hi I'm James professional photographer journalist and educator welcome to this video for tip squirrel comm where I'm going to show you how to create a wet plate collodion effect in Photoshop so to get started we just need to make a copy of the background layer so that's already selected and I'm going to hold down ctrl + J and there we have our new layer and now we're going to add some sharpening using the high-pass filter so go to filter other and high-pass and then just make sure that a radius of 10 is input there if you're going for a really tight portrait like mine if you're going for a waist level portrait then a radius of 5 is going to be absolutely perfect so the reason that we're adding high-pass sharpening is just to mimic the really nice sharp effect that you get with a genuine wet plate collodion and now let's just change the blending mode of this layer from normal to overlay and there we get the transparency back so now what I'm going to do is hold down ctrl alt shift + E and I've just created that layer because I'm doing everything non destructively so all the effects are applied to individual layers and for this one we're going to add the blur which is going to mimic the really shallow depth of field effect that you get so go up to filter blur and then lens blur and with this just leave all the default settings in place it's fine just make sure that radius is set to 60 and then hit OK we're going to add a touch more blur so go up to filter blur and then motion blur and set the angle to 10 and the distance to 50 and that's just going to give us a kind of shaky look to the blur as well and it for me it just creates a slightly more authentic look so just hit OK once you're ready there and now we need to actually reveal some of the sharpness so go down to the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette which is a rectangle with a circle in the center then press B on the keyboard to activate the brush tool so just to make sure that the foreground and background colors down here are set to black and white hit D on the keyboard then if whites in the foreground just hit X and bring black into the foreground so now I'm just going to hold down the shift key and press the left square bracket key a few times to make sure the brush has a really nice soft edge then just by pressing the right square bracket key on its own I'm going to make the brush much larger so now I'm going to carefully paint in the areas that I would like to be sharp so I'm just going to use a slightly smaller brush down here towards the chin so what I'm trying to achieve here is a certain amount of fall-off along the face so I'm just going to hit X to bring white into the foreground so that's going to hide that sharpness effect again and I'm just going to apply it to the edges of the cheeks here just because they're further back from the plane of focus so there we go I think that's looking quite good so now it's time to add the black and white effect and this is where everything really starts to happen so let's go down to the adjustment layer icon which is a half white half black circle at the bottom of the layers panel and then choose channel mixer so I'll just bring that over and just make sure that the monochrome box is checked so to get started just type in -100 for the red channel zero for green and 200 for blues and this gives us that kind of strange wet-plate look and it's all down to the way that the chemicals would have actually reacted to light they were much more sensitive to blue so now what we do is just drag the red slider over to the right until the image looks as bright as you want it to be so we're kind of getting there so I think somewhere around there if you're getting burnt out highlights what you can do is just then drag the green slider down a touch and there you'll see we've revealed all of that detail again so once that's done just click on the X to close down the dialog window okay so now what we're going to do is just lighten the image a tiny bit and then dial it down and knock out some of the contrast so I'm just going to go down to the adjustment layer icon again and choose curves and then just by left mouse clicking in the sin to that line and then dragging up and to the left slightly that's just lightining things off and then I'll close that window down and create a levels adjustment layer and what I'm going to do now is take the white point down and this is knocking contrast out of the kind of brighter parts of the image and then if I just drag the black output and I'm going to take that to about ten so we've set output levels black to ten white to twenty and if I just show and hide that you'll see it just gives that slightly more authentic kind of vintage look that you would get with a wet plate collodion okay so now what we're going to do is add a texture to mimic the kind of smudged emulsion or chemical effect that you would get with a wet plate so I've got a texture open here it's already black and white so I'm just going to hold down ctrl + a to select all ctrl + C to copy and then click back onto my portrait and hold down ctrl + V to paste so what I'm going to do now is just change the blending mode from normal to multiply and then I'm going to hold down ctrl + J to make a copy and then ctrl + I to invert that layer and this time I'm going to change the blending mode to screen so just with that top texture layer active I'm going to hold down the shift key and left mouse click on the other texture layer and then hold down ctrl + G to group those together and now what I'm going to do is just drop the opacity down somewhere to between 10 and 15% so I think I'm going to go for 15 there and you'll just see there's a very light and a mottled effect which mimics the chemicals so so things are looking really good now but we just have a couple more things to do just to make it a bit more authentic so that texture step is one that you can leave out if you would like just to have a really nice clean image but if you want to go for something a bit more realistic then put your texture in and you can experiment with different textures to see what works best so we're just going to add a sepia effect now so go to the adjustment layer icon again and select photo filter and then with the drop-down menu simply go to sepia and then set an amount of somewhere between 25 and 50 it really depends on how strong you would like it to be I'm going to take mine down let's go for when I go for about 30 so once that's done click on the cross and there we have it that is our wet plate collodion effect now what you could do is either save the image with all the layers intact so that you can adjust them later on or you can go to this menu at the top right of the layers panel and it's just popped up outside of the screen but when you scroll down you'll see flatten image and that just flattens that down into the background image and you can save it as a JPEG so that is how to create a wet plate collodion effect in Photoshop