coloring tutorial

[green]

I was going to do a coloring tutorial, because that is what the majority of everyone who voted wanted, but then I realized I don't do any specific coloring. I play with the color balance a lot. That is all.

But if you want to know some specific coloring, I will give an example of something.

This:
to this:


I start with this.




It's cropped and resized and sharpened with unsharp mask. First I want to play with the curves to make it darker/lighter. So I make a curves layer and set it to input: 125 output 145.



Then I want to play with the colors. This is the main thing I do when coloring an icon. I start a new color balance layer and then decide what looks the best. I want to do a sort of reddish color with this, so by the time I'm finished playing the numbers look like this:

midtones: 0, 33, -27
shadows: 25, 25, -10
highlights: 0, 0, -30

And it looks like this:



I'm not happy with the blank space on it and it needs a little texture, so I look through my icon textures and use this one by spooky_window:



Set to multiply at 70%.



Then I burn an edge around it with my paintbrush (plain black) and set the layer to 70%. And that is all there is to it!



Next I'll go from this:
to this:

This picture has a purple overlay or whatever, so we're going to fix that. If you are using Paint Shop Pro, I know what to do. If you are using Photoshop, there's probably something similar. I go to Manual Color Correction and under miscellaneous use the terracotta color. There's a skintones thing you can use, too, but I like this one. It's a subtle difference. You can probably skip this step without anything really changing.



Then I want to darken it up a little bit. So I make a curves layer and set it to input: 150 output: 120.



Then I make a new color balance layer and these are the numbers I end up with:

midtones: 30, 0, -25
shadows: 15, 0, 0
highlights: 0, 0, 40



Then I take this texture I made and resized and set it to multiply.



Then I erase over Gerard's face and duplicate the layer a couple of times.



Ugh, I'm still not happy with it. So I make a burn layer, fill it with black, and set it to 10%.



Needs moar texture. So I add this one I made:



Set it to screen at 100%, and I'm done.

Comments

[turlough]

Whenever I read simple and effective tutorials like this I always wish I could afford something better than Photoshop Elements. It's a great little program in a lot of ways but it's colouring tools sucks! I have no real curves and no color balance or anything :-(

I've never seen the trick with a colour burned edge before and it looks really neat so I'm definitely bookmarking this.

[green]

Gimp is free (?) and has those things, I think! I've been using PSP for years and years and can't seem to learn anything new.

[turlough]

I didn't know that about Gimp. I've always sort of assumed it was as limited as Elements. I should probably at least try it out. Of course, I've been using Photoshop for something like fifteen years so I suspect that no matter how much better Gimp is I will still think it feels all wrong :-)

[green]

I think it has those things, I'm not sure. I downloaded it once for my mom and played around in it and it seemed to have everything I needed. It was just different and I didn't like that, since I'm so used to PSP.