2014 | Ask the Maker Pt. 2
This fills all of or part of the requests from: starkwars, nightbulbs, reebeecaa, wandererjulia, rebel, applepips16, and monstersinyou.
[A Season-by-season breakdown of what you can expect from your Once caps; plus some wishy washy talk about color correction:]Season One
Has pretty great screencaps, actually. They're fairly easy to work with being reasonably well lit and lacking in any wonky color filters to create "atmosphere". I think the biggest thing with these screencaps, for me, has been the fact that they are so well lit that it can be easy to over do the lighting. You probably won't need a lot of screen, curves, or brightness/contrast layers to brighten up things from S1 unless you're working with a deliberately dark scene (usually Regina at night/in her castle or anything to do with Rumpelstiltskin; hah, Once is sooooo subtle *eye roll*).
There are one or two places where none of this is true and they are most probably the Dark One's castle where the lighting has this weird brown-ish tinge and also Jefferson's home which has this harsh, kind of sickly grey-blue tinge. So those two can be rather tricky, I think, and that's something to be mindful of when it comes to S1 caps.
But overall, color correction isn't really a problem with this season, and more or less every style of coloring can be twisted to suit because S1 is so flexible.
Season Two
Season Two isn't too bad, but the lighting in the Enchanted Forest in this season is a bit orange/yellow and can be quite...washed out in places because, I guess, they were trying to go for a kind of empty wasteland feel for a post-Curse Enchanted Forest. This can be incredibly annoying to work with, and my best advice here is to just roll with it because I don't know what it is about warm tones but they are a bugger to work around so it tends to be easier to let them run.
If you really want to go the other direction with your color palette here, the best options, in my opinion, are going to be either painting in the colors you want or going for black and white. You can also try the auto options (more on that in 3A) here, but I find that it tends to overcompensate for the yellow and red with green so it is best to use autos in moderation here.
Again, you can probably get away with lots of different coloring styles. The examples above run the gamut from natural (as I can get, I guess) to vibrant to muted. But I've chosen a lot of examples where I've had to work with the yellow/brown/red colors of the Enchanted Forest here to show the ways you can work with the horrid colors (or in the case of Hook leaving Emma to rot in a jail cell, how you can try to fight against it but it will hurt your soul). Painting in colors will be your best friend (as it was mine for 'heartless princess'), so I strongly recommend doing that, especially if you want to go for a different color scheme than warm (x or x, for example).
Season Three A
Okay so the colors that are the easiest to work with in 3A caps are: cyan, green, and magenta. Colors that are much more difficult: yellow, orange, brown, and red. Now, obviously, all bets are off here if you go for gradient maps, but if you're doing anything else, this usually rings true. Personally, with this season, I like to just go off of the dark blues because I like them, but if you struggle with blue or really want to try for a warmer color scheme then you might want to try:
AUTO OPTIONS
In most cases where the screencaps are really dark and very, very blue (which happens pretty much all the time during the Neverland arc), the auto options (auto tone, contrast, and color) can be real life savers when it comes to color correction. I'd make sure you do these on a new layer (so duplicate your base) because they can be a bit strong (especially auto tone) which means you'll probably want to fade and/or lower the opacity of the layer to get something workable.
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I think I've worked with 3A caps enough now that it takes, probably, a little less time, but LET ME JUST SAY THAT WORKING WITH THIS SEASON IF YOU WANT SUPER FUN, VIBRANT COLORING TAKES FUCKING FOREVER. I cannot tell you how long I worked to get that stupid yellow coloring in example #2. I don't even fucking know why I chose to do vibrant yellow. Clearly, I have it in for myself which would probably explain why I rarely ever use the auto options to color correct (I make terrible choices, I know). Anyway, I actually really like 3A Neverland caps because, once you get the hang of it, look at all the fun coloring you can do!! It is just going to take longer than S1 caps because of reasons. But another area where painting in colors will be your best friend. I am also a big believer in Variations and Selective Coloring.
Season Three B
Kind of a mish-mash between S1 and 3A so it can be a mixed bag in terms of what you get. There does seem to be a extra shot of blue/cyan in most things especially flash backs to the "missing year", as they call it. Fairly easy to just go along with, really, and it shouldn't cause too much of a bother.
