How can you not be romantic about tumblr graphics?

⮞ THINGS TO REMEMBER ⮜

Anon asked about my Masters of the Universe picspam. The key to the coloring here is that the film is bright and colorful. This does the heavy lifting.

Screencaps that are as neutral as possible are also great. I have edited muddy, yellow-filtered, and/or dimly-lit caps BUT it will take some lighting adjustments before I start coloring. For this tutorial, I just want to focus on prime conditions.

Color & Contrast Notes

The following tips can be applied to create either vibrant or muted look. It all depends on how much saturation you want:

When applied, lower saturation vs high saturation:

I also mix and match across the color spectrum. It's comes as no surprise but when a movie/tv show has good lighting, you can pretty much do anything with those caps, like above.

⮞ TIME TO COLOR ⮜

I don't have the psds anymore so I'm recreating from memory.

Basic Lighting

I'm solely focusing on coloring here but first, I always prep the cap by adjusting lighting using Curves and Selective Coloring -> Black. I like the contrast and definition. It gives me a better idea of what to do with the coloring.

Basic Coloring

He-man now looks very orange. When I recolor the subject, I prefer to work one color at a time. I tone down the Reds with the Selective Coloring -> add Cyan +70.

(Click to enlarge)

Add the opposite color to reduce your selected color.

I'm okay with toning down all the reds but use a mask if you're only targeting a specific area.

Next I want to tone down some of the yellow. I didn't like how selective coloring looked for yellow.

Instead, I used a Photo Filter -> Cooling Filter (82) 30% density. The blue neutralizes the yellow for a more natural look.

Adding Soft Brush Colors

Now, I literally 'paint' in the colors. I try to stick with the colors already in the cap but if I'm feeling adventurous, I'll change things up. Here, I see red, orange, yellow and traces of pink/lavender so that's what I'm adding.

If you're working with a cap and struggling to find color matches, use the eyedropper tool on the cap.

I like my colors to have this soft diffused look into the background so I'm not too precious about perfectly coloring in the lines but I prefer not to color over the subject.

I like to build color so I use a default soft brush and set the opacity to 50-70% to add midtone shades from the high saturation side of the color panel. This acts like a loose base canvas:

These opacity values are just my preferences. I normally don't use 100% brush opacity because I like to see some of the background.

Then I lower the brush opacity to 20-30% and I add in a shade color -> red-brown.

Matching hues, like red-brown with a red midtone and pinkish highlight creates a softer gradient. A neutral dark grey will give a stronger shadow.

I avoid pure #FFFFFF (white) or #000000 (black) because they are not flexible. I can edit that later on if needed.

Blend modes are your friends here. Since I use a lower brush opacity, intense modes like Color Burn or Linear Burn look softer.

You can also adjust the opacity of the blend modes for more editing options.

Now it's time to add a highlight color(s) and it's not too different from adding a shade. I use a soft brush at 20-30% opacity again to apply a neon purple and beige-yellow.

The neon purple is to transition the red shadows and add more dimension.

The beige-yellow is color from the lower saturation side of the color panel. This feels like a warm glow that matches the highlights on Adam's skin.

Try Screen, Color Dodge or Linear Dodge blend modes for highlights

The two Dodge modes are the exact opposite as the Burn modes.

From here, I think the color is good but it looks flat and unblended so I bring it all together with the Curves tool. This tool is powerful but I don't really know too much about it. I use it for lighting and this is my Curve line:

I think the general rule is to make an S-curve to get highlights and shadows to pop. The more defined the S-curve, the more dramatic look.

I just about never touch the white point because it's too much.

For highlights, I lift the point above the diagonal line to increase it.

For shadows, I lower the point to deepen it.

I also leave the midtones alone because I'm happy with it right now.

I push the black point to the right to deepen all black tones.

I ended up with this result. I could stop here but to flashbang you to match closer to my original picspam, I added one final Curves layer again but no S-curve this time:

I am light-handed on this final step because as you can see, the white points are starting to wash out.

By pulling the midtone above and into the highlight area, all the colors brighten.

I add a little bit of the black point to keep definition.

There we have it! Here is what my layer panel looks like at the end. It looks like this for most of my edits. For my specific workflow, the layer order matters.

Adding a Color Wash

Let's say you want to flood a cap with color. After I prep my base cap's lighting, I will add a Gradient Map.

The Gradient Map is where I can add a highlight and shade color directly in the tool:

You can also add midtone by clicking directly at the bottom edge of the gradient bar. A square color slider will appear for you to adjust it.

Gradient map plays well with caps that good lighting.

You can move the sliders to adjust how much output you want of each color which is why good lighting is important.

I leave Smoothness and Stops alone.

I wanted more lighting dimension so I added in highlights—similar to the previous section. I could have stopped here but I thought a grunge texture would be on theme.

I set the texture on the blend mode to Soft Light at around 70% opacity and masked away anything that covered up the skull.

For the finishing touch, I added a Curve tool to enhance the black points and lifted the midtones—again similar to the previous section.

⮞ FINAL THOUGHTS ⮜

These are my foundational steps for coloring. I don't use actions because I prefer to adapt my techniques to what I think looks good for the cap. I might skip steps if they're not necessary or repeat a step if it works better.

I hope this is helpful in getting you started. Happy editing!

⮞ ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ⮜

Here are more resources that I've recommended in the past. I think the techniques are universal for any type of cap:

fixing orange-washing tutorial by aubrey-plaza

tutorial by orangesyellow

picspam tutorial by kvtnisseverdeen

color matching subject to background by midnightisquiet