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HOKAY. This is a basic outline of a technique I use to recolor bits of icons. The technique I use for Ith is... well, it's actually a lot more complicated than this! Because recoloring photographic images can sometimes be a heck of a lot more painful than recoloring animated/illustrated stuff a-and maybe I'll get around to doing a tutorial on the extended version later. But. This is based around the same basic ideas, and it's optimized to be as un-OCD as possible because I am very very OCD sometimes. You'll see that I still manage to squeeze in bits of obsessiveness around the edges despite my attempts at making this process relatively straightforward. I use Photoshop Elements, which is essentially Photoshop but minus the cool bits; I'm pretty sure this is A LOT EASIER on real Photoshop. But a lot of these techniques will still apply for any graphics program that has layer grouping, levels, etc.; you just have to work with different specifics.
I'm a little bit sleep-deprived as I'm writing this, so apologies if it's a bit low on the coherency.
But anyway. Exhibit A, our model for today's tutorial:
Tabitha Smith of Nextwave fame, whom I wish to edit to have Squalo's hair color. The base is by actualize.
Part One
Open it up in photoshop. On the layer window, which is usually to your right, right-click or ctrl-click or do whatever you usually do to get the dropdown menu and hit "duplicate layer", or go to "Layer"=>"Duplicate Layer..." in the menu bar and hit okay.
(like this)
Now, on the new copy of the layer, do whatever level, color, and/or saturation fiddling you have to do to make the part of the image in question the right color. For this step, it helps to know a little bit of color theory; since we're working with the adjusted layer on its own without being able to see the layer with the normal coloring, our perceptions of the colors are going to be slightly off (that's okay; we can fix it later).
At any rate! In this case, I started out by messing with the levels, since Squalo's hair is lighter than Tabitha's:
To get the levels box, you go to "Enhance"=>"Adjust Lighting"=>"Levels..." in the menu bar, or simply hit ctrl+L (windows) or apple+L (mac).
[Okay, this is how levels work. You can skip these bracketed paragraphs if you know it already or just prefer to play around with it to figure it out yourself, but some people understand better with the technical explanation and I'm personally one of those people. Anyway. The histogram there displays how much of the image is at a specific brightness level. The leftmost side is black, the rightmost is white, and the very middle represents 50%. The corresponding sliders would be positioned in the aforementioned places when the dialog box first pops up; here, they've been messed around with a bit. When you slide the white slider to the left, it sets whatever brightness value on the histogram that you stop at as 100% brightness, along with everything else to the right of it. The black slider sets 0%. The grey slider sets 50%. Play around with it a bit; one can actually do a lot just by messing with the levels. You can also use the little eyedroppers on the far right side: they correspond to the sliders with the same color, and will set it to the brightness level of whatever you select.
[I didn't use it in this image, but the sliders on the bottom there will set the absolute brightest and absolute darkest in the image. So, the levels dialog box works on the basis of five variables: let's call them w (for white), g (for grey), b (black), d (dark), and... r (bright, lololol). As it says, w, g, and b are input values, or, specifically, values the computer uses from the original image; whereas d and r are output levels, the values the computer uses to give you the final image. The program will take however you set those sliders and assign r, d, and (r+d)/2 (or the average of d and r, which is probably stored in the program as another value, but which you don't get to mess with directly) as w, b, and g, respectively. Making d=r gives you an entire image with just one brightness value; making w=g=b gives you everything at one of three values: either 100% brightness, 0% brightness, or 50% brightness, if some part of the picture happens to be exactly the same value as g to start out with. We'll use this second fact later.]
However, this gives us an image that's a bit too saturated! So.We go to the hue/saturation dialog box--"Enhance"=>"Adjust Color"=>"Adjust Hue/Saturation...", or hit ctrl/apple+u:
....saturation is pretty self-explanatory, actually.
Okay, so we've got our starting point! It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect; look at how stupid that looks. It's really just like that to make the next part easier.
Part Two
Now! Make a new layer between the two you already have by clicking the little square thingummy on the layers panel, circled below:
You can also create a new layer with "Layer"=>"New"=>"Layer..." or with shift+ctrl/apple+N. Now select the layer above it, and go to "Layer"=>"Group With Previous"* or hit ctr/apple+g, which will group it to the previous layer. It disappears! Gasp!
