#76 - Coloring with Gradient Maps and Overlays
this guide was requested by teaotter
Hey! So today, I'm talking about coloring with gradient maps/overlays in general and more specifically, the coloring in the following icon:
[Coloring with Gradient Maps]I love gradient maps and you can really do a lot of cool things with them. They are a really cool way of adding unique colors to an icon and are really helpful in making monochrome icons. Below are three icons where I've used gradient maps to color icons:
Because I love my gifs, here's a little gif of how I typically color my gradient maps. I add the gradient map first and then I add in my brightness/contrast, selective coloring and whatnot to make the icon look the way I want it to look.
With gradients, I really like to increase the contrast so that the whites and the darks are emphasized. It really makes the gradient map look a lot better.
This is the gradient map I used:
Typically, after cutting out the subject, I edit the cap again (after stamping all my layers if I don't plan on adding and textures/text) and add my vibrance, selective color, and curves layers just to make the icon the way I want it.
+ layers of editing =
After placing some textures, here is the final result:
I colored the Mr. Robot icon using color fill layer overlays and a LOT of hue/saturation layers, which is really a godsend. With this icon, I knew I wanted to isolate the skyline/ditch the original sky and fill it with a color. I also knew that I wanted to color in Darlene in a different color. Because this icon is all about coloring, this ended up being more like a tutorial but I hope it is still useful.
Here is the original cap:
Using the paint tool, I just filled in the sky and make the icon square.
In the rest of the tutorial, I'll leave the icons as 200x200 but you can click on them to enlarge them :)
Then I added my curves with three points (input, output): (48, 65); (96, 159); (132, 221)
And then, I added my hue/saturation layer (master hue: -40, master saturation: +30) and I did erase the color off her face.
Then, for some odd reason, I was like "hey, let's make this icon all pink!" so I added another hue/saturation layer (master hue: -+130, master saturation: +0) and erased the layer off because the hue/saturation layer made her all green. eww.
Then, I colored in the sky orange (i don't really know why - I guess I liked the combo of orange & pink)
---->
Now, I colored the icon by using a color layer fill (#7d0228) and set it to soft light @100 to tint the icon.
This kinda acted like a gradient map (I could've used a gradient map too but the color fill layer was easier in this scenario) and helped bring out the shadows and made the icon more dramatic. Then I added a pretty useless brightness/contrast layer (brightness: 2; contrast: 3) - it was so useless that I'm not even going to add it in my remake.
Okay, so next, I added a gradient map (yasss!) and set it to Color Dodge @ 35%
Now, I'm missing stuff from my PSD so I'm assumming I messed around with the brightness and contrast to yield this:
Then, I used selective coloring and brightness/contrast (contrast: 100, brightness: 0) to make Daphne's hair darker to increase the contrast.
Selective coloring on blacks:
cyan: 82
magenta: 75
yellow: 50
black: 52
+ some sharpening and final touches ----->
AND WHOO, we are all finished! So, even though this icon is very simple to make, it has a lot of cool coloring tricks that I don't typically use. I hope that this was helpful and that you learned something!
original | remake