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ASK THE MAKER RESPONSE 2
Asked by
yoxi seconded by likealight
Okay so this might be too vague but I'm curious about your coloring process. You manage to infuse so many colors into icons of shows that really aren't very colorful, like Luther or Being Human.
Examples of what I mean:
Tips on how go from this:
to this
Basically to add that much colour I rely heavily on a few tools & techniques: upping the saturation, adjusting the colour balance, using gradients and a lot of softlight layers.
When I color caps I keep them fairly large to start with, I just find it easier to really bring out colours this way. When I colour caps like this they often look awful at various stages, it's just a matter of continual adjustments until I finally get something colourful but decent in quality too. Resizing them later will also help hide any ugly areas.
The Luther caps started out like this:
I knew I wanted a blue & yellow type colouring, but through experimenting with Luther caps I've found it's helpful to really bring out warm pink tones before starting down that path. Firstly I increased the contrast by duplicating and setting to softlight, then I used the colour balance tool to add pinks & red tones, increased the saturation & used curves to brighten things up slightly:
My favourite method of adding colours to flat caps is to use gradient layers. For these caps I used a green (#8AE100) to transparent gradient with an angle of 45 degrees set to softlight 100% which I then duplicated and adjusted the opacity a little differently to suit each each cap, and a blue (#00E1DE) to transparent gradient with an angle of -141 set to softlight 100%, now I have caps that look like this:
You can see even though they started out with super warm redish pink colouring they still look rather dull,cold and a little sickly, but if I'd not added that step they'd look an awful lot worse. You can also see that on a pale background the gradient instantly adds a lot of colour, but because it's set to softlight it doesn't cover up the background details of the cap, it just colour tints them.
Next I made a couple of adjustments to make things a little better. On the Luther cap I used the curves tool and then copy merged all the layers and set this to softlight with a slight guassian blur (I normally use between 4 & 5). For the Alice cap I didn't bother with the curves adjustment as it was already lighter in comparison:
Once I've injected a fair amount of base colour I work on warming them up a bit and making things brighter and richer in colour. For the Luther cap I used another colour balance adjustment to add some more redish warm tones, I also used a white to transparent gradient set to softlight with a reduced opacity to brighten his face and the base of the cap.
I knew I wanted Alice's hair to look really red so I painted over it with a softlight layer, I also used a white to black gradient set to softlight to lighten the top half of the cap and add some depth at the bottom where the table was starting to get a bit pixelated from all the colour adjustments.
With both caps I then increased the contrast slightly to give me this:
You can see all the colours are now there, it's just a matter of bring out the brightness more from here on in.
For the Luther cap I just added some light blobs and, blured the background slightly and then used copy merge to create new softlight layers to add a little more depth. I also picked a couple of light multicoloured gradients which I set to soft light, for the Alice cap I did some similar adjustments and then continued tweaking it a bit further, but you can see that once the colours are there it's just a matter of ramping them up as little or as much as you wish. Hope this is some help :D
I promise the rest are coming-thank you for being so patient guys! RL has been a bit of a nightmare due to health problems and I'm seeming to have less time for LJ and photoshop rn, but hopefully things will settle soon. Also, I hope this isn't too disjointed as I've been writing little bits here and there for weeks ^^;
Asked by
yoxi seconded by likealight
Okay so this might be too vague but I'm curious about your coloring process. You manage to infuse so many colors into icons of shows that really aren't very colorful, like Luther or Being Human.
Examples of what I mean:
Tips on how go from this:
to this
Basically to add that much colour I rely heavily on a few tools & techniques: upping the saturation, adjusting the colour balance, using gradients and a lot of softlight layers.
When I color caps I keep them fairly large to start with, I just find it easier to really bring out colours this way. When I colour caps like this they often look awful at various stages, it's just a matter of continual adjustments until I finally get something colourful but decent in quality too. Resizing them later will also help hide any ugly areas.
The Luther caps started out like this:
I knew I wanted a blue & yellow type colouring, but through experimenting with Luther caps I've found it's helpful to really bring out warm pink tones before starting down that path. Firstly I increased the contrast by duplicating and setting to softlight, then I used the colour balance tool to add pinks & red tones, increased the saturation & used curves to brighten things up slightly:
My favourite method of adding colours to flat caps is to use gradient layers. For these caps I used a green (#8AE100) to transparent gradient with an angle of 45 degrees set to softlight 100% which I then duplicated and adjusted the opacity a little differently to suit each each cap, and a blue (#00E1DE) to transparent gradient with an angle of -141 set to softlight 100%, now I have caps that look like this:
You can see even though they started out with super warm redish pink colouring they still look rather dull,cold and a little sickly, but if I'd not added that step they'd look an awful lot worse. You can also see that on a pale background the gradient instantly adds a lot of colour, but because it's set to softlight it doesn't cover up the background details of the cap, it just colour tints them.
Next I made a couple of adjustments to make things a little better. On the Luther cap I used the curves tool and then copy merged all the layers and set this to softlight with a slight guassian blur (I normally use between 4 & 5). For the Alice cap I didn't bother with the curves adjustment as it was already lighter in comparison:
Once I've injected a fair amount of base colour I work on warming them up a bit and making things brighter and richer in colour. For the Luther cap I used another colour balance adjustment to add some more redish warm tones, I also used a white to transparent gradient set to softlight with a reduced opacity to brighten his face and the base of the cap.
I knew I wanted Alice's hair to look really red so I painted over it with a softlight layer, I also used a white to black gradient set to softlight to lighten the top half of the cap and add some depth at the bottom where the table was starting to get a bit pixelated from all the colour adjustments.
With both caps I then increased the contrast slightly to give me this:
You can see all the colours are now there, it's just a matter of bring out the brightness more from here on in.
For the Luther cap I just added some light blobs and, blured the background slightly and then used copy merge to create new softlight layers to add a little more depth. I also picked a couple of light multicoloured gradients which I set to soft light, for the Alice cap I did some similar adjustments and then continued tweaking it a bit further, but you can see that once the colours are there it's just a matter of ramping them up as little or as much as you wish. Hope this is some help :D
I promise the rest are coming-thank you for being so patient guys! RL has been a bit of a nightmare due to health problems and I'm seeming to have less time for LJ and photoshop rn, but hopefully things will settle soon. Also, I hope this isn't too disjointed as I've been writing little bits here and there for weeks ^^;