* EDIT 9/27/08: "Layer" => "Group With Previous" is how it works in Photoshop Elements, which is what I've got. Matsumoto tells me grouping is something different in CS3 but there's also Clipping Mask (Alt+ctrl/apple+g), which does pretty much the same thing in CS3 that grouping does in Elements. Thanks Matsumoto o/
BUT THAT'S OKAY. Because what we're going to do now is we're going to paint in the new, empty layer (make sure that you've got that one selected now instead, because if you don't then it's a real pain in the ass). You might want to zoom in for this--I've got mine at 300% zoom, for precision's sake. Use a larger brush to fill in the big areas, and then a smaller one to fill in the fiddly corners and stuff.
Aaand the coloration of the layer above appears now! It doesn't matter what color you use on the layer you're painting on. Sometimes I keep coming back to this layer as I'm also painting in alterations on a different layer, so this one winds up a bunch of different colors, but that doesn't make any difference anyway. It is awesome.
Layer grouping is very useful--if, for an example, you want to do multiple layers modifying just one part of an image (say, both an overlay and a multiply layer), then you can duplicate the background, create those modifying layers, and then group both down to a layer where you've painted over the part you want to modify. I haven't done it here, but a good number of my Ith icons were done that way. (Actually, I'm thinking of redoing those now, though--the effects aren't quite as subtle as I'd like them to be. But never mind that.) We're going to be doing something similar with this icon soon.
And then when you're done it looks something like this:
At this point, I generally like to hide all the layers but the painted layer (click the eye on the left side of the layer preview on the layers you want to hide) to check to see if I've missed any spots. Sure enough:
And also:
(That one's with just the modifying layer hidden.)
Sooooo fill those in, and then we're good! BUT WAIT. You may notice that the lines in her hair appear kind of faint and wimpy and generally failtastic. This wouldn't be an issue in some other images, but this one has some nice subtle lines in the big block that we want to recolor--but! But. Instead of retracing or coloring around them, which would be PAINFUL and VERY MUCH AGAINST THIS WHOLE NOT-OCD THING, we do the following.
Part Three
Duplicate the bottom layer again and move it on top of everthing. Group it down. Go to "Enhance"=>"Adjust Color"=>"Remove Color", or hit shift+ctrl/apple+u, which will desaturate everything into greyscale. Laugh at Squabitha for being an old granny.
Now we go to our old friend the levels dialog box again. We're going to do that thing I mentioned in the aside, where we make practically everything black and white (but not so much):
Move the sliders closer together, so that all the shading goes away and we're left with an essentially black-and-white image. Don't do it too much! Notice the space covered between the sliders in this case is almost half of the total values available (that won't always be true, but). We don't want to get rid of all our greys, becuase that makes everything pixellated and nasty; just some of them.
And now we go to the layer style drop-down box! That's at the top of the layers menu, right here:
(It'll look a bit different on a windows, but it should be in approximately the same place).
The style we want is multiply:
And now look. Isn't that nice? (Linear burn will do something similar, but darker. However, in this pic, depending on how you did the levels, that most likely would have made it too dark.)
...except it's not quite right, because it's a bit jaggedy and stuff if you zoom out to 100% again (if you haven't done that by now, do so). So here we are going to be using our first filter in this tutorial! But don't get all excited, it's just gaussian blur, which is nothing like as exciting as lens flare. Under the filter menu, go to Blur=> gaussian blur. You'll get this:
Since icons are so tiny, we don't really want a very big radius--anything over 0.5 is pushing it, even. I've set it to 0.2 here. And then we slightly lower the opacity of that layer, in the box right next to the layer styles drop-down:
The effect from these two steps is very very subtle, but it softens the lines somewhat, and makes the image more unified. If the image you're working from initially is sharper than this one, then this step might be unnecessary.
Aaaand that gives you this!
I wasn't completely satisfied with that, though, so I went and messed with the levels on the recolored layer some more, and then had to fiddle with the blurring and opacity of the lines layer to compensate, too. If your recolor layer is completely borked, don't be afraid to just delete it and make an entirely new one from the base again! Like I said, the version we started out with in part one was just temporary, so that we could see what we were doing in part two. This last paragraph is kind of part four, but it's so small it doesn't really merit its own header, I think :p
End result:
And that's it! This entire process usually takes me around fifteen minutes tops, and then fifteen more minutes of being obsessive over readjusting the colors and agonizing over the crop h-haha (if it isn't already cropped, that is). Parts one and two can be done in the opposite order, if you so wish, which will minimize the need for part four, but which will also mean you're going in "blind". I often like being able to have some rough idea of what the final product is going to look like as I'm coloring in, but sometimes I don't have the patience to even spend the fifteen seconds it takes to make the mock-up recolor layer and just go in blind anyway \o/
This same technique can actually sometimes work on photographic icons--I did arhu's bigcat icons in much the same way except minus step three and plus some other fiddly bits to make the colors work out right. (Those started out as cougars / pumas / mountain lions / catamounts / whatever the hell else people like to call the damned things, for the curious.)
