier. Let's get some of that It was I'm trying not to overly saturate colors with the computer that are not even possible so that's why I'm swatching it with the Program as opposed to just picking my most saturated That's just what we can do digitally it doesn't represent What your camera is showing us as possible So I'm putting a mid-tone I'm just scribbling that color in and you can see how that the presence of that mid-tone can really help to Give depth to the shape of your Let's call it That let's let's grab that Something in between I'm gonna put that So I'm just gradually gradually adding up stages Just just a lighter Just put them in between if I was taking a longer time. I might try to make a nice gradients in there But the short description is I'm adding color between the highlights in the shadow Okay, there we go, we've got mid-tone in that Coral formation and now I want to So There's no reason that you can't use a bolder Blue in the shadow. So if shadows, you know, if you've staged your atmosphere to be very blue And then you see something that's very colorless It can go against the the feel of deep dramatic atmosphere So I'm gonna try to enhance that as well by taking a blue that I know is available in your palette We'll take that one and hopefully That's a nice lighting Shadows take on atmosphere. Oh, they're more than the highlight. You know, it's it's kind of like with light since you're mixing light a shadow doesn't offer anything to the mix because absence of light So when a light color mixes with the shadow The color coming from the light dominates the hue of that mix So without making it too much lighter, I'm just making it more color. That's my intention everywhere I see those shadows. That's what I'm trying to do it. Hopefully I didn't drop the contrast Touch lighter, let's do the blender tool Blend a little bit so it doesn't look like my food. This is a touch screen. So I'm just smearing along with my Use her technique that's much better than my here To add interesting There we go, now we've got some blue in there and that will add heavy atmosphere But now, you know, maybe maybe I went a bit light on it. I don't know Let's add some more of that. Let's get it dark Let's grab that color and this time And now we're gonna put it Touch So I'm just adding blue to these shadows once again Lots of color, but I'm not trying to make it lighter just ruler. So, you know, if I make it too light, that's just my error Go overboard on The color Now we got some darker shadows in there and that color is hopefully adding some nice atmospheric depth We can put that Also on the rocks, you don't have to you know, it's your picture and I didn't see the photo But these are just things that can be done. I wasn't there to say that these are things that I'm gonna take this But I think that color and shadows is easily overlooked in pictures very easily overlooked and It's a big difference makers. Sorry. I'm trying to Looks like I got a little bug in my program that needs fixed Little bit bluer Yeah, I was just kind of jumping my little selector jump into a It's full of bugs Okay, the intent was to make those blue Let's get another shot here, let's go There we go, I think Project here So we're adding color to the shadows to get deep atmosphere you can get real nice deep atmosphere now your closest four round objects I Really do like to go all the way to a true black. So I'm not trying to eliminate black I'm just looking for places that I can Add a heavy atmosphere. And so since this formation was a little further back I chose to Add the blue to that one, but but I think it's a good move to to leave some of that black black I'm gonna darken some of this And I lost some of that darkness I meant for this to be a short video, but hey, you know, it's worth getting some results I just wanted to make more of a gradual change from my black to the dark blue And then we're getting lighter, you know, cuz we're approaching our furthest away Okay, now I see more outline effect I'm going to try to get rid of so I don't know if this is the Then on top of this fish, so forgive me if I destroy your fish But I think if there's a bright highlight there and the pin would maybe not be this dark Anyway, you know the goal. It's just to get rid of the outline. We're just gonna swatch the background Let's get rid of it here on the tail Okay Yeah, I'm sure I destroyed the actual You know, okay, here's another one so these are these are little boogers these outlines, you know, they they hide and When the number gets high it creates it creates a look like a picture. So I'm going through And you know, it's like hunting for Little bugs All right, let's get rid of that little shadow see all that fish is uh floating a little better, you know floating as in The Background whoops Very large trying to blend You don't want to see It's not that you can't have details, you know, it's just that you don't want those details to do this To your picture so going away those shadows. They're just creating shadows, you know, but they create unlikely outline This We construct a little pin on this it's just for the sake of getting a More constant outline there. See now our fish. It doesn't have the outline effect. So it feels less photoshopped into the picture Here's another one. This effect is pretty abundant in this. So hopefully Hopefully this is it, you know that demonstration gives you enough to go on to address