...I'm not sure why there is so much blue??? I think I'm just on a blue kick, to be honest. Anyway, if you make start with 3B here, you're kind of in the middle of the pool (where S1 is the shallow end and 3A is the deep end) so you'll be able to muddle through, I reckon. Again, I'm a big fan of the selective coloring to make it work. If you want to circumvent the cyan shots that this half season used in abundance, look to your auto options or color balance/variations to help you out.
This is just to forewarn everyone: pretty much 100% of the rest of this guide is going to involve selective coloring in abundance. If you're a whiz at mimicking what selective coloring does with other layers, firstly, you are brilliant and secondly, you're good to go. If you don't have selective coloring...well, you can do whatever you want, but I don't know how helpful this is going to be. Also this isn't going to be super beginner friendly because I'm not going to stop to explain where tools are or what they do. So if you don't know what layer modes are, what Selective Coloring does, where your filter menu is, etc. then you might want to have google open while reading...or one of my older tutorials.
[Tutorial #1: Painted Pirate]
So we start off, as always, with prepping a base. This is the unedited screencap from screencapped.net which is where I get 99% of my Once screencaps these days. Actually, looking at the cap now, I'm not sure this is unedited. I just popped it out of my psd so...it is kind of possible that I used Auto Color/Tone/Contrast on it. This is a big thing for Neverland caps because most of the time you can clear up a lot of the blue toning with one of those options. Okay, no, I just checked. It's unedited. *wipes brow* Glad we've settled that!!
Moving onwards! This icon was for the Wonderland round at 20inspirations, and I try and keep the inspiration post up while I work so I can pop in from time to time to remind myself what I'm supposed to be working toward. This particular inspiration post had a blueymcphluey icon in it, and it reminded me that I downloaded a few textures from them awhile back. Since I was already going pretty hard with paint brushes in the rest of the set, it seemed like as good a time as any to bring those textures out to play. I would link you to them, but...I can't seem to find them. Hm. But you don't need those texture specifically!! All you need are either large painty textures (or small ones if you're working on a smaller canvas) or paint brushes. I randomly google for paint brushes (or...tutorials really and then they link me to brushes, and I go a little crazy downloading them all).
So we have our final aim: paint textures on this screencap of Hook. So now we can get to work. As you can see in the gif above, the first thing I did involved changing to the coloring a bit. There are FIVE (yes, you read that right) vibrancy layers in this coloring group: 3 on Color, 1 on normal, and 1 on Exclusion. There are also three selective coloring layers; two of these concern the neutrals (one takes away cyan, yellow, and magenta and one takes away cyan but adds yellow and a tad bit of magenta back in) and one concerns the blacks. There's also a black and white gradient map set to soft light and a blue/white/grey texture blurred beyond recognition and set to screen. So you get this brighter blue/purple coloring going on that I decided was rubbish so...
Time for more selective coloring layers! The first one is masked off the background and focuses on his facial features. The pale purple coloring was doing his face no favors at all so I popped into neutrals and cranked up the yellow to balance things out. And then I added another SC layer to amp up the blacks a fair bit as well.
Then I was ready to go crazy with the paint textures. This is the part where you absolutely just have to poke around with it for ages. This isn't me trying to get out of explaining things; it is actually what I do. So try the textures in different positions (rotate them, free transform them, etc.), on different layer modes (I stayed very conservative in this one with the majority of the textures on screen and one on soft light), and also try inverting things or changing the channels they are visible on to get different effects. The main thing I find with doing layered paint textures like this is...you need to balance your colors. So you don't want everything to be the same. Try contrasting colors to give your composition some variety. Here I used blue/white versus red. Anyway, once I was happy with where the paint splashes were, I cropped down to 200x200 pixels.
And just when you thought we were done with the vibrance...the first thing I did was add another vibrance layer to amp up those colors because I figured this was one time where me going crazy with the colors and making it super vibrant was going to be TOTALLY OKAY. And then I went for my usual style of adding lights everywhere. Both textures are by mm3butterfly, but they've been rotated to suit my needs and also blurred because that's how I roll. Both are set to screen. Then I took a copy of the icon pre-light texture, dragged it to the top and set it to soft light. Then I used one of the auto options...it looks like it was probably auto tone or auto color which helped even out some of that red/magenta that was still lurking in the icon. But I wasn't totally happy with that so....
