Using Photoshop to Figure Out Values

As I’ve been developing my drawing and painting skills, it doesn’t matter whether I’m taking a class or watching online tutorials, I’m constantly reminded of the importance of value.  If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably heard a hundred times that values are more important than shapes and proportions (even though they are important too!).  But values are the foundation of a drawing or painting.

But I’ve found that, especially with more complicated or busy scenes like urban streets or busy landscapes, it can be tough to really understand and see the values, especially on location.  I’m finding that it takes a lot of practice to train my eye to see the different values.  In complex compositions, there may be many values and many colors and learning to simplify them with the eye and then translate the scene or reference photo to a drawing or painting can be a real challenge.  While the squinting technique is helpful, for me it has it’s limitations.

I’ve found Photoshop to be a helpful tool to convert pictures to value studies, and this is my step by step method to help visualize the value range in a reference photo as I’m developing my eye to perceive it when I’m on location.

Step 1 – Open your photo in Photoshop

If you look in the layers panel on the right, you can see that I’ve duplicated the image.  That way as I’m applying adjustment layers and filters to the picture, I can refer to the original reference.

Step 2 – Apply a Black & White Adjustment Layer to the image copy.

As a black and white image, you can already start to see the value range of the picture.  This by itself is a helpful exercise (and one you can do on your phone without Photoshop).  In the adjustment panel, you can refine the black and white image to adjust the value ranges and it can be helpful to mess around with the sliders a little to see what’s going on.  In the picture above, you can already see a pretty clear distinct value contrast between the tree, shadow and pier being the darkest values and the grass, water and sky being the lightest values.  Notice that the sky and water as they approach the horizon are also approaching a very similar value with about one step difference.  At this point, you can also quint your eyes and see how this enables you to see the values better.  But we’re not done…

Step 3 – Apply Cutout Filter

The cutout filter rocks, but if you haven’t messed with filters in Photoshop, you may not have any idea it exists!

Group your 2 layers – the picture copy and the adjustment layer on top of it – together.  If you’re not that familiar with Photoshop, you highlight the 2 layers in the layer panel and select “Group Layers” from the Layer drop down menu.

Next, convert this group for Smart Filters:

This is where the magic happens.  Once the group is converted for a Smart Filter, go to the Filter Gallery and select the Cutout filter under the Artistic drop down.  This will simplify the value range and allow you to experiment with adding additional value steps or reducing value steps.

You can see here in the filter parameters that this image has been converted into 3 values.  The image is much more abstract, but is still clearly a beachside image with a tree.  Notice how the simplified rendering shows the shadows and highlights in and under the tree.

Changing the value levels to 2 simplifies the image further, but still maintains the essence of the original picture.  Here you can still clearly see the contrast between the dark and light values and how applying values before detail can serve as an underpainting.

You can go through this exercise without converting the photo to a black and white image, but initially when doing the value studies, I find it’s helpful to first look at the picture from a monochromatic perspective to really understand the values.  Once you feel like you really “get it” in terms of seeing the value range, then go through the same process, but leave the photo in color.

In this rendering, there are still 3 values levels but because of the different colors, the image has some additional nuance and at first glance may seem like it contains more values.  Don’t confuse hue or color with value.  They are different concepts!

While I’m sure there’s an app out there somewhere that can reproduce these value studies on your phone, Photoshop is a great way to start training your eye to see in terms of value.

I hope you found this review helpful and check out my YouTube video of this post to see a couple additional examples.