all of them I'm gonna try to get a lot Horse You know, it seems like it would just be perhaps artistic flair something What do you think that you get such a dramatic? effect from a few little soft shadows outline But you do Nice very nice But great job Very light There now the seahorse is floating out in the open space more so is the fish and So now a gradient Gradient change that comes into the foreground can be very helpful. So here's something that flattens your picture if this is Closer, but if this area let me circle it this area is closer than this area Then we want to see more of the sand color on the first circle Unless on the higher second circle, so let's try that. Let's go like this Let's put some some kind of seafloor color that you've already got in there. I don't want to ruin my work on the fish Yes, I don't want to destroy your signature even even though it's just digital something about that feels really wrong Letting this in let's let's just get that gradient that goes to closer Less blue color less atmosphere colors Grant brings it forward. You see how that works. Okay, and then as I go back Here let's watch this Careful All the way up to it, you know I do a lot of I do a lot of work on the edges in a picture as I'm finishing it and This is a lot of what I'm doing when I'm focusing on the edges. I Don't like to on a large mural. I really don't like to waste Time painting background that I'm just gonna eat over, you know So I tried to just paint what I need and then I've got edges of my background I got edges of my foreground and then the final stage of the painting is bringing them together And so I do a lot of this let's watch these get the outline effect away Like this Very subtle thing that is a annoying that I remember working for hours and studying a Walkway that made us one of our regular Viewers who did this real real nice painting of a stone walk when we were together trying to figure out My analysis after a lot of staring at it was that we had To soften these I'm trying to make this But it's not like We can't have variation. It's it's just that gradients are are your best friend. They're just so Okay, so now we're starting to see more depth happening now, there's no reason we can't add a little bit of Mid-tone. I know it's underwater and you don't see a lot of mid-tones in the skin in underwater scenes But it could be done. We could go right there with shadow meets light. Let's use that color Let's just make it touch more Skin color, you know, I'm gonna do that since we're in the green zone with this We're just gonna make it less green just go all the way to the gray Let's let's see, let's see what it looks like And the idea is that against all of this blue that gray will just look a little bit More red like natural skin and what is currently on there see how it's kind of green So opposite of green as a magenta, but but that'll work too. And so I'm just gonna put little bits whatever shadow Needs light Put that color that shadows in here, whatever it means like and then I'm gonna blend it is the hard lines look kind of weird Change that line size There we go The idea is that you don't you don't want to get something greenish where The skin tone needs a shadow and that can happen when you don't want it to happen with paint love to turn So just a very subtle change on the skin tone You can do that all over to to make it feel a little bit more like Translucent sunlit skin even though it's underwater. I would do it a lot more extremely and have More more orange color to this mid tone if we weren't under water, but but there is Quite an absence of the red Here's another little spot where it could be done right here where the lights meets the Let's see what happens when you blend It's just a little bit less mean than it was and that can Make that skin feel more natural and illuminated by the Sun Okay, I really like The the way you did the rays. I'm not gonna mess with those. I just think they're beautiful but You can work your way toward blue or blues just to enhance this even if it even if it's not the real You know, we've got natural glare on the canvas So forgive me for Or I'm just gonna get rid of that But on your picture, you can just saturate those blues as you move away from the lights Contrast it'll make your life look even more bold just by making the blues more blue. So I Can see that this color is available in other places that don't have There on this one and then I'm gonna take this land mass and I'm gonna make it very blue as well I see you've got green in there. I'll try not to destroy those Take this darken it just a touch But I didn't Desaturated so I can see that when you're desaturated when you're darkening your colors, you're losing saturation. So don't forget about the Now this is looking similar to that color so I'll just I'll just blend it into What you got in here? Oh, man, I just barely mr. Fish. I don't want to destroy those Those are some good fish. It's not not bad outline Those are floating along nicely and you're seeing I'm gonna try to restore some of your some of your green Underwater vegetation here. Let's see watch some of that color But it's a fun thing to do This is a different version on my computer than what's uploaded right now Not having to jump through any Okay Okay, I like the way this is looking I'm gonna stop there and You know, I I think it'd be cool to add a little bit of I bet there was some of these