MORE SELECTIVE COLORING LAYERS, WOO. So my goal was to lessen the magenta that was mucking up my reds because they were looking kind of blah. So the first SC layer deals with the reds and I took away cyan and magenta while adding a smidge of yellow and also black. Which gave me this nice yellow in place of the red/magenta on the left side, but of course then the right side where all the cyan was looked a little drab so the next SC layer takes case of that. I just popped into the cyans and added lots of cyan and a smidge of magenta as well as some black while taking away yellow. Apparently I still wasn't happy because then there was a third SC layer in this group where I played in the neutrals again adding yellow plus a tiny, tiny bit of black to darken things and taking away just the tiniest bit of cyan as well. Bit of a subtle change that, but nevertheless...We're done with the SC now, promise.
The final touches were a Difuse layer that has a really subtle gradient layer mask (which means I masked stuff off and then blurred the layer mask to make it look more "natural"~~~) that mostly emphasizes the light on the right half of Killian's face. Then I popped on another Vibrance layer set to color. Then I paint daubs sharpened, and the icon was good to go!
[Tutorial #2: More Pirate???]
I had the second half of this icon's psd file saved. Apparently I didn't bother to keep the full screencap base prep. But from what I can tell, it had some similar things as the first one did: played around with selective coloring to embrace the blues and make them harsh while also upping the blacks. It is also possible that I played around with the whites in this one because the whites are kind of harsh so that's a possibility. There's probably some vibrance in there as well because why not, eh? And then I've added some sort of grunge texture (probably on screen, lbr) to fill in the areas around his coat. So that's...the base that we're starting with here.
The next steps involve a this texture by raiindust on soft light and this texture by mm3butterfly on screen. Then I've gone in and done some variations work which involved making it darker and balancing out the cyans with...what appears to be red and magenta. At some point in here, I did a light box blur with the layer set to 36% because it looks like I may have sharpened before I went down to 200x200 for whatever reason, and I wanted to soften that up a bit.
Can you guess what's next? If you said selective coloring, you'd be right! Basically, I wanted some unnatural, fantastical coloring for this piece so keeping the monochrome blue was out of the question. Working in the neutrals, I've gotten rid of some more cyan as well as some magenta (guess I wasn't too happy with that addition after all) and I've added a whole bunch of yellow to balance out the blue. I've also lessened the blacks here to get rid of some intensity. I'm not sure why because the next step involves a vibrance layer on normal which just adds intensity right back into the icon.
Next up is some texture work. The first thing is this texture by raiindust on screen and masked off the brighter side of Killian's face. Then I did some brush work: there's some red/pink paint splashes on saturation and then some yellow-green paint splashes on linear burn.
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Diffuse glow, masked off of the far right side and then I was back to coloring tweaking with some variations to add some warmth back to the icon.
Then an auto contrast, a paint daubs sharpen, and we're good to go.
[Mini Tutorials on a few icons requested]
(requested by wandererjulia) who mentioned that it looked "hand painted" almost.
So this is the "base" that I cropped down to icon size, and as you can see, I have painted the background into true negative space. I have also done some painting on Emma's hair because half the time whatever coloring I decide on ends up making her hair green so I have to go back and spend eighty billion years bringing it back to some semblance of blonde again. So some of it is hand painted. The rest of that effect comes from a combination of two things:
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This texture by mm3butterfly has this nifty, subtle pattern that I like a lot, and I used it on soft light in this icon which...doesn't show up heaps in the final, but it does give the background a bit of a painty look, probably (and also soft light layers emphasizes what I'm about to talk about so). The second thing is my addiction to layer masks on everything. I had a couple of light textures on this one that I ended up masking away in ways similar to the example above which makes the effect of the texture look streaky and painted as well. Layer masks are a gift, seriously. Quick font aside: the whole thing is intro.
requested by rebel & wandererjulia.