I'm sure you can do something reasonably similar to this with layer masks instead of grouping, but layer masks are a pain and I hate them 8(
I might do another recolor tutorial sometime since there's still a bit else I haven't covered but it's getting late so yeah. That's all for now 8D
[EDIT 1/26/2010]: an addendum!
I'm a little bit sleep-deprived as I'm writing this, so apologies if it's a bit low on the coherency.
But anyway. Exhibit A, our model for today's tutorial:
Tabitha Smith of Nextwave fame, whom I wish to edit to have Squalo's hair color. The base is by actualize.
Part One
Open it up in photoshop. On the layer window, which is usually to your right, right-click or ctrl-click or do whatever you usually do to get the dropdown menu and hit "duplicate layer", or go to "Layer"=>"Duplicate Layer..." in the menu bar and hit okay.
(like this)
Now, on the new copy of the layer, do whatever level, color, and/or saturation fiddling you have to do to make the part of the image in question the right color. For this step, it helps to know a little bit of color theory; since we're working with the adjusted layer on its own without being able to see the layer with the normal coloring, our perceptions of the colors are going to be slightly off (that's okay; we can fix it later).
At any rate! In this case, I started out by messing with the levels, since Squalo's hair is lighter than Tabitha's:
To get the levels box, you go to "Enhance"=>"Adjust Lighting"=>"Levels..." in the menu bar, or simply hit ctrl+L (windows) or apple+L (mac).
[Okay, this is how levels work. You can skip these bracketed paragraphs if you know it already or just prefer to play around with it to figure it out yourself, but some people understand better with the technical explanation and I'm personally one of those people. Anyway. The histogram there displays how much of the image is at a specific brightness level. The leftmost side is black, the rightmost is white, and the very middle represents 50%. The corresponding sliders would be positioned in the aforementioned places when the dialog box first pops up; here, they've been messed around with a bit. When you slide the white slider to the left, it sets whatever brightness value on the histogram that you stop at as 100% brightness, along with everything else to the right of it. The black slider sets 0%. The grey slider sets 50%. Play around with it a bit; one can actually do a lot just by messing with the levels. You can also use the little eyedroppers on the far right side: they correspond to the sliders with the same color, and will set it to the brightness level of whatever you select.
[I didn't use it in this image, but the sliders on the bottom there will set the absolute brightest and absolute darkest in the image. So, the levels dialog box works on the basis of five variables: let's call them w (for white), g (for grey), b (black), d (dark), and... r (bright, lololol). As it says, w, g, and b are input values, or, specifically, values the computer uses from the original image; whereas d and r are output levels, the values the computer uses to give you the final image. The program will take however you set those sliders and assign r, d, and (r+d)/2 (or the average of d and r, which is probably stored in the program as another value, but which you don't get to mess with directly) as w, b, and g, respectively. Making d=r gives you an entire image with just one brightness value; making w=g=b gives you everything at one of three values: either 100% brightness, 0% brightness, or 50% brightness, if some part of the picture happens to be exactly the same value as g to start out with. We'll use this second fact later.]
However, this gives us an image that's a bit too saturated! So.We go to the hue/saturation dialog box--"Enhance"=>"Adjust Color"=>"Adjust Hue/Saturation...", or hit ctrl/apple+u:
....saturation is pretty self-explanatory, actually.
Okay, so we've got our starting point! It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect; look at how stupid that looks. It's really just like that to make the next part easier.
Part Two
Now! Make a new layer between the two you already have by clicking the little square thingummy on the layers panel, circled below:
You can also create a new layer with "Layer"=>"New"=>"Layer..." or with shift+ctrl/apple+N. Now select the layer above it, and go to "Layer"=>"Group With Previous"* or hit ctr/apple+g, which will group it to the previous layer. It disappears! Gasp!
* EDIT 9/27/08: "Layer" => "Group With Previous" is how it works in Photoshop Elements, which is what I've got. Matsumoto tells me grouping is something different in CS3 but there's also Clipping Mask (Alt+ctrl/apple+g), which does pretty much the same thing in CS3 that grouping does in Elements. Thanks Matsumoto o/
BUT THAT'S OKAY. Because what we're going to do now is we're going to paint in the new, empty layer (make sure that you've got that one selected now instead, because if you don't then it's a real pain in the ass). You might want to zoom in for this--I've got mine at 300% zoom, for precision's sake. Use a larger brush to fill in the big areas, and then a smaller one to fill in the fiddly corners and stuff.
