Difficulty: Who really cares? Not hard. Two stars maybe...
Mkay, let’s say you’ve found the perfect picture. The only problem with it is that it’s all blue and green, and you were looking for something more red and black. The solution is either to find yourself a new picture, or to take the blue green thing into PS or Gimp and recolor it there.
Here’s the render I started with:
Click! (From Planet Renders)
Right. Start with a picture, or a render (it doesn’t make much of a difference which you use, but not having a background means less to color). Open a new document and paste the picture in.
Get rid of any parts of the picture that aren’t wanted. For example, if you only want a person and not a background that’s all around them, or if you only need from shoulders and above for a signature. Anyways, use the magic eraser or regular eraser until you have whatever you plan to work with and recolor.
Now, because the old colors are hated and new colors are going the replace them, you want the image to be more black and white-ish.
For PS, press Ctrl+Shift+U to desaturate the image.
If you’re using Gimp, click Layers>Colors>Hue-Saturation…
When you get that screen, set saturation to the lowest possible setting. Hue should be okay, and feel free to mess with the lighting a little bit.
Alright, for the next part I’m pretty sure it works almost the same in PS and Gimp. Now that you have your black and white image all neatly cut out and ready to be recolored, create a new layer (transparency as the layer color). In PS you should already see a list of layers in the image, but for Gimp go to Dialogues>Layers to open the layer menu.
With this new layer, it’s time to start coloring. For Gimp, double click the color button to bring up a color menu. For PS, you should already have a color selection thingy.
Select whatever color you wish to use first. Chances are you would want to start with a larger section first, like maybe the hair in the picture or something like that.
Select the paintbrush option. Use a round brush. Set the opacity to 50%. Then color over the part of the picture that you’ve decided to start with. It’s okay to make a mess.
Then zoom in and go around the edges carefully with the eraser. Neatness counts, almost. Remember that it’s fairly easy to go back and fix up spots later if you realize that you made a mistake.
^ That’s basically what the picture looks like when you’re going through the different stages of recoloring it.
Then add another layer and do the same thing. Pick a color, do a quick coloring job over the section you need, and then cut away with the eraser.
Continue like this until you’ve gotten it all colored in. The reasoning being the layers is that if something is too dark or doesn’t look nice, it’s easy to cut that part out of the picture or make it less visible so that it all blends together nicely.
^ That's the picture with various stages of adding colors and erasing shown. There's no point is going each and every part in here. Each picture has two or three more layers showing then the one before it.
Usually it’s not to hard to just add a color and get it to look nice. Of course, occasionally a color won’t look as nice as it was meant to. For example, you wanted the dress to be a red color and it turned out an ugly pink. One way to fix that is to add a red layer over it. Of course, then it might be too bright of a red color. Then, if you take away one layer, the other looks bad. That’s why the layer menu is so wonderful. Try messing with the opacity of the layers to get a nicer color. With one layer set to 50% the colors were normal, not ugly pink, and not bright red.
Alright. After you’ve gone over the picture one layer at a time, it’ll probably look something like that. Of course, that picture still has a lot of messy spots on it. If you’re planning to use the picture as part of a signature, you’ll probably want to make sure that no transparent spots are messed too.
To check to make sure that any transparent edges are okay, add yet another layer. Click and drag it to the bottom of the stack so that it’s the last layer in the image. Then color the layer black. Because transparency shows up as a white-ish grey square pattern, it’s often hard to see any spots near the edges that are too light or just barely there. With a dark layer behind, it’s easy to spot flaws.
Make a note of any spots that look bad in your mind. Then add a new layer to the image. Go over all the little spots that didn’t turn out like they were meant to. Fix them up using a smaller brush. When you’re going over little spots, it can help to lower the opacity a little bit. If you have trouble with hard edges and lines forming, go over those spots with the smudge tool at a very low setting. (3% is a good setting for the smudge tool) When you’ve worked out all the little spots, then it’s time to go back to the background layer (currently all black) and turn it white.
Clean up any smudges that were made while going along edges.
Now looking at the picture, it seems kinda light and blank. Therefore another layer is added. All black and over all parts of the picture made it look closer to what the original goal was.
Then, look for any parts that were darkened too much. With this layer, the eyes were too dark, so I had erased over them so they would show more. (The difference isn’t easily noticed anymore, but when you can click the layers on and over with the touch of a button it’s much clearer to see what changes)
If you had transparency behind the picture and had added a layer to show the image better, go back and remove the layer so that the picture is now fully recolored and ready to be used wherever.
Voila.
Major reason behind making this Tut. was that I got bored and remembered seeing someone in Synthesis saying that there weren't any tutorials on how to color stuff in PS yet, so now one exists, even though it's probably alittle bit wordy and could have probably been made alot easier to follow...
Any comments? Criticism maybe? And lemme know if there are any parts that I didn't make clear or if there are forgotten steps.