#ombre tutorial

So I’ll take you guys from the very start of what I do. Ombreing is a bit harder than simple recoloring, since it can’t really work properly for all hairs, only ones that are uv mapped so that parts that are on the bottom and parts that are on the top don’t overlap. Also, this may not be what everyone else does, but this is what I find works well for me. 

Step 1: Find your hair in Sims 4 Studio, extract the white hair texture from it. Open it up in photoshop, or whatever editor you use.

Step 2: for every individual strand of texture, cover it in a separate color, like below.

And then in s4s, load it up the hair and put that in as the texture.

Step 3: Identify what parts of the actual hair correspond to which textures. Since I made this hair, I already pretty much knew because I’d placed things smartly, but it’s still nice to have a checking point.

Step 4: Go back to photoshop. Load up the white swatch again. Make it in a good place on the screen where you can see everything, about 80% zoom i find works for me, and DONT MOVE IT ON THE SCREEN AGAIN. Make a new action. Then make a new layer, and put the ombres on a new layer where they match to what you want on the hair. I use an action so I can do it without drawing out where the ombres go over and over. I use it with photoshop’s ombre tool and the two color swatches, then change the color swatches and run the action again until all the ombres are done. 

Step 5: Merge all the layers on top of the background together. Set the layer to soft light, then duplicate it, set that layer to hard light. Flatten the image, save it, go back to the background and run the action with all the colors. It should look like this:

That’s the way I’ve found that makes the colors the most vibrant and true to nature, and works for every shade without other intervention, and also doesn’t need to replace the already existing textures, so it works for dreads and box braids as well.