There was a few years back when I read about the so called "toxic look"on the net.It is called that way because in the dark room they used to use some toxic chemicals to create the effect.I have seen back then a tutorial on how to create a similar effect in Photoshop.They used curves in order to manipulate the RGB channels.So I do not completely understand what is exactly what they tried to achieve in the dark room,to add some sort of a tint to a colored image,or to replace some of the colors to create a more surreal effect.Curves is a great tool but in case I want to change some of the colors in an image to something else I like having more control then that.How well does my final result fit the "toxic look" profile or not I don't know,but here it goes!For this example I will show the already finished product with its layers and all and walk you through on how I created it just to try out that format as well,so here is how my layers panel looks like with the finished product.
I will Alt+click the eye icon of the Background layer,witch contains the image itself, to make all layers but my background invisible.This reveals the image in its original form.
The next step is creating a Selective Color adjustment layer.Selective color is mainly there to help us optimize our images for print.That is why we only have CMYK sliders in the Selective color panel.So as an example.RGB black would look more like a dark gray in CMYK.That in the case of 3 color printers.Those printers use,(or used to use because nowadays we have 4 color printers or some high end printers use even more),Cyan Yellow and Magenta to mix colors.So using 100% cyan+100%Yellow+100%Magenta would try to simulate black but would end up looking as dark gray.This is called a process black.But adding black to a printer first of all makes it use less of the CMY and helps create more rich blacks.K from CMYK stands for keying.Black is known as the keying color,because the CMY plates are keyed with the key of the black plate.But using just black ink for printing black sometimes is not enough,well probably because the paper absorbs the black ink and then it becomes gray,or I don't know.But when using rich blacks first a layer of CMY is applied then on top a layer of black witch then absorbs all light reflected of the paper resulting in deep black. .So to make blacks more black on print we need to create a custom rich black.We can do that by adding more yellow or cyan and Magenta to our black.And Selective Color makes that possible.But!Do not take things that i say about printing as words from the holy bible.Sometimes I just feel like even I don't know what the hell I am talking about.Anyway we are not going to be using selective Color to optimize colors for print.First ,to create a Selective Color adjustment layer click on the round half black half white button at the bottom of the layers panel and choose Selective color.
I obviously only have to turn it back on because it is just invisible.I can do that by clicking the area where the visibility eye ball show be at.And here is the panel that will pop up,in the image below.And even tho no sliders where moved my image changed.If you look at the upper part of the panel there is a drop down menu.By default it will pop up set to red.But it is not the reds I wanted to work on.It is the black and the white that I altered.
So if I switch from reds to black and then white these are the settings that I have used.Of course you can try and experiment with all the colors available,as I did as well.I wanted to change the skin tone as well but Selective Color did not get me the result I was after.Maybe I did not try hard enough but I switched tactics for that one.You will see that as well shortly.
I obviously switched blacks with a tint of green.I also added some more black,you can see that the black slider is also moved to the right to keep the darkest tones black,if not they would also be green.For the highlights I created a yellow color.If you are wondering why the white in the eyes did not change,that is because I masked the effect out from the eyes.The result was not that great on the eyes as you will see in the image below,so I decided to work on them separately.Just in case you don't know that white rectangle on the adjustment layer is a mask.Each adjustment layer gets automatically created with a mask attached.We can selectively hide the effects of an adjustment layer by painting black on the image while the mask is selected.Hit D on the keyboard,this will reset your colors to foreground black and background white colors.Hit B to select the brush tool,or choose it from the tool box,adjust the brush size and hardness by right clicking on the image and then paint over the area you want to mask out.Here is how the effect looked like on the eyes without a mask.
Next in the layer stack is a hue and saturation adjustment.I chose that to alter the skin tones.A hue and saturation adjustment you create the same way as the selective color,but instead of that you choose hue and saturation.
And once again,even tho the sliders in my example are not moved still the skin tones have changed.On top of the Hue/Sat panel there is a drop down menu as well.Right now is set to master.But obviously skin tones in general contain a lot of reds.So I changed it from master to red.In the image bellow you can see that after I switched it to red I also moved those small triangles from the lower color spectrum further from each other to increase the range of what Photoshop includes as red from the image.This step was necessary for a smoother result.Else it would have not changed all of the skin tones.
Now all what is left to do is the eyes.For that I will create a new layer by clicking the new layer button at the button of the layers panel or by holding down shift+ctrl+alt+N.After that I randomly chose a yellowish color by clicking on the foreground color swatch located at the down right corner of the soft interface.Then with the brush tool,hit B on the keyboard,I just painted over the eyes.Here is how the eyes look like now.
Now set the layer blend mode to multiply.
Now this does not look good at all.Well you cold see that there is an other adjustment layer above the eye color layers.I like to call this type of adjustment layers controllers.In this case we will create a hue and sat adjustment layer that will be clipping to the layer bellow it.That means it will affect only that particular layer,in my case the eye color layer.In order to create an adjustment layer that will clip to the layer bellow first hold down the alt button,then click and HOLD down the mouse button,if you let go the fly out will disappear.From the list choose Hue and Saturation.That means push the mouse forward while keeping the button down and let go when the cursor is over the hue and saturation option.In the dialog box that pops up make sure you check the use previous layer to create clipping mask radio button.Now I will turn on my controller so you can see the adjustments.I only worked on master,so no "dirty"tricks this time.
And that is it.I also added some text as it always seems to make an image more interesting for people.I believe that with tis text lots of die hard hip-hop fans would start sharing this on facebook if I make it public.But creating that text effect is a subject for an other story!
