rqs open

something i’ve been seeing circulating on editblr is a need for dark-skin-friendly psds, which is pretty neat! obviously, as with many things, there is no one way to do this. this is just my personal method, which may not work for everyone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

before we get started, let’s get some terminology out of the way:

psd: stands for photoshop document, which i’m using in this tutorial to mean a psd coloring specifically

poc: stands for person or people of color. i don’t recommend saying that your psds are quote on quote ‘poc friendly’ or unfriendly, because people of color is a wide umbrella. if you edit asian media like most gacha and rhythm games, you’re editing people of color—even if they’re from, say, project sekai and are roughly the color of a paper towel.

dark skin: used in this tutorial to mean any character that has even one singular modicum of melanin, which is not necessarily what dark skin means in real life

if you need to see my credentials: hi, i’m canarysage, a mixed blasian person who makes dark skin friendly psds on the regular!

enough yapping, let’s get into the meat here:

i. preparation.

before we can actually get into the psd making, we have to find a suitable showcase to test on. it’s likely if you don’t know how to make a dark skin friendly psd that you don’t edit dark skin characters very often, so here’s some tips:

find characters from media you edit often or from media that is similar. if you edit h*yo media you can use characters like kaeya and xinyan, if you edit fire emblem you can use timerra, petra, and laevatein, and obviously many, many more.

if you want a showcase with a variety of options, i recommend checking out this post by amemcth :) if you want irl skin tones i recommend checking out makeup or soap skin tones.

you can also use the swatchies bar by zeroresources on deviantart (i have a drive download here if you’re boycotting da like i am) but i don’t recommend using that exclusively.

i tend to test all my psds on this showcase, which obviously isn’t an end all be all but is a good way to check how things look in a variety of lighting and on a variety of skin tones:

something i do not recommend is testing your psds on sprite edits or card edits, for a few reasons. for one, sprite edits and card edits will look different than a character who was created with darker skin. for another, it makes it seem like you don’t consume or edit any media with dark skin characters—which isn’t true, right. right. lastly, some card and sprite edits, if handled poorly, can come across as pretty racist. that doesn’t happen often but it isn’t completely impossible. best just to avoid it overall.

ii. identifying the problem.

take a look at your psds and figure out, what exactly is making this unfriendly to dark skin? it’s not always whitewashing, it can be orangewashing (over saturated or excessively warm coloring,) and ashiness (under saturation or excessively cool coloring.)

i’ll be looking at a few old psds of my own for this example. god help us. eyestrain warning for below, but it’s for a purpose i swear:

…dude don’t even ask. okay. so, beside the obvious (that they’re bad) what’s wrong with these? we’ll go in order from to left to right:

iii. redwashing and orangewashing

*this means that the psd oversaturates skin tones to the point they look entirely orange/red, not brown.

first two are tackled in one, because they’re basically the same problem but with marginally different correction. so! how do you fix a psd that red or orangewashes?

pretty simple: desaturate and darken your yellows and reds. you can do that with a hue/sat layer over top:

which is my personal favorite, or something like a photo filter over top, which is a little more broad but still works well:

obviously this doesn’t fix every problem in these psds because they’re just like. gestures. but it’s a good start.

iv. whitewashing

*this means the psd lightens skintones to the point they’re no longer recognizable as the original. it’s much more divisive than both ashiness and orangewashing in editing because of the colorism dogma associated with it

onto the third psd! you may think, well, that doesn’t make the skintones white, it makes them pink! that’s the same thing. sorry.

to fix whitewashing, it’s best to go below the psd, because trying to fix the lighting from above just yields a WEIRD ass psd. also if you have any luminosity layers (brightness/contrast, exposure, levels, curves, so on) it would be best to either a) disable them entirely or b) dissect them and fix manually. up to you.

here’s what i get after dissecting the existing layers and adding a dark luminosity layer at the bottom. obviously it’s not the best, but it’s better than before

to fix a whitewashed psd, you do kind of have to just. start over and make it from the bones. but you can fix it with some work

v. ashiness

*this means the psd desaturates skintones to the point they look green or gray, sort of ‘dead.’ some people may think this is okay—after all, it’s not orangewashing or whitewashing—but it’s still… not great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

to fix an ashy psd, you instead go through and resaturate it, sometimes even lightening (SPARINGLY) if you must. this can also be fixed with a hue/sat or selective color overtop, like orangewashing:

again does this fix every single problem present. no. but is it a good start? absolutely

vi. starting anew

fact of the matter is, sometimes it’s just easiest to take a psd that isn’t dark skin friendly and make it from the bones up. i’ve done this a few times before both as my style has changed and as i made a conscious decision to become more inclusive:

left: old, right: remake

is this 100% necessary? nope. if you scroll all the way back in my psd tag you’ll find some old psds i made that are less friendly to dark skin. but you’ll also notice as you look through my recent psds that i make a pointed, conscious effort to make psds that work on many skin tones. it’s a matter of balance

vii. making dark skin friendly psds from the start

so, how do you avoid things like orangewashing, whitewashing, ashy skintones? unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all trick to it. you just have to pay attention and be careful. here are a few tips:

be mindful of what’s happening to red and yellow hues. if you make them too light, too saturated, too blue/green/etc, it’s pretty likely your psd won’t work on dark skin tones

be careful with luminosity layers such as brightness/contrast and especially threshold. over-lightening a psd is a one-way ticket to whitewashing for sure

test your psd on a variety of images. this was covered above, but it’s good to check your psd on dark skin tone to confirm whether or not it works

you can check out this post by my oomf cutesiplushi for more tips :-)

but, in short: be mindful, be smart, and test on a lot of images.

viii. in conclusion

holy crap this post is long. here’s some reminders.

every psd you make is not going to work on every skin tone. it’s just not. even my own psds need adjusting for some images. it’s a hazard of being a psd maker

you don’t have to delete any psds you post that don’t work on dark skin. just test yourself to find out and add a disclaimer. it’s fine to have them. it doesn’t make you a bad person. if they’re all you make all the time… that’s a problem, but one that’s super easily fixed

people of color, especially people with dark skin like myself, are not mythical beings. you don’t have to treat us like magical unicorns that know all and require super-extra-special psds. we’re just people.

and, psd making is an art. one method isn’t going to fix everything. you just have to experiment and see what works for you.

congratulations if you read this far. you earned a proverbial gold star! i’m proud of you <3