[TUTORIAL] (MANGA COLORING) COLOR ENHANCEMENT
Sup people! Been a while since I last posted to this community.
I come once again with a tutorial! This time, rather than how to color, it's about how to enhance your colors to give them a bang and make them pop. Word of warning: Neon loves bright colors.
In other words:
→
This tutorial includes the .psd files for every step, plus the finished product, so you can see for yourself what's in the layers, their order, and what they do. :3
Done in Photoshop 7.0, but it doesn't use any particularly fancy tools, so it should be fully translatable.
★☆TUTORIAL: COLOR ENHANCEMENT☆★
This tutorial is advanced and does not deal with how to color! If you need that kind of tutorial, please see these other tutorials I wrote. They should cover everything you'll need to know to achieve the colors in the base icon here. :3
This tutorial does, however, repeat some of the things I said in the above ones - mostly since it deals with color enhancement in general, so I've listed pretty much every step toward enhancing colors here.
And it's also very simple! You'd be surprised by how simple steps can affect your finished product.
Anyway, enough blabbering.
As said up there in the preview, we're starting with this:
(see .psd file?)
This consists of the lineart, the background, and the basic colors. For the above icon, I used my regular method of lineart on top; the color layers for the hair and skin are under the lineart, and the color layer for the eye is above the lineart (since Tsubasa's art has the habit of coloring in everyone's eyes, that's the only way to get it to be blue - that, or erasing out the black from the lineart. I prefer painting over it).
As you can see, the coloring is very pretty, but the colors are a little bit lifeless. The lineart feels a tad too stark against the softer shading, too.
Thus, I did my basic first step toward color enhancement: duplicated the skin, hair and eye color layers, dragged them all on top of the original eye color layer, and set the mode on all of them to "Color". This gave this result:
(see .psd file?)
That's a little better! The lineart feels more integrated with the image now - for instance, the screentones on his face are now closer to a brownish color than the original gray. If you can't tell the difference, you might want to check this zoomed-in side-by-side comparison.
But! It's still not quite as powerful as it could be. The shading seems to lack a stronger light source - it has very clearly defined shadows, but the lighter part of his face is still a little flat.
Thus, I did some adjustments and got this:
(see .psd file?)
Put simply, I used a soft brush, then the blur tool, to make two layers to do the trick for me. One of them (this) was placed below the lineart and the color layer of the hair, but above the color layer of the skin (so that it'd only affect the skin color), to add a faux shading effect - I then set the layer mode to "Color Dodge" and opacity to 25%. On top of that, a layer was added on top of everything (this) set to "Soft Light" to further increase lightness in that spot.
Much better! That took care of the flatness of the shading, and helped raise contrast quite a bit. But it's still not quite there - the next step was to use a trick that I absolutely love abusing, and that works fantastically to give dusky colors to the majority of images. With Photoshop's gradient tool, I made a gradient that goes from dark purple to orange (this), set that layer to "Soft Light", and placed it just below the extra color layer for the eye, but above the other color layers and the lineart (so that it wouldn't affect the blue of the eye color too much). Opacity was reduced to 60% to get a softer effect, and the result added quite the bang to the colors:
(see .psd file?)
And we're almost done! For the final bang and to add a generally softer feel to the overall shading, I made a duplicate of the icon (to do this while preserving layers, select canvas and use the "Copy Merged" command), pasted it on top of everything, then used the Gaussian Blur filter with the radius set to 4.2 (resulting in this). Layer mode was changed to "Soft Light", with opacity set to 50%:
(see .psd file?)
Voila! It's finished. :3
Although the steps described here work wonderfully to give your icon dusky colors, keep in mind that you can use different color gradients and a variety of other layer modes to enhance the image depending on the effect you want - for instance, blue exclusion layers (this one placed just below the blurred soft light layer on the finished product's .psd) can work fantastically to subdue brighter tones and enhance the melancholy feel of an icon, while changing the gradient's color can produce a variety of different results. It all depends on what your personal preferences are, and what you want to do with the icon!
There's really no set formula to do anything, so I'd recommend playing around with colors as much as you can - you may discover a different result that you like better than the previous one! Don't just throw the same gradient or exclusion layer on top of everything - it's not a matter of ~*~style~*~ but moreso a matter of not having every icon look the exact same while still keeping your personal style of coloring. The tiniest color adjustments can completely change the atmosphere of an icon, so use that to your advantage!
. resources .