You can just water down your pain. This will be the last thing I did I'm going to Maybe borrow some of this Let's take this and let's just Lighten it and color it And then I'm going to Put a few of these Just some sprinkles. Then I'll just blend them sideways. Maybe there's just you can really scrunch them Very squished together Where they're along a surface in the background Maybe these weren't even there, but they're just kind of fun. I see that you've added them, you know So I'm just I'm just having some fun running with it Okay, I'm gonna get my blender tool Just drag those side beside not up and down because this is a long a Ground surface of the perspective So I'm just taking my senior to running my finger along just getting rid of the sharper He's hoping to capture the essence of you It's kind of nice to have that under those light rays, okay, I'm gonna stop there There you go. I'm gonna download this picture. I'm gonna send it to Donna. So let's go like this down arrow and I'm gonna send that to her and Hopefully this will be helpful to summarize everything you looked at we're trying to add mid-tones wherever there's colored loss between the dark shadow and bright highlight and We're trying in into clarified to elaborate because Paint subtracts color where light does not so we're trying to simulate light most of the time And So we want to restore color where it looks like it Gets lost between a dark dark shadow. I'm sorry. I got kind of obsessed Starting to enjoy this a bit too much. I'm blending that I'm just distracted Okay There we go That's the final result for me. And hopefully this Gives you some some helpful things to work on There's other things, you know, we could do some other things. I'm sorry I'm gonna add a couple more things to this that I think might be cool because we're talking about drama Lighting up the underside of something can also be done strategically even if it's not part Of the original eyes. It looks like you've done it a little here I'm gonna take this Color we're gonna say light is bouncing off of the sea floor. See the sunlight comes down hit the bottom We flex back up and hits bottom edges and this looks especially nice If you already have a shadow, so watch on the other side of the lake Right along here. Oh, do they go on? Well, you know what? Just a little bit will go a long way and it's just a line. That's all it is This will go down here and I'm leaving the shadow in place Now that that leg pops out and have the lighting from underneath getting it and we get rid of some outline effect Here Maybe not so much on the inside of the arm, but that's facing a darker Then on the shorts we can edge like that Right here, I'm just getting a pixel that's between Now we've got some of the light from the background Shorts I wonder if there might have been Okay, so edge lighting the undersides of things you get that magical 3d lighting a nice little Let's do it with this turtle, let's take some of this It's not a bright color, you know, we're letting it go to dark shadow and then Going back to a slightly lighter shadow in order to put light reflecting off of something underneath and up on to the bottom of the object so Then right there, sorry, it's not a fantastic job Now that I mean this Kind of color that shadow There we go, but see all that bottom edge it's you know, it's not my finest work I wouldn't say but it's as That may be hardly even visible in the real picture, but nevertheless It can be a drama enhancing effect That's cool You've already got it there I see you've done it a little bit you got that effect so, you know, no harm in Gradients are super powerful. I'm sorry. I said I was gonna wrap it up If you have an object and coming out from under another object, you know, this this gradient is a super powerful thing So I'm gonna take this Rock color in here and I'm just gonna start making little shapes going Fewer and fewer back into that dark shadow because the gradient Gradually fading off into the shadow as a nice 3d effect that ground will look deeper further I'm just scribbling colors, but you can see what I'm doing less and less of it Perhaps it was my adjustments to the picture the coloring that it took away the original gradient because I wanted to add the blue But the more gradually you can make that happen instead of a sharp edge the more you can capture the look of a very Three-dimensional transition of a ground surface coming out from under some shadow Good trick for shadows under trees bushes There see how it makes the surface going back back back you get more depth Okay, now I really should should stop I feel that I'm starting to go overboard too much Those are things that can be worked on I'll send that picture to you Donna. Thank you very much for submitting and if anyone else has a very specific Question I want to make short videos this one did not end up short, but I hope it was helpful short answers to single questions is Something that I'm more likely to make a video for you about so if you've got a specific Question and you want me to tinker with your work just like I did on this one Send that To me and if you watch my live streams on Saturday morning Then you will get the email to send it to I want you to watch those live streams In order to get that email so that I'm not just getting flooded a lot of a lot of less relevant things I would love to see you there Okay. Thanks everybody. It's been a pleasure