#58 - Tips and Tricks to Coloring and Editing Disney Screencaps
this guide was requested by adriftingsea and lumsx
Hey y'all! Welcome to my guide to coloring (and editing) Disney screencaps! I'm still in awe that adriftingsea and lumsx actually like my coloring - it makes me feel super special! Now, I'm probably not an expert at this but I'm going to try my best "expose" all the secrets to working with these caps ☺ Warning: there is a lot of rambling and screencap usage!
I will use a Tangled cap throughout my tutorial and you can view/download the cap here.
**some caps can be clicked on to be made larger!**
Now, I present a guide to the guide:
-If you are new to iconing, start at the WAYYY beginning
-If you're pretty adept, you can skip to the second part
-If all you want to know about is the coloring, go directly to the third part and collect $200
let's start off on our journey!
[Starting Off: Picking the Right Caps and Basic Editing]
TIP 1: Pick your caps wisely!
Yeah, this has nothing to do with coloring but it is A KEY POINT. Here are two caps from Frozen (cause we all haven't heard enough about this movie) and one of the caps is a good-ish one and the other is a little worse. Okay, both aren't the greatest caps in the world but let's be honest, no cap is perfect but suprisingly, the second cap with baby Elsa and Ana is actually a better cap. Although the Elsa cap would be easier to edit in terms of brightness/contrast, the other cap is more sharp and will be easier to edit on a whole b/c blurry icons are harder to fix (or at least they are IMO).
So, here are two "icons" I've created (more on these below) from the above two caps. As you can see, the second icon is sharp and the dull tinge of their skin was easily fixed. In the first icon, Elsa is still fuzzy but her skin was easier to fix so you'd still need to sharpen her face a lot.
Five second summary: Don't pick crappy caps and expect them to become awesome. Pick clear and SHARPISH caps that will get you good results quickly and will be easier to color ☺ Here are some "good" Disney caps I've worked with (click for full-size):
TIP 2: Don't over-brighten animated caps when you first start editing.
So, what I've noticed is that when you try to make the cap brighter, sometimes you can make the faces all pixely, especially in the areas where there are shadows, such as under Rapunzel's jawline. If you look at the original cap vs. the edited cap, you can see that in the edited cap, the shift between the face and the jawline is way too obvious and isn't smooth.
original cap | face is a little pixelated due to overediting the brightness/contrast
What I try to do to overcome this problem is the following:
STEP 1: Make it less contrasted. YES, I mean it :) This will help lower the intensity of the bridge between the shadow and the regular face so that you can brighten it!
STEP 2: Next, I always try to use a curves layer to brighten up my icon. But, as you can see, obviously, my cap is now less contrasted. So, we need to fix that!
STEP 3: Another Brightness/Contrast layer!! This time, I know that the brightness is fine so I only increased the contrast. But, in order for the brightness to remain close to what it was before, I needed to lower the brightness.
If I hadn't lowered the brightness, the cap would've looked something like this:
Clearly, a lot of her features are lost and that's no good!
so we go from
this -------> to this!
so to sum up the first step of our journey: PICK GOOD CAPS and brighten your caps in stages and don't go overboard on the first setting :) I always have TONS of layers on my icons, even if it is a simple crop and color.
let's keep moving a bit further....
[Getting the Small Details: Fixing the Blemishes!]
Up to this point, I've done very basic coloring. The only PS functions I've used are Curves and Brightness/Contrast. Now, we're gonna use some selective coloring, the channel mixer, color balance, and maybe gradient maps (not all of these will be used in this section!). Definitely consider downloading Gimp for your computer if you don't have a graphics program and/or don't want to pay for PS. In this tutorial, I think I use tools that are only found in graphics programs and may not be found in online programs like PicMonkey or Pixlr.
Okay, now we're back to the Rapunzel cap...
TIP 3: Make use of the blur tool to even out some of the pixely parts of animated caps!
Obviously, with animated caps, you want the cap to bo as smooth as possible. Since animated characters rarely have blemishes pr spots, we need to get rid of them! Now, it might just be my pickiness but I can still see a divide between Rapunzel's face and jawline and some lone pixels in the cap above. To fix this, simply blur it or use the Airbrush to paint a strip between the jawline and cheek to blur it up a bit (see how to use it here or here). You can also smudge it but I wouldn't reccomend that since it's easier to mess up on that. With any cap, whenever there are loose pixels or blemishes, airbrush/blur them out!
