Brightening Neutral-Coloured Screencaps
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Program(s): Paint Shop Pro X2
Involves: Channel mixer, colour balance, brightness/contrast, layer blending modes.
Translatable: Most definitely.
Steps: Five
Difficulty: It's pretty simple.
This tutorial is mostly a guide! Please don't just plug in these exact numbers into your program because chances are, it's not going to work with these numbers with every image. This tutorial works best with images that don't have a lot of blue or red tones to them - I found it works best for photoshoots or screencaps which are fairly neutral in colour.
1. Since this base is ridiculously dark I duplicated it twice and set both layers to screen 100%. For a guide, that brightened my image up to this:
2. Poor Hayden looks incredibly washed out and flat, so I'm going to brighten up the reds and yellows using the channel mixer. To do this I upped the Reds on the Red channel and then compensated by lowering the Green and Blue. Since I wanted to warm the entire image up I also pushed the constant % up a little. To add yellows I went down to the Blue channel and increased the Blues a little, and then lowered the Red the Green to add more yellow to the picture. Lastly, to make the effect a little more natural I went to the Green channel and added a little Green, and then dropped the Blue/Reds. It's a pretty basic pattern :P Fiddle with this depending on your image! The channel mixer makes huge changes to your picture even when you barely move the slider, so make sure you don't overdo it and neonize things.
Red: 148 | -40 | -19 | 3
Green: -10 | 116 | -8 | 0
Blue: -6 | -19 | 125 | 0
This got me here:
If you're working with a cap that's pretty red/pink, this is the layer that you're going to want to fiddle with if your end product comes out looking horrific and over saturated.
3. Since she's awfully red, I decided that a colour balance layer was in order to correct that somewhat. Under the shadows I added blue and cyan to get rid of the red, and then a little magenta to keep her skin colour natural(ish). Under the midtones I still added more cyan, but since she was looking a little blue I added some yellow and green. Lastly under highlights I added just a little cyan to get rid of the red. I didn't do anything drastic because I'm aiming for natural here - the less I play with the sliders, the better.
Shadows: -10 | -6 | 6
Midtones: -14 | 10 | -2
Highlights: -11 | 0 | 0
The change is subtle, but the next step makes it really noticeable. Now we're at:
If you're working with a blue toned base, this is the layer that you're going to want to tone down, for the same reasons that you'd tone down the channel mixer layer for a red base - natural is good! Since people aren't blue, we really don't want to overdo this layer.
4. Time to fix the flatness! I just used a basic Brightness/Contrast layer for this:
Brightness: 0 Contrast: +25
This image was really flat, but for most images I found something closer to the 10 - 15 range was better for the contrast level (without making it look overdone). Now we've got:
5. Last step! I decided that I wanted to emphasize the shadows on the right side of Hayden's face, so I floodfilled a new raster layer with a basic white to black gradient. I then set that layer to soft light and lowered the opacity down until it looked natural, around 36%. That layer ended up getting dragged underneath my brightness/contrast layer, but it shouldn't make a huge difference in the final product because the effect's pretty subtle. The white section lightens the image and the black darkens; the darker the gray, the more intense the shadows will be. If you don't want to use a gradient because it doesn't suit your image, maybe try a soft brush on a new layer set to soft light, and use different shades of gray to get the effect that you're looking for. The gradient I used is:
And here we are:
Some other images coloured using this technique:
- The image came out very blue, so I reduced the cyans/blues on the colour balance layer, and set it to opacity 60%
If you've got any questions or if you found this useful, let me know! :)