These two are pretty simple so I'm not going to bother with a full length tutorial. Lots of selective coloring, probably in the same vein of: cyans and greens and magentas plus somewhere along the way, upping the blacks a lot (especially in the graham/regina one). Then some vibrance in both and some tweaking in the form of variations (g/r) and light textures (hook) and we're done. At least the G/R one had the crop going for it, but I'm going to be honest with y'all, the Hook one was just lazy, and I only kept it/entered it because I like his face.
requested by monstersinyou.
This was a case of two steps forward and then one big step back because it went something like this:
So I started out with a base that clearly had selective coloring work done to it. It has enhanced blacks and well as some cyan/magenta going on there in the background. Then I added some textures, some levels (for contrast after the textures), some vibrance, and some more selective coloring which got me to this in-between stage that had some green and some red/orange tones going for it at which point I clearly had a change of heart and went right back to the cyan/magentas with the help of variations (though I kept a hint of the greens and reds for balance). I also made use of the mm3butterfly texture from before, but I changed the color scheme to match so it ended up being purple. Um, another quick font aside: Admiration Pains for the 'Q', Intro for 'long live the', and Atreyu for 'ueen'.
requested by reebeecaa.
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Painted the background pink to match her lip color, but I kept the opacity a smidge lower than 100%. I also completely ignored coloring inside the lines and let the brush work overlay her hair because I thought it was pretty. Then a texture I made on screen, a stamped layer on soft light, brightness/contrast, vibrance, and then a stamped high pass layer on soft light gives us the first half of the icon.
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The second half is pretty much a texture by endearest blurred beyond recognition and set to screen then a stamped layer on soft light, some vibrance, and then a paint daubs sharpen. This final clearly didn't make me 100% happy because I can tell I did some more editing after I went to 100x100, but I didn't keep that so I'm not sure what I did. Perhaps it was some variations?
[The tl;dr version of this guide:]
1. There's a reason they call it a layer palette.
Mostly the coloring you want to achieve won't happen immediately. I mean sometimes things just click and everything's coming up roses, but usually you've got to build up to it. I layer my color into the icon a little bit at a time in most cases. So we'll have four or five selective coloring layers sitting pretty at the bottom that set the foundations of my coloring for later. Or I'll paint over the background and then spend the next two hours layering textures and various adjustment layers over it so that it looks right to me. So...the secret to my vibrant coloring is just slow and steady layering, building up to the final product.
2. Opposites Attract~
So half the time I start out with a really muted coloring in order to build up to a more vibrant finished product. To illustrate:
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Yeah, be honest now, how many of you would have guessed that the base for that icon was so ridiculously ugly? But the muted greens/yellows that the selective coloring added changed the base from purple/red and put down the foundation for the bright greens later. And the seriously amped up blacks allowed for the later intensity of the shadows and light in the icon.
3. We have to go back!
I reckon it's totally cool to be indecisive about your icon. Sometimes you'll do something and then three layers later you undo the whole thing with some selective coloring or whatever. It happens. In fact, it happens to me a lot. Halfway through you figure this bright yellow icon needs a ton of blue and maybe some red, and that's perfectly okay.
4. It's all a balancing act.
This is always a struggle, but you kind of want...a balance of sorts with your coloring (and with pretty much every other element in your icon, what a pain in the rear) which is kind of why all the other tips exist.
And there are lots of things I could, theoretically, say about this, but...I think just to keep this mega guide from becoming Godzilla, I'll just keep it to: if you're having problems with your coloring, try looking at it on a "scale". If you're going for something with a lot of red in it, but it just isn't working, try adding some blue. You never know.
5. I just love Selective Coloring.
I like things to come in groups of five so to round this list off, I really love Selective Coloring. Like, a lot.
Okay so the next thing is going to be a composition guide (whyyyyy) so that'll cover, probably, everything else that has been requested. But, um, if I haven't covered what you were hoping in terms of coloring here, please let me know here or at my AtM thread so I can answer them for you! <3 Okay, I am hitting the post button now so I can stop staring at this ridiculous thing.
My previous tutorials and guides can be found here. | My Ask the Maker thread is here if you have any requests.