Value grouping is not about removing every subtle tone. It is about deciding which tones belong together.
In his 2018 post How Many Values?, James Gurney recommends practising with two or three tones. He then makes an important distinction: a finished painting can contain variation inside a light family and a dark family. The underlying groups still need to remain readable. Read Gurney’s explanation ↗
A practical example from a real painting
Look at Rembrandt’s The Mill, reproduced above from the National Gallery of Art’s public-domain collection. The mill and raised bank form a substantial dark shape, while the brighter sky opens behind the sails. Small people and shoreline details reward a closer look, but they do not need to be individually resolved for the broad scene to read.
That is our visual reading of this painting; Gurney’s post discusses different examples. The connection is the same design question: can the large tonal arrangement carry the picture before the smaller marks take over?
Why this helps a Photoshop painter
Gurney’s later plein-air demonstration, Grouping Tonal Values, describes connecting the dark trees to shadowed parts of a house and a nearby bin. Objects with different identities can belong to one visual mass. This is a useful correction to painting every object as a separate, equally emphatic island.
- Open a reference beside a small blank Photoshop canvas.
- Choose three greys and use an opaque brush. No texture brush is needed.
- Group connected dark areas before drawing their internal details.
- View the result at thumbnail size. Compare its large shapes with the reference.
- Paint a second version with fewer divisions. Decide which is easier to read.
The exercise is ours, adapted from the principle rather than presented as a verbatim lesson. Keep the source image visible while working; the goal is to make deliberate choices, not simply turn a photograph into a filter effect.