Aaand the coloration of the layer above appears now! It doesn't matter what color you use on the layer you're painting on. Sometimes I keep coming back to this layer as I'm also painting in alterations on a different layer, so this one winds up a bunch of different colors, but that doesn't make any difference anyway. It is awesome.
Layer grouping is very useful--if, for an example, you want to do multiple layers modifying just one part of an image (say, both an overlay and a multiply layer), then you can duplicate the background, create those modifying layers, and then group both down to a layer where you've painted over the part you want to modify. I haven't done it here, but a good number of my Ith icons were done that way. (Actually, I'm thinking of redoing those now, though--the effects aren't quite as subtle as I'd like them to be. But never mind that.) We're going to be doing something similar with this icon soon.
And then when you're done it looks something like this:
At this point, I generally like to hide all the layers but the painted layer (click the eye on the left side of the layer preview on the layers you want to hide) to check to see if I've missed any spots. Sure enough:
And also:
(That one's with just the modifying layer hidden.)
Sooooo fill those in, and then we're good! BUT WAIT. You may notice that the lines in her hair appear kind of faint and wimpy and generally failtastic. This wouldn't be an issue in some other images, but this one has some nice subtle lines in the big block that we want to recolor--but! But. Instead of retracing or coloring around them, which would be PAINFUL and VERY MUCH AGAINST THIS WHOLE NOT-OCD THING, we do the following.
Part Three
Duplicate the bottom layer again and move it on top of everthing. Group it down. Go to "Enhance"=>"Adjust Color"=>"Remove Color", or hit shift+ctrl/apple+u, which will desaturate everything into greyscale. Laugh at Squabitha for being an old granny.
Now we go to our old friend the levels dialog box again. We're going to do that thing I mentioned in the aside, where we make practically everything black and white (but not so much):
Move the sliders closer together, so that all the shading goes away and we're left with an essentially black-and-white image. Don't do it too much! Notice the space covered between the sliders in this case is almost half of the total values available (that won't always be true, but). We don't want to get rid of all our greys, becuase that makes everything pixellated and nasty; just some of them.
And now we go to the layer style drop-down box! That's at the top of the layers menu, right here:
(It'll look a bit different on a windows, but it should be in approximately the same place).
The style we want is multiply:
And now look. Isn't that nice? (Linear burn will do something similar, but darker. However, in this pic, depending on how you did the levels, that most likely would have made it too dark.)
...except it's not quite right, because it's a bit jaggedy and stuff if you zoom out to 100% again (if you haven't done that by now, do so). So here we are going to be using our first filter in this tutorial! But don't get all excited, it's just gaussian blur, which is nothing like as exciting as lens flare. Under the filter menu, go to Blur=> gaussian blur. You'll get this:
Since icons are so tiny, we don't really want a very big radius--anything over 0.5 is pushing it, even. I've set it to 0.2 here. And then we slightly lower the opacity of that layer, in the box right next to the layer styles drop-down:
The effect from these two steps is very very subtle, but it softens the lines somewhat, and makes the image more unified. If the image you're working from initially is sharper than this one, then this step might be unnecessary.
Aaaand that gives you this!
I wasn't completely satisfied with that, though, so I went and messed with the levels on the recolored layer some more, and then had to fiddle with the blurring and opacity of the lines layer to compensate, too. If your recolor layer is completely borked, don't be afraid to just delete it and make an entirely new one from the base again! Like I said, the version we started out with in part one was just temporary, so that we could see what we were doing in part two. This last paragraph is kind of part four, but it's so small it doesn't really merit its own header, I think :p
End result:
And that's it! This entire process usually takes me around fifteen minutes tops, and then fifteen more minutes of being obsessive over readjusting the colors and agonizing over the crop h-haha (if it isn't already cropped, that is). Parts one and two can be done in the opposite order, if you so wish, which will minimize the need for part four, but which will also mean you're going in "blind". I often like being able to have some rough idea of what the final product is going to look like as I'm coloring in, but sometimes I don't have the patience to even spend the fifteen seconds it takes to make the mock-up recolor layer and just go in blind anyway \o/
This same technique can actually sometimes work on photographic icons--I did arhu's bigcat icons in much the same way except minus step three and plus some other fiddly bits to make the colors work out right. (Those started out as cougars / pumas / mountain lions / catamounts / whatever the hell else people like to call the damned things, for the curious.)
I'm sure you can do something reasonably similar to this with layer masks instead of grouping, but layer masks are a pain and I hate them 8(
I might do another recolor tutorial sometime since there's still a bit else I haven't covered but it's getting late so yeah. That's all for now 8D
[EDIT 1/26/2010]: an addendum!