The icons in this tutorial are free to use if you'd like! Please credit neonclover or lulzy if you do so. ♥
Drop a comment if you have anything to say or an icon of your own to show off! I like knowing what people thought. :3
I come once again with a tutorial! This time, rather than how to color, it's about how to enhance your colors to give them a bang and make them pop. Word of warning: Neon loves bright colors.
In other words:
→
This tutorial includes the .psd files for every step, plus the finished product, so you can see for yourself what's in the layers, their order, and what they do. :3
Done in Photoshop 7.0, but it doesn't use any particularly fancy tools, so it should be fully translatable.
★☆TUTORIAL: COLOR ENHANCEMENT☆★
This tutorial is advanced and does not deal with how to color! If you need that kind of tutorial, please see these other tutorials I wrote. They should cover everything you'll need to know to achieve the colors in the base icon here. :3
This tutorial does, however, repeat some of the things I said in the above ones - mostly since it deals with color enhancement in general, so I've listed pretty much every step toward enhancing colors here.
And it's also very simple! You'd be surprised by how simple steps can affect your finished product.
Anyway, enough blabbering.
As said up there in the preview, we're starting with this:
(see .psd file?)
This consists of the lineart, the background, and the basic colors. For the above icon, I used my regular method of lineart on top; the color layers for the hair and skin are under the lineart, and the color layer for the eye is above the lineart (since Tsubasa's art has the habit of coloring in everyone's eyes, that's the only way to get it to be blue - that, or erasing out the black from the lineart. I prefer painting over it).
As you can see, the coloring is very pretty, but the colors are a little bit lifeless. The lineart feels a tad too stark against the softer shading, too.
Thus, I did my basic first step toward color enhancement: duplicated the skin, hair and eye color layers, dragged them all on top of the original eye color layer, and set the mode on all of them to "Color". This gave this result:
(see .psd file?)
That's a little better! The lineart feels more integrated with the image now - for instance, the screentones on his face are now closer to a brownish color than the original gray. If you can't tell the difference, you might want to check this zoomed-in side-by-side comparison.
But! It's still not quite as powerful as it could be. The shading seems to lack a stronger light source - it has very clearly defined shadows, but the lighter part of his face is still a little flat.
Thus, I did some adjustments and got this:
(see .psd file?)
Put simply, I used a soft brush, then the blur tool, to make two layers to do the trick for me. One of them (this) was placed below the lineart and the color layer of the hair, but above the color layer of the skin (so that it'd only affect the skin color), to add a faux shading effect - I then set the layer mode to "Color Dodge" and opacity to 25%. On top of that, a layer was added on top of everything (this) set to "Soft Light" to further increase lightness in that spot.
Much better! That took care of the flatness of the shading, and helped raise contrast quite a bit. But it's still not quite there - the next step was to use a trick that I absolutely love abusing, and that works fantastically to give dusky colors to the majority of images. With Photoshop's gradient tool, I made a gradient that goes from dark purple to orange (this), set that layer to "Soft Light", and placed it just below the extra color layer for the eye, but above the other color layers and the lineart (so that it wouldn't affect the blue of the eye color too much). Opacity was reduced to 60% to get a softer effect, and the result added quite the bang to the colors:
(see .psd file?)
And we're almost done! For the final bang and to add a generally softer feel to the overall shading, I made a duplicate of the icon (to do this while preserving layers, select canvas and use the "Copy Merged" command), pasted it on top of everything, then used the Gaussian Blur filter with the radius set to 4.2 (resulting in this). Layer mode was changed to "Soft Light", with opacity set to 50%:
(see .psd file?)
Voila! It's finished. :3
Although the steps described here work wonderfully to give your icon dusky colors, keep in mind that you can use different color gradients and a variety of other layer modes to enhance the image depending on the effect you want - for instance, blue exclusion layers (this one placed just below the blurred soft light layer on the finished product's .psd) can work fantastically to subdue brighter tones and enhance the melancholy feel of an icon, while changing the gradient's color can produce a variety of different results. It all depends on what your personal preferences are, and what you want to do with the icon!
There's really no set formula to do anything, so I'd recommend playing around with colors as much as you can - you may discover a different result that you like better than the previous one! Don't just throw the same gradient or exclusion layer on top of everything - it's not a matter of ~*~style~*~ but moreso a matter of not having every icon look the exact same while still keeping your personal style of coloring. The tiniest color adjustments can completely change the atmosphere of an icon, so use that to your advantage!
. resources .
The icons in this tutorial are free to use if you'd like! Please credit neonclover or lulzy if you do so. ♥
Drop a comment if you have anything to say or an icon of your own to show off! I like knowing what people thought. :3