Devin Korwin

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

Painting from life and analyzing master work like this will help build an intuition about relationships that you can take to work from imagination. It works for any style of painting!

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

Once we have the temperature of the grass in light, we can compare the temperature of the grass in shadow to that. Again, we already know the value, so all we need to do is find the right temperature relationship from light to shade.

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

Here we can see the same scene compressed into two values instead of four, but it is the same relationships. Practice compressing to varying degrees!

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

Compare across the scene and values and other relationships will naturally compress. Look for areas where the value is the same across different objects and compare to that. Here are some more examples of areas like that too look for!

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

The information is compressed from what Levitan was seeing in real life. There’s one value for the sky, one darker value for the light trees, one dark grey for the dark trees and the shadow of the light grass, and a very dark value for the shadow of the dark trees.

Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning:

Values (and color, and edges, and drawing) are all about relationships. Let’s use this scene as an example. The cloud definitely reads against the sky, but it is just a temperature change, not a value change. We want to look for the big similarities and differences first.