Here it is after airbrushing and blurring! Also, please ignore how I've cut out the BG (cause this is going to become an icon) since that's irrelavent at this point.
I think that her jawline looks a lot better now!
QUICK RECAP: So far, we've picked a good cap, colored it using basic coloring techniques and have gotten rid of blemishes. Now, it's time to make the cap stand out!! We're going to use overlays, brushes, and some filters in the next steps!
AND THE FINISHING TOUCHES!
[Pretty much everything else.]
By now, if you're making an icon, I'd recommend cropping out the character and doing all the composition you're going to be doing so that you can be prepared to color!
After cropping, my Rapunzel cap looks like so:
This cap has already been edited to be brighter and smoother. Now, we're going to color individual things to make the icon more polished. I'm going to start off by brightening up her hair to make it stand out.
TIP 4: Use color blobs to help accent your colors in your icon!
I've painted over her hair with a yellow color since I want to make her hair more yellower and brighter without editing the rest of the cap.
As you can see, I just used a basic brush and went over her hair with the yellow IN A NEW LAYER. I didn't do a crisp job but you don't need to! We're going to clear the extras later. PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO USE A NEW LAYER!
Okay, so then I set the layer with the yellow to overlay and adjusted the overlay until I liked it. Then, I used color balance to edit the overlay so I could find the "perfect color" that suited my needs.
----->
Now, I'm going to color the rest of the icon the same way!
Keep the following in mind when you color your icon:
To make a section brighter: Pick a lighter color in the same color scheme (or grey), paint it over the section and set it on overlay or screen
To make a section darker: Pick a darker color in the same color scheme as the section, paint it over the section and set it on overlay or multiply
---->
So, I've finished coloring Rapunzel. Now, I'm going to use Selective Coloring to even some things out. I wanted to bring out the shadows below the book and in the arms and I edited the Reds selective coloring since the book is prominently red. Selective coloring is fantastic because it selectivey colors and works magic! PLAY WITH IT!
Here are the values I've used:
After selective coloring, I played around with brightness and contrast a bit. Playing around with the b/c is my most fav thing to do and with animated caps, I do it even more often since it's just so important. After that, I added some light blobs to make things interesting ☺
BRIGHTNESS BLOBS!
----->
Okay. So a quick SUMMARY:
-Use SELECTIVE COLORING to bring out shadows and stuff.
-Don't be afraid to adjust brightness/contrast multiple times throughout your iconing process
-Use color blobs to bring out sections and make them more colorful or darker!
NOW LET'S FINISH THE ICON!
First, I'm going to scale my icon down to regular icon size and then stamp all the layers (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-E on a PC) and then set it to soft light. Soft light is wonderful since it brings out shadows, creates a kinda glowy look and generally polishes the icon.
A TRICK: Try messing around with diffuse glow and setting it to screen! You will also get an awesome glowy look that way! Also try gaussian blurring your soft light layer to create a blurred glowy look!
+ soft light at preferred opacity =
Okay, so now, I like to sharpen the icon by using paint daubs. I stamp the icon once again and use the paint daubs setting with all fields set to 1.
+ new stamped layer w/ paint daubs =
Now, I'm pretty much all done. Sometimes, I would now add some text or a texture but that's about it!
So we went from this:
to this:
!!! Can't you see the difference?
PART 4: WATCH IT IN ACTION. [Basically it's a few gifs and words.]
So, in the gif below, you can see how I've edited this cap of Elsa by using the usual selective coloring, curves and paint blobs. Next to it is the layer palette so you can see which order everything goes in. (this gif only goes up to selective color 2)
And, here is the sharpening of the icon and the soft light (rest of palette):
Now, you guys can see how I color my icons and edit them. Really, it's not a long process but the key point is to make the colors bright and visible and not dull!
to conclude this guide, here's five-second summary of the whole darn thing:
1. PICK A GOOD CAP!
2. Don't forget basic coloring techniques like brightness/contrast and color balance
3. SELECTIVE COLORING IS PS'S GIFT TO YOU AND YOUR ICONS/GRAPHICS
4. Always try using soft light (and even gaussian blurring the soft light filter) to see if you can get colors to pop out
5. Sharpen your icons and don't ever think that too much brightness/contrast usage is a bad thing. Play around with it!
I hope that this guide was semi-helpful! If you have any questions on anything that you just read, leave a comment below!
Any questions? ASK ME!
Ask The Maker 2015 || My Thread